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.
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.