On Sat, Jan 31, 2015 at 04:28:16PM +0000, Mark Rogers wrote:
But it's a long time since I looked at graphics chipsets so any comments welcomed. I'm undecided whether to get a cheap laptop (~£200) or go for a better one (say £400) but I'll take some convincing to go beyond that.
This isn't going to really be a helpful comment but I recently bought a Thinkpad W530 which was £1000, although it did come with SSD, full hd screen, 8GB RAM and a quad core i7. One of the selling points was that it has both an Intel and Nvidia graphics chipset it that can be switched between per application at runtime so I have the best of both.
I used to have a Thinkpad W500 that had an AMD and Intel chipset in it but you could not switch between the gpu without a reboot and the AMD support was supposed to be great but in reality it left me with a fast but broken gpu so I ended up using the Intel chipset all of the time which meant no playing around with software like blender. Personally I'm unlikely to buy an AMD graphics card again.
Anyhow, there are some external gpu options that you may want to look at where you can hook up a single lane of PCI to an external graphics card, it won't work for many modern games but would be good enough for 3d modelling.
At the price you're looking at spending I think I'd be wanting an Intel based chipset.
Adam