A Regretful Laptop Buying Experience

      I recently bought a Dell N4050 laptop with Pentium B960 2.2 GHz. Frankly i bought it because I read a pamphlet somewhere mentioning it comes with Intel HD 3000 graphics which is much faster than HD Graphics 2000. I wanted to play games such as NFS Most Wanted, Counter-Strike Source, Red Alert 3 : Uprising, Starcraft 2, and Sonic Episode 2, so a fast GPU is a must. I browsed many review sites and they all sing praises for the HD 3000 graphics, which as they said is the first Intel graphics that outpaced a budget AMD offering at the time. Without much thought I grabbed one from a local retailer shop for just under RM1000 ($333), thinking it was a steal.

      After numerous gameplaying and founding it to be a bit slower than my expectation. So to doublecheck I ran 3DMark Vantage. It scored 929. I compared the results with other Intel HD Graphics systems from Google and guess what, it placed smack in the middle of HD Graphics 2000 range, rather than the more expected 1700+ of HD Graphics 3000.

      Undaunted by this, I went to Intel Ark site and read the Pentium B960 spec sheet. To my dismay, the graphic chip column lists "HD Graphics", without any of the numbering whatsoever. I Google'd for this and found out that apparently Intel has misquoted the graphics for the Pentium B960 as HD 3000 and since then has made correction. Oh well, I guess we all got what we paid for. But honestly, I hate being tricked into like this. I'm sure there are many others who fallen prey to this "unbelievable offer".

      Seems I have to live the rest of my life with slow gaming until I can get my hands on more money to buy another laptop. Sigh.

Edit: I found a way to increase the laptop speed by at least 200Mhz! Click here: