Doesn't play games though does it.Originally Posted by iYRe
Scumbag junkie-looking biker
Doesn't play games though does it.
Forum whore
nope.. why would I bother? I got bikes to ride.. children to rear, etc etc.. no time for games.
"If a million people say a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing." - Anatole France
"An education isn't how much you have committed to memory, or even how much you know. It's being able to differentiate between what you know and what you don't." - Anatole France
ZRXOA #9170
Don't forget to bring a towel
My MP3 collection on its own wouldn't even fit on a 250GB drive. With all the movies and software it's over 2TB.
Forum whore
Scumbag junkie-looking biker
Now the bad news. Despite huge performance gains and much improved compatibility, even the Intel HD Graphics 3000 requires that you run at fairly low detail settings to get playable frame rates in most of these games. There are a couple of exceptions but for the most part the rule of integrated graphics hasn’t changed: turn everything down before you start playing.
This reality has been true for more than just Intel integrated graphics however. Even IGPs from AMD and NVIDIA had the same limitations, as well as the lowest end discrete cards on the market. The only advantage those solutions had over Intel in the past was performance.
Realistically we need at least another doubling of graphics performance before we can even begin to talk about playing games smoothly at higher quality settings.
sdkfz
Yep. Going 64 bit is half the reason I'm looking at upgrading. Truth is my old Centrino 2, 4 GB, 320 GB, 512MB GeForce 9200M GS laptop does pretty much everything I need - but it's running 32 bit Windows Vista, I need better to support certain clients, and I can't be arsed upgrading (and I want to give the laptop to my Son as he's outgrowing his PC).
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On the drive thing: I really don't get how people end up with so much data.
My complete boxed set of Led Zeppelin at high quality (but not raw) ripped to just 8GB. I'd never listen to 100 GB of music. I mostly watch movies once, so even if I did get them digitally, I'd never fill a drive with them - they'd get deleted. Even years worth of Family photos haven't filled a drive. (Partly because I don't bother taking them at much higher res than any device I'll view/print them on?).
I've still got two beer crates full of Vinyl from the old days, but I don't understand "collecting" digital Music and Movies.
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On the integrated graphics is crap thing: yeah, depends on what you are doing. Playing the latest games at "Ultra quality" - nope.
For me, the question was about using both on-board and card at the same time; as another avenue to multiple monitors (yes, the cards do multiple monitors anyway).
(Even if the integrated graphics was crap, that wouldn't matter if it was just running a monitor showing some sample code I'd googled up, while I worked in one of the other monitors (which in this case (coding) wouldn't need to be all that flash either, really)).
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I see people complain about that in the TradeMe message board too, but I don't really mind it. TradeMe has a box that lets sellers enter speed. Multiplying by number of cores gives some ability to compare CPU's in the absence of a separate descriptor for cores.
Yes, it's not fully accurate as it depends on the software in use, but calling it misleading is, I think, over stating it.
Measure once, cut twice. Practice makes perfect.
Forum whore
OP wants to play Civ II. The latest integrated graphics can play Civ V at 15fps.
Highway Biker
Getting one with integrated graphics is good for a backup if ur gpu dies for whatever reason - unless of course u have a spare card in your pocket.
sdkfz
Yep.
This page rates my laptops card as 142 : http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/mid_range_gpus.html
This page rates Intel HD 3000 as 397 : http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/high_end_gpus.html
...and I quite happily play "Medal of Honour: Airbourne" on my laptop. So yep: it's all about perception and what you want to do. (I'm certainly not going to pay top dollar for whatever is the current "best" card. (Something like a GeForce GTX 560 Ti seems good bang for buck at present).
That's very plausible. I can even imagine being between selling one card on TM and not yet having bought the next, so temporarily using the on-board.
(Given fan noise (and even power consumption) might be noticible, it still seem naff that the card can't be disabled and the on-board used - under choice. There doesn't seem much technical challenge in that, and some laptops do it...)
Measure once, cut twice. Practice makes perfect.
Don't forget to bring a towel
No it doesn't give you an indication of performance, and yes it is completely misleading to multiply clock speed by the number of cores. Clock speed often has little to do with performance of a component. Just compare a modern Intel chip with the same clock speed AMD chip and you'll quickly have your answer.
You wouldn't call a CBR1000RR a 4 litre bike just because it has a 1 litre engine with 4 cylinders, would you?
sdkfz
So (with the right software) a single core 2 GHz CPU won't (in general) be slower than a Quad core 2 GHz CPU?
Why do they even make multi-core CPU's then?!
You need a quick-and-dirty way to compare. I still don't see the issue. It seems like train spotting to me.
Sure, it's not perfect, but it still gives a basis for some kind of comparison. (e.g. a Quad core AMD chip would, I expect, out perfrom (with applicable software, etc...) a hypothetical single core Intel chip of the same "speed"). For that matter, the TradeMe search function doesn't have "Intel" versus "AMD" options - so you may as well complain that the simple "speed" based search is "completely misleading".
I see what you're saying, but that's not a directly applicable analogy. (I'd expect a car built with a CBR1000RR engine front and another in back, to be more powerful than a single CBR1000RR bike.)
Perhaps more to the point, would be the formulas used in racing to make try to "match up" rotaries with regular engines, or twins with the 4 cylinder bikes. (i.e. how they don't all have the same cc rating limits).
(However, I do note now that TradeMe, in the descriptions (not the search function) does have a "cores" option. In that case the "speed" rating ought to just be the base clock speed.)
Measure once, cut twice. Practice makes perfect.
Don't forget to bring a towel
Processor architectures are so different that it often makes little sense to make a comparison. Put a 4GHz Pentium 4 against a 4GHz Sandybridge in a single threaded benchmark and see the difference.
The whole "more cores is better" approach is often marketing bullshit as how many people outside a server environment are going to use more than 3 cores? Perhaps doing video encoding but other than that there is little sense in going for more, slower cores than fewer, faster cores which is the approach AMD has taken.
Forum whore
It is a lot more complicated than it seems.
4 cores running at 3ghz does not give you 12ghz.
There are all sorts of bottlenecks that means you won't get anywhere near 13ghz of performance.
If you really want to know more then it is best to google and read up but you could probably read for hours about it.
sdkfz
Yeah, I know it's more complicated than that. Cache size + speed, etc etc etc.
I'm certainly not saying that 4 cores at 3GHz actually gives you 12GHz equivalent.
I just think in the absence of something better, I don't see what's such a big issue in using that as a quick and dirty way to compare.
As SMOKEU points out (post #25), an Intel and AMD CPU, with the same number of cores, running at the same speed, won't actually give the same performance. So why, in that case, is simply stating the clock frequency so much better anyway?
(
So Joe Average, sees these two CPUs being sold on TradeMe, both listed as 4GHz - and doesn't know which is "best".
)
As you point out, to know the full details and really be able to compare two CPUs would take hours of reading (let alone the motherboard it's stuck in, etc). Is Joe Average buying a PC off TradeMe going to spend those hours?
Again, I'm not saying "speed" should be stated as cores x clock - I just don't see why people are so up in arms about it.
Measure once, cut twice. Practice makes perfect.
Don't forget to bring a towel
The best way to "measure" performance is to go to sites like overclockers.com and tomshardware.com who do many hardware benchmarks using different benchmarking tools, so the end user can make an informed decision in relation to which hardware best suits their needs. I've just been studying CPU architecture as part of the degree I'm doing and there's a hell of a lot more to performance than just clock speed and cache.
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