Intel HD Graphics 300 w/ Core i5

[Affliction]

Hi guys.

I'm looking to get a cheap-ish (~£500) Core i5 laptop, for HD TV and a little bit of gaming (mainly Minecraft, but probably some Steam gaming too), and a lot of the systems I'm looking at all seem to have Intel HD Graphics 300 GFX chipsets, which use shared memory. Does anyone know how good these chipsets are for what I want? The most likely contender's specs are below:

Intel HD Graphics 300
Core i5 - 2.5GHz, 3MB Cache
6GB DDR3 1333MHz RAM
Windows 7 Premium 64bit

I'm too rusty on laptop components, it's been far too long since I looked at them

 

[Cuchulain]

Hi guys.

I'm looking to get a cheap-ish (~£500) Core i5 laptop, for HD TV and a little bit of gaming (mainly Minecraft, but probably some Steam gaming too), and a lot of the systems I'm looking at all seem to have Intel HD Graphics 300 GFX chipsets, which use shared memory. Does anyone know how good these chipsets are for what I want? The most likely contender's specs are below:

Intel HD Graphics 300
Core i5 - 2.5GHz, 3MB Cache
6GB DDR3 1333MHz RAM
Windows 7 Premium 64bit

I'm too rusty on laptop components, it's been far too long since I looked at them

My work machine has the Intel HD2000 chipset and it barely runs WoW at the lowest settings (1080p), see if you can find one with a discrete nvidia/amd card instead.

 

[Affliction]

My work machine has the Intel HD2000 chipset and it barely runs WoW at the lowest settings (1080p), see if you can find one with a discrete nvidia/amd card instead.

Well that sounds encouraging XD Is it any more capable at 720p?

Also, like I said, I'm not clued up on laptop components to the extent I am on PC rigs. If a GFX card with shared memory has a maximum Allocated RAM size of, for simplicities sake, 512MB, does that make it the equivilent of a 512MB desktop GFX card (obviously only memory wise)?

 

[lowrez]

Here are some handy comparison tools:-
Tom says locate any card in this banding hierarchy and to make a noticeable leap in capability you need to get something 3 or more bands higher: http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/gaming-graphics-card-review,review-32416-7.html
For example, a card within your price range is the 1GB Nvidia GeForce GT 525M; thats 6 bands higher than HD 3000 so well worth the investment.
Having found a card if you Google it you will usually get two other good resources on page 1.
The maker's reference: http://www.geforce.co.uk/hardware/notebook-gpus/geforce-gt-525m/description says it'll do HDTV nicely. And notebookcheck helps out too placing your card in a hierarchy amongst all others and tells you what to expect from it: http://www.notebookcheck.net/NVIDIA-GeForce-GT-525M.43889.0.html

Then if you have a gander on youtube you can find people posting examples of how well the card performs on various games with various processors.

I'd also add that i3 or i5 quite often doesn't matter too much, especially in your price bracket, the graphics card is more important, modern i3 processors have as many cores (2) and threads (4) as i5, just a slightly slower clock speed, they also have the same cache in many instances too (3M).

 

[DotA]

The HD3000 is a good card for casual games but in some games it just runs out of grunt. well worth getting something like a 540m if you can if you get an i5. also try and get a laptop that uses optimus as you can switch between the gpu and the hd3000 to save on battery usage when on the go.

 

[Affliction]

Thanks for the responses guys. Went with the 1GB GT 525M =]