#EXTERNAL GRAPHICS CARD FOR LAPTOP 2015 SERIES#
It’s pretty simple, too - the series before were called GTX 800M and R9 M200, the series before that was the GTX 700M, and so on. The most recent generation from Nvidia is its GeForce GTX 900M-series chips, while AMD has just launched the Radeon R9 and R7 M300-series. Just like laptop CPUs, laptop GPUs arrive in generations. Made by either AMD or Nvidia, you’ll see them called either Radeon or GeForce respectively, with additional model numbers to denote the relative level of performance within that range - a GeForce GTX 980M is more powerful than a 970M, a Radeon R9 M380 is more powerful than an R7 M360, and so on. Discrete or standalone graphics chips in laptops, although they’re not user-removable or replaceable, are much more powerful than their integrated variants because they’re much larger, consume a lot more power, and have the physical separation from a CPU that means they’re able to get hot - and hot means speedy.
If you’re intending to do any kind of gaming, you’ll want a laptop with a discrete graphics card. AMD APUs can have integrated Radeon R6 or R7 graphics performance that is more than enough for mainstream games like League of Legends, DOTA 2 and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, making a laptop a perfectly reasonable choice for this kind of casual gaming - while not consuming much more power than lesser integrated graphics chips. One special case is AMD’s APUs, a class of laptop-grade CPU that includes an integrated GPU that is much more powerful than Intel’s HD Graphics series. Some laptops with discrete graphics will also let you switch back to integrated via software, which will get you a partial improvement in battery life. This is a huge improvement if you’re going to be using your laptop away from a charger, so there is a real case for buying a less powerful laptop when it means you’ll be able to use it longer. The upside of this, though, is that integrated graphics are able to operate at a significantly lower energy demand than a standalone - you should expect a laptop with integrated graphics to perform with an extra 25 to 50 per cent better battery life. Integrated graphics don’t quite have the outright computational power of their standalone alternatives. You might see them tagged as HD Graphics by Intel, while AMD uses the same Radeon name but usually sticks to the R4 or R5 product tag where its standalone graphics chips are usually R7 or higher. Their graphics chipsets are integrated into the CPU, operating at lower power and with much lower performance levels for 3D gaming. The majority of laptops out there, especially thin and light ultraportables and cheaper mainstream notebooks, don’t have standalone graphics cards in the way that desktop PCs usually do.
An APU combines those two elements - a CPU and a GPU - on the same piece of silicon. More and more non-gaming applications these days, like Adobe’s Photoshop and Photoshop Lightroom, are switching on GPU acceleration, too, so if you intend to be running video editing or image manipulation on your new laptop then you’ll see a genuine improvement from high-power graphics.Ī couple of techy things to note in this laptop graphics buying guide: CPU is an abbreviation for Central Processing Unit, GPU is an abbreviation for Graphics Processing Unit, and APU is an abbreviation for Accelerated Processing Unit.Ī CPU handles the computational heavy lifting and raw number crunching that a computer has to do in its everyday tasks, while a GPU is for more specialised tasks like processing geometric cacluations and rendering polygons that enable 3D graphics to be drawn in real time. It’s only if you intend to be doing some serious computing on the go that you should begin to consider a laptop with a more powerful standalone graphics card. A laptop with a low-powered integrated graphics chipset will serve your needs just fine. If you just want to browse the Web and look at cat videos on YouTube and do your online tax return, any old machine will do.
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