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A Dedicated Notebook Video Card

A dedicated notebook video card is what they call a graphics card which is not a graphics accelerator but has its own memory that is "dedicated" for use only in graphics processing.

It isn't counted in your system memory. These cards have a graphics processing unit, a memory bus, the dedicated memory, and quite frequently a cooling fan. They fit into a slot on the motherboard that connects them to the CPU and the video display.

notebook graphics card

What you generally see in 15 inch laptops are mid-level laptop video cards such as the Nvidia GeForce 9400 GS or the ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3450/3470. These cards will play games comfortably, but not at the highest settings.

The next step up is to performance cards that are for hard core gamers or people working in graphics intensive applications. Nvidia is more straight forward here. A higher number is usually faster. GT is better than GS. ATI is more complicated. You would have to look at bench marks and see where a particular ATI card is rated. ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3650 and the Nvidia GeForce 9600M-GT are good cards in this class.

The top end cards are almost never put in 15 inch laptops. They run hot. The very top end cards are SLI from Nvidia and Crossfire (X2) from ATI. These are essentially multiple cards linked together to share the workload and increase performance. You might see them in top end gaming laptops 17 inches or larger. If you are looking to get a card in this class, you probably should be getting a custom made computer. If you are spending the amount of money where one of these cards makes sense, there isn't any reason for the maker to give you bad advice. They will make more by having a happy consumer who buys their next computer from them than by selling you something unsuitable.

It is easier to list pitfalls to avoid then to tell you what to get.

In a notebook video card, more memory isn't necessarily better. The GPU and the bus can affect performance more than the amount of memory. In the same card series, the bus may not be able to utilize additional memory. Generally speaking, a card can only fully utilize memory to twice the bus speed. If the card has a 128 bit bus it can only fully utilize 256 MB of memory. You won't get much gain if you pay for 512 MB of memory.

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