D630 Owners Thread

Thanks for the answer.

But I actually had a different point of view about it : If I can't run anything with the NVS, why bother paying more money to get a card that will drain more power...

 

Sebxoii--I really don't think power drain is much of an issue with the 135M card. That's what I have in my D630, and with a 9 cell battery and wi-fi on, I get between 5-6 hours out of a charge. As Nickcoffer says the M135 is definitely a step above the intel integrated graphics. With the M135 card you'll definitely be able to run more games at better settings than with the integrated chip, but even with the M135 card, don't expect to run the newest games on high settings.

dordale

 

That's my point of view as well.

Basically, if you're interested in playing 3D games, get the nVidia card; if not, get the Intel card.

 

I can confirm that games are playable with the 135m. Maybe not at the highest settings and not the most recent games, but i can play ut2k4-based games, warcraft III and other games.

 

For those who don't care about games, there's still a big difference. Text and graphics are clear and more detailed with the high-end card.

 

Huh? I don't believe that... What is this claim based on?

 

That is not true.

What is true is a dedicated card will make vista run smoother even if you don't game, you will notice it in just using the os.

 

What do you think is smoother about it? I mean, what difference do you notice?

I could imagine Flip3D possibly being smoother on a dedicated card (although I don't know if it really is), but it's not bad at all on the x3100. All of Vista's other effects -- transparency, taskbar thumbnails, Flip, fading effects, window minimize and restore animation... they're perfect on the x3100, and I can't see any room for improvement.

One could argue that a dedicated card would make the OS run smoother by freeing up a small amount of system RAM that no longer needs to be used for video... but spending $50 (or is it $70) to free up 0.1 gb of system RAM is silly. You can get a whole extra gigabyte or two of RAM for that money.

I suppose one could also argue that having dedicated video RAM reduces traffic on the system bus, since data doesn't have to use the system bus to go between the GPU and the video memory. I guess this is true. So I guess any programs running and using RAM heavily would be slowed down slightly while 3D animation such as Flip3D is happening, if you have integrated graphics.

 

Thanks everyone.

I guess I'll just take the NVS135 then.

 

Personal observation: Same machine, same resolution LCD panel, Intel Graphics Adapter vs higher-end card. (Actually, my comparison is based on a Latitude D610 with the higher-end card being a Radeon X300. But the text/graphics in a D630 I observed with the Intel Graphics Adapter looked just like they did on the lower end D610.)