Graphics Card

[UBT - Halifax-lad]

Well the new memory went in OK

Time for a graphics card soon I think, am I right in thinking that on-board graphics use some of my CPU processing power to display everything

[UBT_Grumpy Old Bloke]

Time for a graphics card soon I think, am I right in thinking that on-board graphics use some of my CPU processing power to display everything

As far as I know yes, and they also use system memory for the display so you have less available for applications. We have a few machines at work with on-board graphics and they seem pretty dire.

[Seti-Cruncher]

Time for a graphics card soon I think, am I right in thinking that on-board graphics use some of my CPU processing power to display everything

As far as I know yes, and they also use system memory for the display so you have less available for applications. We have a few machines at work with on-board graphics and they seem pretty dire.

It really depends on what your machine is doing. My fastest machine has an on-board graphics processor but it runs only BOINC/SETI in Linux text-mode and so there is no graphics output. There is absolutely no reason for me to install an add-on graphics card in that machine at the moment.

[UBT - PiezPiedPy]

Both onboard Gfx and Sound slow your mobo mostly due to sharing Ram and also your CPU and chipset will have to do more work.

You only really need onboard gfx and sound for buisness machines or if your running say Linux with text only and not using sound.

As soon as you start playing games, audio video rendering,CAD/CAE FEA, then your need to start looking at high speed RAM Gfx and Sound cards.


mmmmmmm Corsair XMSxxxxXL DDR-DIMM with a CAS latency 2-2-2-5-T1 I won't use anything else

AMD64 3500+
Windows XP Pro 32bit not 64, Service Pack 2
Corsair Dual XMS3200XL 512 = 1Gb Ram
Western Raptor HD 10,000Rpm 4ms Seek
Measured floating point speed 2992.27 million ops/sec
Measured integer speed 9297.49 million ops/sec

Weeeeeeee