T61 w/ Intel 950 graphics

A friend of mine is looking for a Thinkpad and there's a pretty nice T61 on CL, but it has integrated graphics. I've never had good luck with IG, but then I never owned the T61 variety of IG.

Any opinions on how well it performs? Will it play a hulu video full screen without chopping?

 

T61 with intel 950 graphics? that intel graphics card is used in the T60.

if you want t play hulu video get a R400 from outlet.lenovo.com with the intel 4500 MHD GPU.

 

My bad...it's a T60 for sale. What's the IG used in the T61?

I'll keep looking.

 

X3100 intel is used in T61, which will struggle for FHD movies, unless the CPU is from a T8xxx or T9xxx.

 

The integrated graphics on the T61 should run fine on vid sites such as hulu. I played YouTube HD videos and BBC iPlayer (think of it as the UK's equivalent of hulu) in full screen on my T61 and notice no noticeable lag.

 

That is because you got the Penryn T9xxx CPU, T7xxx CPU won't run these video as well.

 

True the T7xxx processors would be strained doing these videos, my T7100 did work a lot harder and hotter than my current T9300 doing the same task.

I guess I should've slightly expanded on my last comment a bit more, what i'm trying to say is the integrated Intel GPU on the T61 will run fine running these HD videos. But as lead_org said it is dependant on the processor to decode these efficiently. If you can, opt for the later models of the T61 which came with the Penryn processors such as the T8100. But if you can't then finding these Penryn processors on the second hand market should be relatively cheap and easy to fit.

 

in which case it is probably a better proposition to get a R400 for 500 USD or so from outlet.lenovo.com. Also if you run the T7xxx CPU T61 with LCD resolution higher than WXGA+ then it would start to lag... and external LCD on anything higher than 20 inch widescreen is probably going to struggle too, especially if you have other background process running.