Another computer question!

[Chukie sue]

So I ended up buying an HP compaq NC 6320 with 2.1Ghz, 3gb ram, 120 gb hard drive with a centrino core duo processor for 180$ used. I think it'd be cool to be able to play relatively new games such as Devil May Cry 4, Resident Evil 4 (and maybe 5 if I could run it).

The only thing listed under "graphics" is "Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 950 with up to 128MB shared system memory", which of course means nothing to me.

Anyway, off the top of your heads, is that even a graphics card? If so, do you know if it's powerful enough to handle those type of games? And finally, if not, what would you recommend?

Thanks for your patience. It probably takes a lot of it to deal with my incompetence.

[Nitro Vordex]

If you bought that for gaming, you made a terrible decision. Low end processor, and that graphics media accelerator is an Intel, which is already bad news. It means it's just integrated, and it's only 128MB of memory, AKA crap. It might run game, but you ain't gettin' 'em pretty, nor are you going to 60 FPS anything recent.

[Randomness]

If you bought that for gaming, you made a terrible decision. Low end processor, and that graphics media accelerator is an Intel, which is already bad news. It means it's just integrated, and it's only 128MB of memory, AKA crap. It might run game, but you ain't gettin' 'em pretty, nor are you going to 60 FPS anything recent.

You'd be lucky if it ran something from this year on minimum settings, frankly.

I'm always annoyed to see the Intel stuff labeled a graphics card. It's just an add-on to the CPU really.

[Blitzkommando]

The 950 GMA is also pretty old and wasn't all that good when it was new years ago. It struggles to play Youtube videos at 480p and about the best gaming you're going to do with it would be something like Quake III or the original Unreal.

[Chukie sue]

Nah, it was primarily for writing. I very quickly abandoned any hope of playing a new game, but RE4 and DMC4 are 2005 and 2008, so I'm hoping I can play those, or play them after a small to medium upgrade.

[Rubius-sama]

If you bought that for gaming, you made a terrible decision. Low end processor, and that graphics media accelerator is an Intel, which is already bad news. It means it's just integrated, and it's only 128MB of memory, AKA crap. It might run game, but you ain't gettin' 'em pretty, nor are you going to 60 FPS anything recent.

Well, by nature, everything in a laptop is integrated (meaning on-board).

@OP: If you want to game, get a desktop, or spend 4x as much as one on a laptop that can kinda run games.

[Blitzkommando]

The 950 GMA lacks something that killed off the Voodoo line around a decade ago: no hardware T&L. Basically, geometry is done in software and it's incredibly slow. Some games will refuse to install based on that. Essentially, your graphics chip would have been competitive in 1996 but after the advent of the nVidia RIVA and ATI Rage series of 1997 and 1998 respectively, it falls flat. It wasn't until Intel released the X3000 in 2006 that they finally caught up with the concept of hardware accelerated shader processing.

[Randomness]

Well, by nature, everything in a laptop is integrated (meaning on-board).

@OP: If you want to game, get a desktop, or spend 4x as much as one on a laptop that can kinda run games.

That's not what integrated refers to...

Also, if you can find a desktop that runs games very well for around $200, tell me.