Intigrated or not

[TheinsanegamerN]

hi
i have a new budget gaming build, with 4 gb ram, and a intel g850 sandy bridge (2.9 GHz, 3mb l3 cache) with intelhd graphics. ) on tiger direct, the geforce 8600 gts is only $34. is that worth the purchase, in terms of performance, or would the integrated hd graphics be better?

 

[Deemo13]

Most of the time discrete will always be better for gaming. The card does not use the RAM in your system to power its graphics needs, it has its own. You might want to go with something with a bit more punch though, the 8600GTS is not that powerful of a card by todays standards and you will mainly be playing older games (unless that is your intent, the go for it)

 

[jitpublisher]

8600gts was considered the bottom end for a gaming card, a year ago. I don't think its worth $34 if you want to game. It would be better than the onboard graphics, that is for sure. But you are still not going to be very happy if you plan on playing modern games.

 

[geofelt]

The integrated graphics on sandy bridge was reviewed some time ago as equivalent to a $50 discrete graphics card.
Sufficient for HD movies and some games.

From that point of view, you might not want to bother.

I suggest you see how well you do with the integrated graphics. It is easy enough to add a discrete card later.

 

[TheinsanegamerN]

well, after doing a FPS test, supreme commander gets 45 fps with the integrated, and i can still take the integrated from 850 MHZ to 1100. but then i ran into another problem. supreme commander randomly shuts down for no reason whatsoever, and empire at war just whites out on the main menu screen. does anyone know what is going on?.
on a side note, i think intel screwed up. all sandy bridge cpu's are supposed to have intel hd 2000 gpu's except for the k series, which has hd 3000 series. but acording tto gpu-z, mine has 12 ROP's, which falls in line with the hd 3000 chip. did they do something different, or did i just get lucky?