Review Geforce 7400 vs. X1400 vs. integrated graphics

Hello,

I just stumbled upon this review http://www.pcwelt.de/tests/hardware-tests/notebooks/134334/index1.html
which compares various lower end graphic alternatives for notebooks. The comparison is in German but the bar charts is actually all thats needed. It shows that a high end graphics card isn't always necessary in order to play most games. The X1400 seems to perform slightly better than the Geforce 7400.

 

If you intend to play 3d games at all, it is best to get the best gpu you can, if you have a choice, because the weaker the gpu, the sooner it will be that you try to install a new game, and it will not play. I wanted a smaller machine this last time around, and the 7400/1400 is about the best you can do in this size right now. I was pleasantly surprised at how well it does play current games. I think new games 1 year from now will likely cause me problems though.

 

Well, I am happy then that I decided to get the HP dv8000t with NVIDIA Ge 7400!

 

Thats a great card, should be happy with it

 

the 7400 isn't a bad card at all. i got 1903 in 3dmark05 on my sz and am happy about it. the 1400 is slightly better though

 

I expected the X1400 to do better - the 128-bit bus makes a difference. The Go7400 isn't that far behind, however.

Thanks for the link - it's in German of course, but bar charts are universal indeed.

Chaz

 

The geforce 7400 has particullaly high memory clocks for its class to help make up.

 

one of the most popular laptops to use the x1400 is the acer 5672 and it does terriably I think someone said it was a driver problem and acer is working on it.

 

Hey,

I just got the dell inspiron 9400 notebook, with an ati X1400 256 Mb graphic card, but only 512 Mb DDR2 RAM in it. It has an intel centrino duo processor 1.66 GHz.
When I played COD2, performance was really bad (very slow and jumpy!), even worse than when I played it on my dell latitude 610 with the ati radeon x300 and 1 Gig of DDR2 ram memory!
It really puzzles me, but at the same time, I am almost certain it is due to a shortage of memory, but what do you think? I've installed all necessary drivers...
Will updating the memory to 1Gb solve my problem?

 

Probably will.

 

Yeah, you can't game on 512MB of RAM these days - 1GB is the 'target' range, I would go with even more than that. Just pick up a 1GB stick, then you'll have 1.2GB (you have to remove one of the 256MB sticks you have in there).

And, you might think about running the game under DirectX 7 mode, since the X1400 isn't that powerful of a card. It's in the graphics settings in CoD2.

Chaz

 

Yea... 1Gb of RAM will help out for sure!

 

Does it use hyper memory at all? If thats eating up more memory then it would be nos surprise your getting such bad performance

 

x1400 should only do that if it runs out of video memory. Even a 512mb x1900xtx will use hyper memory if it runs out lol.

 

Well,

I ran cod2 on a latitude D610 with only a 64 mB X300 graphic card, and it ran brilliantly in comparison to what I see now. I will try to install these omega drivers everyone is talking about, but something is definitely not ok on my laptop, and it ain't just the memory as most games run fine!

Cheers

 

Have you made sure powerplay is not set to max battery life?

 

Thanks for the link. The firefox extension "translate page" made it an amusing read.

 

I solved it by uninstalling all ati catalyst 6.3 drivers and installing the 6.2 drivers + omega, if I put graphics on directX 7, it works ok.
Probably just a driver problem...