Stupid question, but was Aero Glass turned on for the GMA, but not the Nvidia machine? That doesn't seem fair. I am not sure whether 3DMarks will disable Aero anyway when running, but if not there would be a continuous load on the 3D chip for compositing the desktop.

Naturally, I don't expect the GMA to come close, but it would be interesting to see the effect, if any.

Its amazing how an Inq article about laptops and graphics chips can still take a poke at Vista. Maybe they should have reinstalled and tried Linux for the benchmarking. Wait, does Linux have any benchmarks....

It would have been much better , if other integrated IGP AMD and Nvidia solutions were compared as well. The total power drain could also be compared as main advantage of using IGP is power saving for the non gamers out there. IGP also keeps the BOM down for users who cannot to buy the latest and greatest of the display cards available.

It appears as if you are running the Intel GMA4500 with Aero on and the nVIDIA 9600M with it off.

This should not make a huge difference at all, but seriously, try and make things slightly more fair.

Eugene - GM3500 and Mobile 965 both do just fine with an external LCD @ 1920x1200. Might want to check your work again.

Would you be able to verify this please? I want GMA4500 on my next notebook (instead of a separate video chip) since it saves power and produces less heat. But, I also want to be able to connect it to an external monitor on its native resolution. GMA3500 did not support 1920x1200 and maxed out at 1600x1200.