Really stupid video card question.

[luciusad2004]

Ok, this is gonna be a dumb question and I probably already know the answer but i thought i would ask anyway.

I recently purchased this motherboard w/ the Geforce 7150 On-board graphics and nForce 630i chipsets.

I have this graphics card: A Geforce 6200 w/ 256MB of memory on a PCI slot (didn't have PCIe in my box at the time of purchase).

Is the on-board graphics on my motherboard better than my PCI card? I figured its probably a newer GPU than whats on my dedicated card so maybe its better, but at the same time my dedicated card has its own memory.

I always assumed that any dedicated card was better than any integrated solution but is that actually true? Sorry for the dumb question I don't really know much about graphics cards (they change so damn fast its to hard to follow.)

[The boy 4rm oz]

I am guessing the dedicated card would still perform better. The onboard graphics chip uses your system RAM rather than having its own dedicated RAM. The dedicated card will also most likely have more streem processors which are well worth it.

[Datech]

Without doing the specific research, I'd have to guess the card is going to perform better as well. If you had a 780 mobo with 4GB of RAM and a 5 series card I might reconsider, but for your current system you should notice a positive difference between the card and the onboard.

[Luke122]

Why not benchmark both, and decide? Aquamark3d is a quick benchmark program that can determine which will offer better performance.

[The boy 4rm oz]

My money is on the dedicated card. Don't on board chips still access the CPU making them worse for gaming, despite the fact they don't have dedicated RAM?

[Luke122]

I still say try both with Aquamark. We had a little benchmark festival last night, and a few people got some suprising results. It's a small download, and it's free. Why not try it out?

[halcyonforever]

Yeah, all the hypothisizing we can make it really will come down to the numbers. It is true that most integrated chipsets steal system RAM. The higher end ones like the nvidia 7100 probably won't steal too many processor cycles like the integrated Intel chipsets you see most often. I don't think there is enough of a jump between the 6 and 7 series for that to be too much of a factor. So I am predicting pretty close race.

Personally I would say use both and get more monitors!

[luciusad2004]

Thanks for the advice guys. I'll download it later and run a benchmark. Honestly i think ill be a lil sad if my dedicated card is outrun by on-board graphics but hey, what can i do lol, I was working w/ what at the time when i purchased it and that wasn't much.

I'll probably use the on-board eventually anyway, its got hdmi and is HDCP compliant which means i can throw a blu-ray player in my pc as soon as i get an hdcp compliant monitor.

Another quick and easy check will be to see what score windows seven gives the chipset, thought that obviously isn't as good as hard numbers.

[Luke122]

Nice.. well, then you could install the card anyways, and use that to run a second monitor.

[luciusad2004]

Nice.. well, then you could install the card anyways, and use that to run a second monitor.

I've been complaining to my gf that i need at least two more monitors. One more for my desktop and another to hook my laptop up to. I've got no room for them though lol.