Graphics Card
Graphics cards for laptops used to be fairly standard, as they pretty much served one purpose – showing the operating system and applications in a responsive manner. They didn’t have to be top notch, because if someone was going to be gaming, they were going to be doing it on their desktop with their souped-up graphics card loaded with video RAM. So, notebook manufacturers just stuck to the basics, usually embedding the adapter hardware right into the motherboard, with a minimal amount of memory and power. Those days are over though, as more and more gamers are turning to laptops to do their thing, which involves a lot of graphics processing power to display the rich, 3d scenes that advanced games have these days. So, graphics cards in notebooks have become a lot more advanced to keep up with the demand.

There are currently two types of graphics cards for laptops: integrated and dedicated. Integrated graphics cards are built into the motherboard, and do not have their own memory, instead sharing memory with the system which severely reduces performance and lowers the amount of memory and memory bandwidth available to the CPU. However, integrated graphics cards do not throw off a lot of heat, and will use less battery power than dedicated ones. So, if a laptop is solely used for purposes that do not involve intricate graphics, such as document processing or web surfing, this would probably be the best option.

Dedicated laptop graphics cards, on the other hand, are completely separate from the motherboard and for the most part have their own memory. Basically, these are smaller versions of the graphics cards one might install in a desktop computer. And while a gamer wouldn’t be caught dead without one, they use up a lot of battery power, and so they aren’t a good choice when one is doing a lot of mobile computing.

So, if you’re looking for a notebook for gaming purposes, make sure to check and see if it has a dedicated graphics card, otherwise it will be sorely lacking in the graphics department. Likewise, if you are going to be spending a lot of time on the road, an integrated graphics card is the best choice, to maximize your battery life.