ATi Mobility FireGL 5200 vs ATI Mobility Radeon X1300

Recently my computer wouldn't boot, although I could hear the hard drive humming along. Since this is a 6+ year old laptop, I went to a lower cost -- though still competent -- repair shop for a diagnosis. They said it was a video chip failure, and I told them to repair it. (They charged me US$140.)

When I picked it up the guy said they had replaced my old ATi Mobility FireGL 5200 with a "better" chip, the Radeon X1300. Since it was a done deal, I just took it home to see how it worked, to see how much "better" it was. Nothing seems to have changed in the static images on the screen. The color depth and quality are very good on the Thinkpad "FlexView" IPS screen. The problem I'm perceiving, however, is that when doing video streaming from the internet -- watching NFL games via a paid streaming account, and occasional Youtube videos -- the machine (video chip?) cannot seem to keep up with the stream, which is coming in at about 5 Mbits/sec.

My son's machine, a T410 Thinkpad with integrated graphics and a pedestrian i5 CPU, has no trouble at all keeping the video quality at optimum level, with the video stream almost always coming in a max levels, whereas my machine never seems to get comfortable processing the down stream, and fluctuates from max to min levels of download streaming.

Is this a problem with the "new" video chip, the Mobility Radeon X1300, or would the FireGL also be over-taxed by this live streaming?? More specifically, what is the performance difference I should expect from the X1300 vs the FireGL?? I've seen a comparison here ( ATI Mobility FireGL V5200 - Notebookcheck.net Tech and here: Video Card Comparison - GPUReview.com ) that indicates the FireGL to be more robust than the X1300, but I'm not sure I'm interpreting the data correctly.

OOTM

 

FireGL 5200 is based off Radeon X1600 chip. In terms of "gaming" performance it is better, but not that much better. It's probably your hard drive or CPU limiting you at that point.

 

Thanks for your quick reply.

How does the X1300 compare with X1600?? From what I'm reading, it seems that the X1300 is a crippled version of the X1600. True?? If so, can you explain it a little?

Followup question: is the X1600 made more for gaming, while the FireGL 5200 would be more for business use?? I see this issue discussed a lot but I'm not sure what makes one for gaming while the other is better for CAD, video rendering, etc.