Dell D810 w/ATI graphics card 2

[unclerico]

I am doing some hardware procurement for my company and have a few questions.

1) Will an ATI x300 w/64MB of RAM be plentiful enough to run typical business applications (Office, Quickbooks, etc.) at the same time without any kind of performance issues or should I step up to the x600 w/ 128MB of RAM?? The laptop would be rated at 2.0 GHZ Pentium M with 1 GB of DDR RAM.

2) What are some of the downfalls with video cards that use shared memory??

Thanks.

 

[garebo]

I am not the last word on laptops but i believe the one with 64mb would be fine for what you are talking about, bus apps and standard stuff.
However, im not sure, the way you put your question, how much ram your system has for itself. I am guessing you are talking about 2 vid cards, one with 64 mb ram and the other with 128 mb ram?
Video that "shares" takes its ram from the system ram and forces it to share. As long as you have enough system ram, all would be well.
Also, if sharing, you can often set the bios to have less of an effect on the sharing process, at least i believe thats the case.

Its gaming where the performance issues usually arise and you are not doing intense gaming. I dont do gaming either so im not totally up on all this, but i think i have set you in the right direction anyway.
How much system ram do you have?
As an example one of my systems has win xp pro, a 2.4 gig cpu, and only a 16 mb video card and i get great video. Again, it really only matters in gaming.




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[paparazi]

Like garebo laptops aren't my area of expertise but as I understand it:

If the motherboard was using a chipset that incorporated graphics in it's design ie: KM400/915G or similar, then not only would the graphics performance be poor (when compared to one with a standalone card) but this design burdens the system with generally higher CPU utilization as well as using system memory.
Those motherboards that use a seperate graphics chip like the X300 DON'T have that problem! they take up less CPU time and perform much better.

One thing I am sure about though, is that an X300 ATI is easily capable enough to carry out your relatively easy office and quickbooks tasks, infact they are overkill in graphics terms as both these apps are very low stress 2D operations.

Martin



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[unclerico]

Great guys, I appreciate your answers. garebo, my systems will have 1GB of DDR RAM with a 2 Ghz Pentium M processor. Thanks again, have some stars.

 

[garebo]

unclerico, sorry i didnt notice you had already stated the amount of system ram.

The employees getting these systems should be happy with both you and the systems as they will be both very fast and over-qualified for office type tasks. Now you will have to keep any eye on them so they dont start gaming, lol.

Good luck, and thanks for the stars!


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