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So I think I am going to buy a couple of laptops from Dell. The 1505's look about right for under $1000.

The video card selection offers:
Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 950.
ATI x1300
ATI x1400
Nvidia Geforce Go 7300 Turbocache.

I really have no use for gaming on these machines but I do want them to play video and I'd also like them to be able to perform mythfrontend duties for SD content. Also does anyone know if all or some of those have TV out?

How important are accelerated drivers for playing video content? Is there any sort of drivers for that shared Intel chip?


There is also a choice between Dell wireless 1390 and Intel pro/wirless 3945. Anyone have any experience with either of those chips?


Thanks for any input.

hellonorman wrote:So I think I am going to buy a couple of laptops from Dell. The 1505's look about right for under $1000.

The video card selection offers:
Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 950.
ATI x1300
ATI x1400
Nvidia Geforce Go 7300 Turbocache.

The Intel cards have open source drivers, the ATi cards use ATi's crappy proprietary driver and the NVIDIA card works great with NVIDIA's proprietary driver.

hellonorman wrote:I really have no use for gaming on these machines but I do want them to play video and I'd also like them to be able to perform mythfrontend duties for SD content. Also does anyone know if all or some of those have TV out?

How important are accelerated drivers for playing video content? Is there any sort of drivers for that shared Intel chip?

3D acceleration may not matter to you that much, but I still like having it, because then you can tell Xine to use OpenGL to display the video, you can do AIGLX and XGL and all that cool stuff that's on the doorssteps towards us.

hellonorman wrote:There is also a choice between Dell wireless 1390 and Intel pro/wirless 3945. Anyone have any experience with either of those chips?


Thanks for any input.

You can see the differences between the driver support for those three cards right here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison ... vers#Linux

As you can see, the lastest chips are a lot more proprietary.

Thanks.