GPU questions.

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My wife's trusty Macbook Pro (late 2008) is finally dying.. Needs a new fan, new battery, the PSU adapter is coming apart right at the plug (MBP side)..

With that said, we're wanting to buy her a new laptop.. It'll be all she uses.

She doesn't really want another Mac.. Plus the MBPs are really over my budget this go around, and I refuse to buy the non-pro..

My wife doesn't play a LOT of games, but she loves her WoW, and she likes to try other fantasy RPG games.

She isn't likely to run anything other than Win7/8 on it...

My budget is -around- $750-$800 USD, and I can find numerous machines that fit my processing/ram/storage requirements, but I'm not really up to speed on the GPUs these days.

Is it still worth getting the discrete cards these days? Or are the new Intel HD4000 gpus finally catching up in terms of performance?

Her current book has twin nVidia chipsets, the faster one is a 9600M with 1GB dedicated vram, iirc.

Everywhere I've priced, the discrete cards (whether the AMD/ATI cards, or the Nvidia ones) usually add about $75-$100 bucks to the price of the laptop..

Suggestions?

As far as brands go, I'm leaning heavily towards the Toshiba satellite series, with the amd A10 CPU, but also have been looking at i5 and i7 laptops.

I like to -heavily- research before I buy... My instinct is to impulse buy, so by forcing myself to do all this research, I've learned to control that. lol

Thanks,
Chuck
 
My personal preference is something with NVidia graphics. I know those always work and NVidia regularly updates their driver. And you won't have a problem with dual-head, openGL or anything else. Keep clear of those Optimus combination things though, support for them isn't there yet.
 
Yea, if it were ever going to run something other than windows, I'd be worried about said support.. But as I said, her laptop is -hers- and she's only ever really liked OS/X and Win7. She liked to play with OpenSolaris sometimes, and never cared for FreeBSD or even any of the Linux distros she'd tried. "they all include too much bullshit! Or not enough clicky stuff! There's no happy medium here!" lol
 
In that case I'd just go for a nice Windows 7 laptop. The ones with Intel graphics tend to be a little cheaper, their graphics performance isn't bad but it's not super either. I have an older HP/Compaq 6510 with Intel graphics, I've been able to play some games, better than I would have expected anyway. Newer Intel graphics should be a big improvement so I don't think you have to worry about it too much.
 
The HD4000 isn't bad. I ran WOW last year on an HD3000 and it was totally playable. The HD4000 is faster.

I'm a big fan of intel GPUs these days if you don't NEED nvidia or AMD, as the machine runs a lot cooler and quieter without the extra heat. Battery life is better, too.
 
I'd rather have Nvidia for FreeBSD, but the Intel HD4000 has been working quite well.
 
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