Latitude E6400 Owner's Lounge

Temperature should be a factor in your argument as well, and this is where the integrated graphics is better.

 

does the intel chip support x264 hardware decode?

 

Your numbers do not make sense. Let's say you use the 55WHr battery (6-cell). 10 W gives you 5.5 hours. 12 W gives you 4.58 hours. The difference is 0.92 hours. Or 55 minutes.

Let's say you really have the 9 cell, so use 84WHr. 10 W gives you 8.4 hours. 12 W gives you 7 hours. The difference is 1 hour and 24 minutes.

BTW, the Intel IGP plays 1080p just fine. I assume that when you saw it not playing smoothly, something else (like the network connection) is the bottleneck. It is much better than the Nvidia Go7300 because it has built-in HD decoding, in hardware.

 

Would integrated still be good for graphics and photoshop?

 

It is slower in 3D graphics but I do not believe it is slower in 2D graphics.

Since the Intel GPU is part of the chipset, the 10W is the maximum chipset power drain whereas the nVidia GPU power is in addition to the chipset power. We concluded last year that the average power life difference between the two GPUs was at least 1 hour when using the 6 cell battery.

Numbers aside, we know the Intel GPU runs cooler. It is also less likely to die just after the warranty expires.

John

 

Depends on what you mean by "graphics". In Photoshop CS4, there is limited support for hardware acceleration.

 

Yes. It supports AVC, VC2 and mpeg. It is designed to handle Blu-Ray playback.

 

Photo editing.

 

The Intel IGP is great for photo editing, which is an easy job for any modern graphics system.

 

Based on battery life of a new 9-cell battery talk about and compared on this thread. It is approximately 30min. What you failed to calculate is that you assume that Nvidia GPU consumes 12W ALL the time. But because of Nvidia PoowerMizer, the GPU powers down to a much slower rate when you don't need the power. Also, by default, the Nvidia GPU stays under power when going on battery mode. Also, the Nvidia GPu goes full power only when it's plug-in, by default. For instant, play any game on battery, even setting Vista power mode to High Performance, the game will be a slide show until you plug the laptop in.

You can see the underclock that the GPU does if you look with Everest software.

It could be, as I said I only saw it on one laptop. My apologies for the FUD.

The Geforce 6 (and their equivalent from the Quadro series) series and up, have Nvidia PureVideo which is a HD decoding in hardware system.