> Define "high-quality videos"? Really 2D is most of what I do. I run > compiz in gnome, but don't need to. I don't do any 3D gaming. I watch > videos and TV off the web and that's it. Mostly I write software with > the machine. Since I'm getting into MythTV, I get lots of 1080i content - ~ 7 GB per hour of video. Stuff that I want to store, I usually encode to H264. Both of those take lots of horsepower to decode and de-interlace for display. If you can't offload it to the videocard, the load will eat a pretty major processing power from the system. I have laptops that are only a couple years old that can't decode this type of video at full screen resolution without stuttering / dropping frames. But in my mythtv box, with a cheap motherboard, a cheap celeron processor, and a NVidia GT 220, I have about 5% CPU usage while playing it. The other thing you will find is motherboards that have even the best intel video chipsets (or boards that support the new Intel i3 / i5 / i7 processors) are quite expensive... and they don't even come close to the performance of a $70 standalone ATI or NVidia video card. I mean... try to find an online benchmark. They are such different worlds of performance, they usually don't even compare them with each other. Integrated graphics are just really, really bad, compared to add-on cards. If you want to play any modern 3D game, they just don't cut it. But if your mostly writing software with it, I suspect that none of this will really matter... probably your most important questions are can it handle my monitor resolution (if you have a high resolution monitor) and/or can it handle multiple monitors, if you typically use more than one. But if you want to watch full-screen online flash video - the more power the better - this is funny only because it is so true http://xkcd.com/619/ The hoverover tooltip even specifically mentions the intel driver :-) > I'd prefer open, but right now my real problem is that the driver is > broken. Here's one of many posts about the problem. > http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=140371 > Ugh. That sucks... I've got several machines running NVidia, and have not encountered this... one of the threads I followed from their seemed to be blaming the SATA chipset, as it afflicted Gigabyte and ASUS boards using particular video cards and the same chipset... but ASUS reportedly fixed the problem with a BIOS update. But no one seems to have the real answer yet. Then again, a PCI SATA controller for $15 is probably a quicker way to avoid the headaches. Dan