Is the Intel Media Accelerator 950 any good?

or should I definetly get a dedicated video card?

 

It's a decent business graphics card but a dedicated video card gives you more options for software (CAD, 3 D programs, Gaming). If you don't use them, they don't give much advantage.

 

It all depends on what you're doing. If, like titaniummd said, you're only using business apps (e.g. Office, Word, browsing), then the 950 is perfectly fine. However, if you need 3D or want H.264 decode for HD movies, you will need a dedicated card.

I personally have the 915GM card, and I can say it's fine 99.5% of the time. The only thing I can't do is A) play games (which is fine since I never intended to play them on this laptop) and B) watch QuickTime H.264 movies, which is sometimes a little annoying (but these movies are still so rare for now that this is hardly a concern--for example, the high quality QuickTime movie trailers are still acceptable if the HD ones won't work).

 

I'm trying to figure out which Vid card to get too.

Sometimes I go to YouTube and watch videos, or movie trailers, or video stuff on the internet in general. The 950 should be able to handle all that stuff with no sweat, right? Basically, if I'm not doing 3D gaming or watching HD video on my computer a dedicated card does nothing for me, correct?

 

I'd go dedicated. T60 has plenty of options, you can get an ATI X1300 which is sufficient for anything listed, won't play many new games, but it has plenty of optimizations for video rendering (I believe H.264 is similar to MPEG4 so it has extensive use of vector processing). There's a nice little TopSeller T60 for about $1500 I think 1.66 and X1300 and the 3 year warranty (I refuse to go 1 year).
Here's the link:
http://www-131.ibm.com/webapp/wcs/s...yId=2049168&dualCurrId=1000073&catalogId=-840

 

Since I'm a casual gamer, I need a discrete card. But the Intel 950 integrated graphics will handle nearly anything the typical notebook user would want it to...and it does save a little bit of weight.