Integrated or Discrete?

[Ilmater]

I currently have an XFX Radeon HD 5670 with 1GB of RAM. My motherboard died (I hope that's all that died), so I'm upgrading all the way from an Athlon II X2 250 to an i7 4790, an ASUS H87-PLUS, and 8GB of RAM. I've been out of the game so long that I honestly don't know if it's better to use the card or just the integrated graphics. I basically stopped paying attention right when integrated graphics were starting to get real.

I really never game any more, and if it's basically a wash then I'd rather have less cards in my case for cooling purposes. But if the integrated graphics cards are still gobbling up system RAM - taking over a chunk of it that the OS loses - then I'd rather the OS get the RAM. And I do hope to game a little in the future, so I'd like to know which is better.

It's nearly impossible to find benchmarks comparing the two directly, but I was able to find this Futuremark estimate of the 5760 and benchmark of the HD 4600 with the i7 4790 that would suggest the 5760 would be faster (9770 vs. 8733), but if you just compare the HD 4600 to the HD 5760 on that Futuremark site on the 3DMark11 results, the HD 4600 blows the HD 5760 out of the water (4430 vs. 1510). Thoughts?

 

[AtenRa]

For games the HD5670 GDDR-5 will be much faster than the HD4600. If you going to play some games then use the HD5670, if not use the integrated HD4600. You can set how much RAM the iGPU can use with in the BIOS, so you can only assign 512MB to the iGPU or less. For desktop use even 256MB will be enough.

 

[Ilmater]

Wow. I thought integrated graphics were really making strides, but a mid-range, 5-year-old card is still better than integrated graphics? That's sad.

Thanks!

 

[SlickR12345]

Wow. I thought integrated graphics were really making strides, but a mid-range, 5-year-old card is still better than integrated graphics? That's sad.

Thanks!

It actually might be quite close, though the GDDR5 ram makes the difference. So yeah.

You can keep the 5670 in the slot and just disable/enable it in bios.

It should in theory be a bit faster than the integrated card due to the faster memory.

Since you don't game though, you might as well not bother and just use the igp for some casual games, though IGP's are still very weak when it comes to gaming, I mean at best expect medium settings in 2012/13 titles at up to 720p, though probably lower resolutions to have a stable framerate.

 

[coffeejunkee]

Well, considering where igp's were at not so long ago, they really did made strides.

But there must be something wrong with that Futuremark estimate, HD4600 also scores higher than HD6870 card, and I'm pretty sure the 6870 is a lot faster than HD4600.

My advice would be to test with the igp first, it's capable of running older titles or some more recent ones at lowered resolution/settings. If that works for you, great. Else put in the 5670. The memory used by the igp is irrelevant if you have 8GB.