It has been forever since I built/bought a PC/Laptop and now I was asked to suggest a laptop with an iGPU for casual light gaming (if possible refurbished).
Can someone help me get up to date with the current specs? How much VRAM is bare minimum? And which CPU generation should I aim for?
Thanks everyone!
Edit: Gaming is not the priority. Office work is the focus with the possibility of photo and video workflows in the future. Also I am very confused with the naming scheme of Intel for their CPU and iGPU. Not very intuitive.
What budget do you have/what are you goals both gaming and otherwise?
If you’re buying something with an iGPU then for gaming don’t even bother thinking about the CPU. The GPU is going to be holding you back way more. Also IGPUs don’t normally have dedicated vram. They just use system memory.
Intels 11th-14th Gen. all have the same IGPUs and the higher end ones are reasonably capable. Core 100 brought Arc IGPUs which are also a big step up, but idk if they’re very cheap yet. AMDs IGPUs are still so much better so try to aim for AMD if you can.
And get at least 16GB of RAM. Decent amount of laptops with better iGPU have it soldered to the motherboard, so not upgradable.
Not all mobile 11-14th gen had Iris Xe - you can look them up on Wikipedia and I wouldn’t go lower than 80 EUs. You should be able to find more used Intel laptops than AMD.
I have i7-1165G7 (96 EUs) and it’s fine for older/not demanding games - I played Cities Skylines 1 on my laptop and it was playable.
PS: last time I checked I had better FPS on Linux than on Windows 10, which might be related to how Intel drivers and dxvk handle DirectX9
Thank you very much! Yeah I was not thinking about 8 GB RAM, but thank you for the heads up!
So execution units are a metric I should look out for? And what exactly means Iris Xe? Is it just a general name for Intel iGPUs or is Xe better than other Intel iGPUs?
Iris xe is what the iGPU is called. Execution units is what intel calls the amount of “processors” in the GPU.
If the laptop only has single channel memory they can only advertise it as “Intel Graphics” or something like that. As soon as you put the second stick in it magically renames itself to “Iris Xe”. It’s mostly just marketing.
Not quite, Iris Xe is a GPU architecture and is quite distinct from earlier Intel HD and UHD graphics, which was still present in some Intel 11-12th gen mobile CPUs. They basically created a new architecture, and that’s what powers current Intel Arc GPUs.
Iris Xe on Wikipedia
I’m not sure about the branding of the devices, but the iGPU performance is hugely dependent on the memory boundwidth, so the same iGPU would perform worse on a single channel than dual channel and the best performance should be with soldered LPDDR*x memory.
Thank you very much! With the CPU generation I was aiming at the iGPU that comes with the CPU. I figured that the CPU is usually not the bottleneck in laptops.
I did not know that about the system memory, thanks a lot.
Core 100 is another CPU family I suppose? And AMD laptops are a rare find, unfortunately.