I’ve been trying to find out if the Intel Extreme Graphics 2 chipset in the Thinkpad X40 will outperform the Radeon Mobility in my Thinkpad X22. I’ve looked lots of places and blogged the question, but it’s been tough finding any info other than that the Intel chipset uses system memory rather than onboard memory, meaning it can access more, slower memory.

IBM tech support had no info, so I called the account manager for Harvard, since I’m looking at doing the upgrade through my Berkman affiliation. The first person I talked with, Eric G., didn’t have an answer, but he started IM’ing CJ and relaying his comments. After a few minutes, he put me on the phone with the guy directly. And CJ was exactly the right guy. He looked up my model X22 and told me that my Radeon card only has 8MB of onboard memory, so the Intel should do much better. When I said that the system memory was slower, he said that it’s a 333 [insert correct unit] bus, which is not much worse than the 400 [insert correct unit] of modern graphics cards. Also, the X40 has a full megabyte of [something that isn’t RAM]. So, assuming that CJ isn’t making this stuff up, the X40 should outperform the X22 graphically.

I was impressed with Eric’s initiative in hunting down the right person, someone who happens to care enough about tech to have looked into all this. And both Eric and CJ were friendly and unwilling to BS me.

Categories: Uncategorized dw