New Mac Laptop and HD

Hi,
I am currently a Windows user but I would like to switch to mac. I want to get a laptop. I've been looking at different iBooks and PowerBooks but what I have noticed is that the graphics cards only have 32 MB of ram, which is less than my 3 year old pc graphics card has. I want to be able to hook up the laptop to an HDTV without having noticable lag. Can the graphics cards on Apple laptops handle this? What other restrictions are there going to be on using the computer at a very high resolution? Any advice on laptops would be appreciated.
Zach

Actually the PowerBooks have more than 32 MB's

12" PowerBook - 64 MB
15" PowerBook - 128 MB
17" PowerBook - 128 MB

Oh yes you're right. I guess I just got confused with iBooks. Even still, is 128 MB enough? It may just be that I'm used to reading about PC graphics cards which even low end ones have more than 128 MB of memory now.

Im just not seeing what you are seeing. I took a look at Dell's stuff and most of them are 32 or 64 for their laptops and they are actually not very upfront with what they have.. they call it xga, sxga, uxga and so forth.. which really does not tell you much about how much vram they have! So I had to do more research and I still could not find any, especially low end notebooks with that much vram.. or even that much ram period.. most ram it seems to only be able to get 512MB's or so, while my powerbook can hold 2 Gig's of RAM.

Ok onto vram some more.. Ill continue looking for cheap laptops that come with 64 or 128 MB's or more.

Wahoo I found one! Dell's top of the line laptop the XPS M170 which costs $2,699 and has 256 in it, while all the rest has 64 or less. And it looks like it's a 17", too big for my taste, but might be good for you. It's about the same price as the 17" PowerBook, they are both pretty comparable from what I can see.

I think you might be reading about PC graphic cards for desktop computers, not for laptops.. that's a completely different thing

Well that was interesting to compare Dell with Apple.. Ill need to do that again some time

What do you plan on doing that would tax a graphics card? If you're not doing anything 3D (Games, Maya, Games, Scientific visualizations, Games, etc.) then any video card should be able to keep up. Even the PCs without dedicated memory (yes, lots of PCs have 0 MB graphics cards--they use system memory.) If you're playing games, then you might want to think carefully about getting an iBook.

You mentioned HDTVs. HDTVs have fairly low resolutions for their size...1366x768 is common. That's about 30% smaller than the resolution of a 15" PowerBook, for example. But an iBook could only send the 1024x768 signal from its internal display, since iBooks only support mirroring. Any PowerBook could drive an HDTV at its full resolution; a 15" or 17" would actually be stepping down.

I guess I'm making too big a deal of the memory on the graphics card. Mostly I'm just wondering what kind of hardware I need to be able to multitask while outputting to an HD monitor. What are the most important parts for doing this? Can it be done effectively with an apple laptop? If so, which one(s)?

I didn't see this post before I made my last post.

technologist said:

You mentioned HDTVs. HDTVs have fairly low resolutions for their size...1366x768 is common. That's about 30% smaller than the resolution of a 15" PowerBook, for example. But an iBook could only send the 1024x768 signal from its internal display, since iBooks only support mirroring. Any PowerBook could drive an HDTV at its full resolution; a 15" or 17" would actually be stepping down.

Click to expand...

This is pretty much the information I needed. Thank you very much.

Cool, sorry I was not able to answer the question more fully, great to see technologist stepped in