On-board Video

I am planning on building a Pc for my 60" plasma acreen t.v in full HD, is on-board video good enough or do I need a graphics card. I am not going to be gaming, it will be mainly for watching DVD's, streaming and a bit of productivity.

well, it depends. if you use an AMD APU, then for sure yes. intel is a no. intel iGPUs suck. trust me, i'm using one.

Thanks for your help.

i know of absolutly no recent gpu (integrated or otherwise) that can't run dvd's at 1080p

unless maybe what they use with the atoms, that sucks pretty hard

true. after reading it again, I realized that he said he WASN'T going to game. seeing that, I would go with an ivy bridge i3 in an ITX system.

The intel 4000 chip is actually not half bad. But if you dont want one, I guess just get something really cheap or even free from craigslist or a 5450.

Most iGPU's are fully capable of hardware accelerated video playback, but a GPU isn't even necessary for that. Any decent dual-core can playback full HD fine.

Even Intel's Celeron (Sandy/Ivy Bridge) are capable of full HD playback, though they lack Intel's ClearVideo HD, which applies a bunch of effects to "enhance" image quality.

Personally, I'd opt for a Trinity APU, such as the A4.