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General discussion

INTEGRATION (electronic type, not human)

Aug 19, 2005 4:44AM PDT

I'm looking at a Sony desktop. The question that comes to mind about the specs is that both the audio and video are "integrated". What exactly does this mean? Is there not a separate video card?

The basic specs are:
Memory Type DDR
Total Memory 1.0GB
Interface SATA
Capacity 250GB
Optical Drive Type
DVD

Discussion is locked

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That's what it means.
Aug 19, 2005 4:55AM PDT

To push down costs, if you can fit the audio and video sections onto the mainboard then it's cheaper.

Bob

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I should add that I do a lot of Photoshop
Aug 19, 2005 4:56AM PDT

which uses a huge amount of resources.

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I don't see how PS could care about this item.
Aug 19, 2005 5:04AM PDT

3D games do care, but 2D items like photo work and even video editing don't suffer a big impact.

Bob

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uh yeah it's onboard
Aug 20, 2005 9:13AM PDT

what it means is that the audio is provided by the motherboard itself (that's amazingly common and it's not a bad sign)

so is the video (that however is a bad thing, it will be terrible in 3D)

basically you have a geometry unit on the mainboard, and the CPU does the processing for it

it's amazingly slow for games, yet provides an amazingly cheap alternative to providing a seperate controller card for the video

which would add to costs due to more power, more heat (which means more cooling) and the expense of that controller board itself

if that system has an AGP slot you could add in a graphics card to be seperate from the main board

if it has PCIe it could also have a card added in, same goes for PCI yet a PCI card will be slow and won't provide much benefit

also, photoshop doesn't really care about the system's 3D abilities
it's 2D work

you'll want a good ammount of RAM and a decent hard drive, which that machine seems to have