Which Notebook Video Card

A notebook video card may seem like a trivial thing when purchasing your next laptop or notebook, but get this wrong and you could be in a whole world of slow graphics pain, with little or no options to upgrade.

Laptop graphics cards are definitely a weak link when it comes to most laptops, if you’re looking for a laptop to perform any kind of high end graphics processing such as games or design then a powerful laptop video card is a must.

Shared Memory Cards
The most common type of notebook video card is the shared memory type, not just what exactly does this mean?

With shared memory cards you can increase or decrease the size of the memory allocated to the card, usually from 64kb to 256kb, but where does this memory come from? it actually comes from the computers Ram, so for example if you choose to allocate 256mb to your graphics card and your laptop has a total of 1gb of Ram this then means you’ll really only have around 744mb of Ram available, which equates to a loss of approx 25%, so in effect a shared memory notebook video card could be referred to as lost memory as in effect this is what happens.

Even if we take a laptop which has 2gb of Ram, it will be left with 1.7gb which is plenty to run most applications and operating systems but this brings us to the second downside of the shared memory notebook video card, if we compare a shared and dedicated graphics memory of 256mb the dedicated memory will run rings around shared memory type.

Advantages of shared memory
The real advantage of shared memory is the cost. As shared memory is part of the system Ram a shared memory notebook video card will cost less.

Notes
Of course having a laptop with shared graphics memory is not such a bad thing, it really depends on what you want to do, the later generation of shared memory graphics will run most tasks and games without a problem just don’t expect to have all the extra effects on, as long as the system has enough Ram and your ok with this most will be fine.
But do take into account if you wish to play the latest games where programmers add more and more complex features dedicated graphics memory is the only way to go.

To reiterate this have a look around many manufacturers actually list laptops under type now, and one of these types is listed as games laptops, just checkout the specs of a decent gaming laptop and see the difference between this and a standard machine, this is simply due to the fact that not only do manufacturers recognize that there is indeed a market for this, but that the later generations of games are probably the most graphic, processor and ram intensive single applications that most people will ever run.

However one word of warning, as in the saying never judge a book by its cover, some laptop are sold as being gaming laptops, but this could not be further from the truth, so before parting with your hard earned cash checkout out what to look for in a gaming laptop page..

The notebook video card is important to any system
But any laptop is only as good as it's weakest component, find out what else to look for to make your laptop suit your needs

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