SSID?
Sorry, I meant SSD. Solid state hard drive.
Now you don't know what you're talking about. SSD has been, is, and will be a farce in the majority of cases until they make flash memory that isn't restricted to entire block or entire page writes/reads. Even the pcie cards that use ddr2 system memory & a battery are dogs. Not only that, but most SSD drives actually do not save much energy - turning your screen down 1 brightness level will save more. A $500 vs $50 cpu or gpu will have a huge performance gap, but I find it odd HDD vs SSD does not:
http://www.notebookcheck.net/SSD-versus-HDD-in-comparison.18750.0.htmlI can then show you some old cards with 128mb of memory that still aren't worth a damn. The one I just put in my mom's pc isn't the slowest 9xxx ati makes, but it's 128mb doesn't do shit for it. Intel doesn't exactly use GDDR3 in their cheap shit either. To JD: I know a moble x1300 64mb isn't crazy (yours is probably a x1400 128mb), but mine will play nearly any 3d game on lower detail as fast or faster than my old 9800 pro 256mb ever did. In the mean time, most onboard video has problems playing with 3-d in a flash advertisement, some with simple page scrolling (given the retardedly bloated web pages now).
As far as system memory, I really don't understand why people think >2gb of memory is necessary. It's enough to run 3 virtual machines at once w/o missing a beat, meaning you are using 4 pc's worth of memory. Assuming your OS even uses caching properly and predicted what your plans were, your SSD's claimed benifit will be moot once it loads the initial files the OS needs, as it pulls the rest for caching in the background. If people truely understood how long it takes to generate 4gb of data in memory, let alone read it from the HDD (sorry, SSD), they'd understand how retarded it is to NEED that much memory. The only time I've needed 4gb's was when I had a 3.2gb database that was being rebuilt, and it was also the only time my quad went above 75% usage. In that case, I borrowed 2gb from a different machine. If anyone still doesn't believe me, find a dummy file creator, make a 2gb file, then rename it as a txt file. Then open it with notepad...
Cliffs: ssd is hype atm, onboard vid sucks regardless, and terabytes of system memory is useless outside a server farm.I'd reiterate what I said before - buy a slightly used thinkpad and you'll be just as happy, as well as $100-200 richer.