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The Display Adapter

The display adapter stands out from the other components in the machine. Unlike with the other components, the display adapter is hard to compare to a person working at a desk. This is because it uses its own little system.

The display adapter is abbreviated as GFX and is, broadly speaking, made of two parts. One is a chip – GPU (Graphics Processing Unit), the other a given amount of RAM. There are many different classes of display adapters, but the two main groups are onboard and dedicated.

An onboard GFX is built into the chipset (a chip that has another primary function than processing graphics), and has the advantage of being cheap and consuming little power. The RAM needed is simply borrowed from system RAM. Performance is shoddy when it comes to processing 3D graphics, but the average user will do just fine with an onboard GFX. A dedicated display adapter has an independent GPU along with an independent amount of RAM. The amount of RAM is very important in relation to gaming, but hardly so for office use. Onboard GFXs that come with office laptops borrow system memory, which is RAM that you usually use for running different programs and Windows. Therefore, a display adapter should not borrow too much RAM, though this is not really needed anyway (you can usually set how much RAM can be borrowed in BIOS) as 32 or 64 MB are enough for most.

However, with gaming and Workstation laptops, GFX RAM and the speed of the GFX chip make a huge difference. The more RAM, the better! This is because the display adapter’s RAM stores textures in games and so on, and as such a display adapter with a lot of RAM won’t need to extract new textures from the hard drive and system memory as often, which results in a more seamless gaming experience, and generally a much better performance in Workstation programs. The most stunning (3D-wise) games have a tendency to use a lot of RAM on both the display adapter and the system memory. Today, a display adapter with 256MB RAM and 1 GB system memory is absolute minimum if you want a decent gaming laptop that can run the newest games at medium settings. Multiply that by two and you get a display adapter with a 512MB GPU and 2 GB RAM, the biggest on the market and optimal if you want a really good gaming experience.

It’s becoming more and more popular to make a combination of dedicated and shared RAM. The producer can then state a high number of RAM which many mistakenly believe will result in great performance, but ends up in disappointment. This “technology” is called Turbo Cache and Hypermemory at nVidia and ATI (AMD) respectively.


There are currently 3 brands of display adapters worth mentioning: Intel, nVidia, and ATI (AMD). Intel exclusively produces onboard display adapters while nVidia and ATI (AMD) produce both.

The Display

The quality of laptop display has become quite high. The size of the display, the resolution, and vertical and horizontal angles of view are aspects that many place a great amount of importance on. Vertical and horizontal angles of view refer to when you look at the display from above or from the side. On many of the discount models, it’s hard to see what happens on the display when you’re viewing it at even low angles. On the more quality focused laptops, view is good regardless of angle. It should be mentioned, though, that most notebooks these days have satisfactory and quality displays. One reason for this is TFT (Thin Film Transistor), meaning that the display contains liquid crystals. TFT ensures a light, strong, and sharp picture that is pleasant to look at. Displays come in different sizes and resolutions, size usually being 10.4” to 19”. Displays also come in different Aspect Ratios, which is the relationship between width and height of the picture. Displays come in two broad groups – widescreen (e.g. 16:10) and non-widescreen (e.g. 4:3) – with smaller subgroups. Besides aspect ratio, it’s also important to look into what kind of resolution the display is able to show. The higher the resolution (number of points on a display), the more can be shown on it at any given point. The most common resolutions on laptops are:

Non-widescreen – The abbreviation – The resolution – Aspect Ratio

XGA / 1024x768 / 4:3SXGA / 1280x1024 / 5:4SXGA+ / 1400x1050 / 4:3 UXGA / 1600x1200 / 4:3



Widescreen – The Abbreviation – The Resolution - Aspect Ratio

WXGA / 1280x768 / 5:3WXGA / 1280x800 / 8:5 and 16:10WXGA+ / 1440x900 / 8:5 and 16:10WSXGA+ / 1680x1050 / 8:5 and 16:10


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