In 2007, the mobile video accelerator for Intel GMA 3100 laptops was introduced. The characteristics of this accelerator, its specifications and parameters will be further considered. The test results of this model of the accelerator will also be given and recommendations regarding its most correct and optimal operation to date.
Device Specialization
Features Intel GMA 3100 attributed to a series of entry-level devices. High speed and performance from an integrated accelerator initially should not be expected. Therefore, playing with high image quality on such laptops will not work. But the usual and most common programs will function perfectly. The latter include text programs, office suites, accounting utilities, browsers, and media players. These are the main cases of using portable personal computers based on such an accelerator.
Accelerator Parameters
The mobile graphics card Intel Graphics Media Accelerator GMA X3100 has the code name Crestline and is intended for use as part of economy class laptops. This chip was manufactured using 90 nm technology and has an outdated layout to date. That is, modern built-in video adapters are included in the CPU, and the video card is made in the form of a separate chip on the system board. Such a performance extremely negatively affects the performance of the graphics subsystem of a mobile computer.
The accelerator includes only 8 stream processors. Each of them operates at a frequency of 500 MHz. The thermal package of the accelerator is limited to 13.5 watts. That is, it can quite successfully function with a passive cooling system in the form of an aluminum radiator. Therefore, a high speed of operation from this adapter is certainly not to be expected. The priority in the development of this device, the developers had energy efficiency, and they coped with this task perfectly. Also, due to this, the battery life of the portable computing system has increased.
Memory subsystem
Specifications Intel GMA 3100 focus on the fact that this device does not have a separate memory for storing processed information. For its needs, the accelerator reserves part of the system RAM. Personal computers with such an adapter are equipped with DDR 2 modules, which most often operate at a clock frequency of 667 or 800 MHz. The video buffer size is set in the system board BIOS. But the maximum size of RAM used is limited (384 MB). This adapter is not able to address more RAM. It should also be noted that this built-in accelerator was used on motherboards with the LGA775 socket, whose motherboards could address no more than 4 GB of RAM.
Results in games. Real speed
The accelerator shows very modest results in various tests. Moreover, both in gaming applications and in synthetic utilities. Nominally, it is designed to work in conjunction with the DirectX 10 API. But if Windows 10 is installed on such a computer, then its version will be 11.
All toys released until 2004 inclusive, on such a graphics accelerator in good quality will be launched. The latter include, for example, HMM 3, Sunrise, Worms, or DooM 3.
In the 3D Mark 2006 test suite, this adapter gains 431 points. It is inferior to accelerators such as Quadro NVS110M from NVidia and Radeon Xpress 1250 from ATI. The more modern integrated graphics cards are many times faster in speed of this mobile video card.
Adapter relevance
Of course, the Intel GMA 3100 specifications are very modest. Therefore, now computers based on it allow solving the most simple problems. First of all, these include office suites. That is, such a laptop is great for processing text data or tables. Also, its speed allows you to launch a browser and view various Internet resources. You can include very, very old, demanding and new, entry-level toys in this list. Both in the first and in the second case, the speed of the accelerator under consideration will be quite sufficient. But still this graphics adapter is very outdated. And the owners of such laptop computers is the time to think about buying a new mobile computing system.
Conclusion
In this review, the characteristics of the Intel GMA 3100 were examined and described in detail. The test results of this adapter are also shown, which show an extremely low level of its performance. In addition, it was introduced by the manufacturing company in 2007. Since then, I managed to become very outdated. For the simplest software tasks, its speed is still sufficient. But resource-intensive and demanding programs on such hardware will not start. In addition, the degree of wear and tear on such laptops is already significant. Therefore, it's time to buy a new one instead of such a laptop. And this is exactly what owners of such laptops should already think about.