Must Have dedicated graphics card in laptop?

J

jtnet

Im looking at a DELL 17inch laptop, with the WUSXGA+ screen and possibly adding a second LCD onto it.

I use my laptop for internet, webdesign, tons of multitasking (lots of windows open at once), trading, and esigna with a few charts open at oncel.
I dont play games.

Question is: Will the cheaper intel graphics accelerator work just fine or should i plunk down an extea hundred or so for the nvidia or ATI card? will i see any significance in speed with a better graphics card running business apps?
 
I can only say that a dedicated card is always better, but so much depends on what kind of apps you are running, but certainly you will free up memory and bandwidth with a dedicated card, maybe you wont see a difference now but as apps become more demanding you may see the benefit
 
I'd go for the graphics card but a more scientific approach would be to check memory use and processor utilization when running your trading and charting apps.

For example, running Sierra Chart on a modern graphics card has less than half the processor load of the same application on an older PCI card. And SC isn't a particularly heavy user.
 
Quote from trend_guy:

I hear this is a must if you plan on running VISTA.
More...

Good point - if buying a new computer soon and you plan to upgrade to Vista, check MSFT's website to see what the requirements will be. Whatever the minimums are, get much more.
 
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