I’m looking into a new laptop and all the shiny one’s I can afford on my budget usually have UMA memory. From what I’ve gleaned, this means the video card uses the laptop’s RAM.
I’m wondering how this would impact on performance, the magazines I’ve read have simply said a big no if you can afford not to. If I’m watching DVDs or playing games of a relatively low graphic intensity (none of the newer FPS or flight sims) would I have any problems? The laptops I’m looking at have between 512mB to 1Gb of RAM.
Would a modern laptop screen handle games and DVDs ok? I have a monitor to hook it up to in the house but what about on the move?
As far as just viewing DVDs, you shouldn’t generally have any big problems - if the laptop includes a DVD drive, the manufacturer knows you’ll be viewing DVD video and will (or should) make sure that you can do so without much degradation. I don’t know what “relatively low graphic intensity” means (flight sims are demanding, but many other gaming apps are, as well), but an average user should be okay. 512 is the lowest I recommend to the folks I give advice to, and as times (really slowly) change these days, I generally tell them they’ll thank themselves for a GB or more. I’m thinking in 2-3 years, HDs will be going solid-state and the whole paradigm will shift, though.
My opinions are all based on what you need now and what you’ll need in the next 2-3 years.
I hope that’s not as useless to you as it is to a lot of the folks I give that advice to - myself being one of them!
I have a Dell Inspiron 510m, which originally came with only 256MB of RAM, part of which was used by the video card, but even that wimpy configuration had no problem at all with playing DVDs. I don’t play very many games, but Age of Empires 3 ran acceptably, if that’s a useful benchmark.
I’d definitely look at getting at least 512MB, though, and 1GB is even better - the boost in performance is quite remarkable.
Most of the time I spend not using a computer for study is spent playing DVDs now (a turning point in my life) so that’s good to know.
I was thinking along the lines of Civ III (or possibly IV), so that’s quite useful indeed
There are a few firms offering 1GB of RAM instead of 512MB for very little extra money, so I’ll plump for that. I was wondering if the UMA bit would cut into performance terribly, it might have put me off a laptop completely.
