faster with or without geforce 128mb?

Hi, I'm on the verge of buying a Dell XPS M1330 (13.3"), 2.2 GHZ, 4MB RAM, 64GIG SSD.

Is this laptop going to be faster with
1) the NVIDIA GeForceTM 8400M GS met 128 MB DDR3
or with
2) the standard Intel Graphicr Media Accelerator 3100?

I will not be using the laptop for gaming, nor for complex photoshopping or whatever: merely for office, internet, music, movies etc. If speed is the basis on which I will be deciding, which option should I go for?

 

8400 by FAR...

Though, the intel graphics card is probably much cheaper, but don't plan on ever gaming with it, or doing much of anything excel word, movies, etc.

 

I would second 8400GS too. x3100 is the strongest integrated adapter and will do OK stuff you are going to do, but if you have enough money for 8400GS go with it. Faster, not integrated, and supports DX10.

 

Having a non-integrated video chip will improve overall performance as it won't use RAM capacity, or RAM bandwidth. Though, if you want long battery life, you might want to consider sacrificing the performance, as integrated chips are quite a bit less demanding on the battery.

 

Although the 8400 will help you out, the 64Gb SSD will knock your socks off. It is tested and all of its benchmarks are available below in the New SSD Thread and the SSDs Tested Thread.

Heck, if ya gotta a few minutes, grab a java and read them all. You will be glad you did and very excited about the SSD.

 

For your usage I see little point getting the 8400M GS. It'll just run down your battery and produce more heat than the X3100 and won't give you any boost in performance.

Don't waqste your money on it. To get the best performance doing the tasks you do a fast hard disk (7200rpm) and 2GB ram would be much better investments.

 

The difference in performance for the tasks you have listed will be very insignificant regardless of which graphics card you choose. If you have money to burn, consider purchasing a faster CPU, larger battery, larger HD, or about 3.996GB more RAM (assuming you did not make a typo in your original post )

 

Yeah, I agree. Especially for what your doing....bettery battery life and more importantly, less heat. Also, I have a X3100 on my rig and it handles light gaming very well......not great, but enough to play some cool games with decent graphics and respectable frame rates.

By no means is my computer a gaming rig and I use it mostly for what your doing...that's why we have a "Wii" and "XBOX".....that's for gaming.

 

I agree with these statements. The x3100 is great for non-gaming uses. Its uses less power, produces less heat and handles all office/internet graphics chores with ease.

If you want to game, then the x3100 is not for (although it will support some casual gaming).

 

Moon got it correct. For the needs listed no reason to upgrade, completely unnecessary. But the X3100 "the best IGP" NOT! tumnasgt made a very good point but all you need to do to address is make sure to get enough RAM.

 

While having enough RAM is a big step for IGPs, they still use RAM bandwidth so the performance will never be quite the same, that said, RAM is so fast now it probably isn't much of a problem compared to what it was with DDR266 (when I last had an IGP).