Keith Wallace
New member
The Laptop is a Toshiba Satellite that I got for $250 at Best Buy almost a year ago. The processer is a newish Pentium. I wasn't expecting much of it, but it surprised me how capable it is in comparison to every netbook/nettop that I have tried. It is the least capable of the three to be sure, but still handles emulators surprisingly well. The desktop is a Sandy Bridge i3 with intel HD graphics (2500 maybe?) that I built myself just to test out after reading many articles about it. The system is approaching 2 years old now.
I'm not going to say that Intel's integrated graphics processing is better than AMD, but only that it is a little unfair to use terms such as "mess" and "useless" to describe them. I had one of the original Asus Zenbooks shortly after building that desktop because I saw the advancements as pretty remarkable myself, and the experience I had with the Zenbook sealed it for me. I sold the Zenbook shortly before the Ivy Bridge refresh and then just decided to hold out for the Surface Pro.
Well, when I say something is useless, I mean it's mostly a low-power part. You're not going to play anything even remotely-intensive on the graphics side with HD 2500 graphics. Even the HD 4000 graphics are lacking, when compared to an AMD APU.