SB: HD 3000 versus HD 2000, should I care?

[ignatzatsonic]

I will be building a Sandy Bridge PC within a month or so.

I don’t game. I don’t overclock. I don’t upgrade other than hard drives or outright parts failures. I rebuild from the ground up every 4 years or so. I use a single high quality 19 inch monitor at low resolution. I don’t resell used hardware.

Currently, my most strenuous graphics use is probably mild to moderate Photoshop and watching random videos on the Internet. I do a bit of low-level video editing.

My first impulse is to go with an H67 chipset, a 2500 processor, and use the integrated HD 2000 graphics.

Considering my usage, is there ANY reason to upgrade to the 2500 K just to get HD 3000 graphics? Benchmarks mean nothing to me---I’m interested in possible real world examples.

On the one hand, the price differential from 2500 to 2500 K is only $15. On the other hand, if I had HD 3000, would I ever know it?

Who exactly is a candidate to benefit from HD 3000 rather than HD 2000?

Thanks in advance for any insight here—I don’t follow graphics closely.

 

[dualsmp]

I'd just go with 2500 and H67. Doubt you would feel or see any tangible difference between HD 2000 vs. HD 3000. Games you would see a slight difference, but the integrated chips are still way too slow to matter anyways.

I have the first generation HD graphics on the i3 530 and it's fine for Aero, desktop chores and accelerating Youtube. Games are dirt slow though, so I bought a discreet card anyways.

 

[Bish]

I do know there is a significant bump in performance of the HD300 versus HD2000. The obvious question is would you notice? For me, the extra few dollars was good insurance even though I'm running a htpc and likely shouldn't notice. For the occasional game that gets played on it, I'm guessing I WILL notice.

 

[dualsmp]

I do know there is a significant bump in performance of the HD300 versus HD2000. The obvious question is would you notice? For me, the extra few dollars was good insurance even though I'm running a htpc and likely shouldn't notice. For the occasional game that gets played on it, I'm guessing I WILL notice.

Way I look at it is he could drop a discreet card in for insurance if he ever really did need more power. If he doesn't game though I don't see a problem with the HD 2000. My 2 cents.

 

[Sp12]

I'm willing to bet the extra EUs would accelerate quicksync and whatever other GPGPU apps come out.

 

[ignatzatsonic]

Thanks for the responses so far.

Is there any chance at all that text would be crisper on 3000 rather than 2000?

Or that a still image (jpegs, bmps, tiffs, etc) might have sharper focus or better color on 3000 than 2000?

Or would the performance of the two be utterly identical EXCEPT on some type of moving image (game, video, etc)?

I used to read discrete card reviews (8 or 10 years ago), and recall that they would likely have a comment about how well the card did on text, so that's why I am wondering about text in this case.

Are there any other considerations?

 

[dualsmp]

There's going to be zero difference in image quality between 2000 vs. 3000.

 

[guric1van]

"Along with a bump in clock speed, the new GPUs support the HDMI 1.4 standard with 3D stereoscopic playback, and hardware encoding for H.264 and MPEG-2 video (for applications that support it) and minor image enhancement features. The features-set has also been upgraded to DirectX 10.1 and Shader model 4.1. With all these improvements and changes to the architecture, Intel claims their new GPU is comparable to entry level discrete cards from its competitors."

support for HDMI 1.4 is needed to watch 3D movies, which i think would be a must if youre building a HTPC

 

[gramboh]

Is the 2000 capable of decoding compressed 1080p (say x264) video? That's the only thing I'd be concerned about, although the CPU could easily handle it in software so it's kind of a moot point other than power savings/load balancing.

 

[Nemeth782]

The only thing I can think of, is that Quicksync will be faster (ever transcode movies for your phone/tablet), and that IF any other GPGPU stuff comes about that you want to use (maybe the next Photoshop supports Intel GPGPU acceleration, right now I know some of CS master suite uses CUDA so it is possible...) the 3000 will be quicker.

However, text quality and 2D performance will absolutely not matter, and even if you decide to play back some esoteric 4K resolution video, then the CPU can do the decode if needed.

 

[Barfo]

Thanks for the responses so far.

Is there any chance at all that text would be crisper on 3000 rather than 2000?

Or that a still image (jpegs, bmps, tiffs, etc) might have sharper focus or better color on 3000 than 2000?

Or would the performance of the two be utterly identical EXCEPT on some type of moving image (game, video, etc)?

I used to read discrete card reviews (8 or 10 years ago), and recall that they would likely have a comment about how well the card did on text, so that's why I am wondering about text in this case.

Are there any other considerations?

No difference between the two in that.

 

[lamedude]

SNB IGP doesn't support OpenCL so you can forget about hypothetical GPGPU app.

 

[happy medium]

10 month old thread...................................?