M1210 video card question

Is the geforce 7400 really worth it? I will definitely get the 9cell which for max battery life. Would the battery life be severely reduced with the dedicated card? Can anyone give me a real life benchmark or experience with both the gma950 and the 7400? Thanks

 

What are your needs? If you want to play any advanced 3d games, run any 3d apps, or intend to run vista with areo, 7400 all the way.You will take a small hit in battery life, and running heavy 3d apps will depelte it faster, but for standard usage, you might lose 5 minutes give or take, no biggie. Look at the stickies in the gaming forum for bench marks

 

Gma950 can run aero and I won't run 3d apps or play 3d games. By benchmark, I don't mean video card benchmarks, I mean battery life benchmarks... Thanks for your reply, but it's really not what I am asking.

Oh and no, you do lose more than 5 minutes... should be at least 30 minutes, but I would like to know the actaul time. Whoever moved this post, please move it back... it's a question about the machine, not the video card.

 

for general use and power mizer options set for max battery life, its a very small hit, and yes the 950 can run aero, though there will be limitations, and it will affect your battery life, and significantly raise the temp of the machine as you'll be pushing the chip to its max just to render the desktop, there are posts of people reporting temps of 80+c just doing minimal tasks while running aero on the beta build of vista with a gma950

I would recommend the 7400, simply because you cant change your mind about it later, its not very expensive, it wont tank your battery life, especially with power saving measure implemented,it will be much better for vista, and it will give you some headroom if your needs change down the road

 

The GMA950 CAN run Aero, but whether it is acceptable remains to be seen. Running RC2, my mate's Inspiron 6400 w/950 would lag when moving windows sometimes, or when alt-tabbing. It just didn't look right. Go for the 7400. With the amount of underclocking and such you can do to them, the battery lost will be far outweighed by the peace of mind you'll get knowing you can actually run Vista like it was supposed to be run.

 

With the dedicated NVIDIA card and a 9-cell battery, I get around 4 to 4.5 hours of actual usage time with the screen set to 3/7 brightness, WiFi on, browsing the internet/listening to music, chatting etc., and NVIDIA PowerMizer setting set to "Max Battery" (which throttles back the graphics sub-system to running 100MHz core/200MHZ memory, the default setting is 450MHz core/900MHz memory).

I've been running Vista RC2 for the past 2 weeks now and I can say Aero is silky smooth, and on battery power (with the chip slowed down), I don't notice Aero being bogged down or being laggy.

I would say with the Intel GMA integrated graphics option, you should be able to squeeze at least 1/2 hour more over the NVIDIA solution, so you should hit 5.5 hours usage time under the same settings as I have above, or 6 hours even if you turn the brightness all the way down and WiFi/BT turned off.

In my opinion, it is definately worth your money and battery life sacrafice to go for the NVIDIA graphics option if you plan to migrate to Vista next year. The Intel solution just wouldn't cut it. Otherwise, if you plan to stick to XP until your next machine, or content with Vista Basic (Classic) GUI, and you don't run ANY 3D applications or games whatsoever, only then will I consider the Intel intergrated option.

A lot of cool new apps are going to utilize the 3D rendering power, not just confined to games. Google Earth is a very good example (and it is a way nifty mapping tool too), and half the reason most would go for Vista is for the eye candy (Aero).

 

Okay thanks everyone. On a review I've read about the m1210, the guy said it's possible to reach 8 hrs with the gma950, I suppose that's not completely true. I suppose the 7400 will be a better choice.

Thanks again

 

7 hours is pretty far fetched, You would have to have everything either shut off or turned all the way down, no drive usage,no wifi, minimal brightness ,you could hammer away a word document for 7 hours straight I suppose, but that would be about it. Your best bet for long haul trips away from a power source would be to invest in another 9cell battery to carry with you, the only real complaint I have with with the 1210 is the lack of a hot swappable media bay, it would be great to be able to pop out the optical drive and put in a 4 to 6 cell battery, but all in all its one hell of a machine for its size. If battery life is that important, you might want to look at the 12.1 lattitudes with the ultra low voltage cpus, they are available with core duos now

 

Yeah, the 7400 will be much better overall for your system performance and should help with Vista.