Hello everyone, I've got a little bit of a dilemma in that I really want my friend to be able to play eq with me, but he's got 2 laptops that can't run EQ and his wife doesn't want him using hers, so I'm going to buy him one so that he can play with me. Now, I'm not made of money, it'll be a very basic one, and I actually did find one at Best Buy on sale for $250 that has an AMD a6-9225 cpu and an AMD Radeon R4 integrated GPU, and that's the part that scares me. Can it run on an onboard chipset or does it need an actual, dedicated GPU to run?
It does not. You can run it on Intel HD graphics, which is the basic video most cheap laptops come with. Even though that R4 is integrated, it's running on its own cores in the CPU, so it's better than not having anything, but not as good as a dedicated video card of course. It's roughly equivalent to Intel HD 4200 and should work adequately.
The main difference between integrated and dedicated is that integrated GPUs use shared memory (borrows some from the main RAM), whereas a dedicated card has its own RAM. So, make sure you've got enough RAM, 2G is too low, 4G is about right for a unit like that.
The primary concern is going to be the CPU. There is a cutoff point on the CPU speed, especially when approaching the 1ghz. The a6-9225 though has a baseline of 2.5ghz so no issue there. The only real hiccup will be GPU + ram. Many of those laptops utilize the system ram for GPU memory so he may not be able to run it full tilt graphics but it will run it. The other is if it has an actual harddrive and not one of those using "flash memory" for storage. As for his laptops, he has two or he has one and his wife has one (that she will not let him touch ) Do we know why his laptop will not run EQ? What is the brand/model or does it have to deal with not able to upgrade the OS to at least WIndows 7, it running either XP or Vista?
