I am considering a new laptop in the near future (I actually have been for years, but now I'm really really close... ) and I have narrowed down my search to the Dell Vostro 1320. This laptop has two video card options; the Nvidia GeForce 9300m and Intel's GMA X4500 HD integrated chip.

Obviously, the Nvidia card is the better of the two, but I don't do anything graphics intensive (HD video, gaming etc) so that's not a concern. However, I do want my machine to run KWin compositing well, and I'd like to know what other's experiences with the Intel 4500HD have been like; does it require any special tweaking? Is compositing smooth, or does it bog down the system noticably?

I'd rather not spend extra money for a dedicated graphics card that I don't need, but I don't want to be forced to live with a choppy or unresponsive desktop. I have a couple other machines with Intel Integrated graphics and they handle KDE/Kwin just fine, but this is a much newer chipset and I've heard mixed rumors about it (none of which recent enough to be of much use to me). I read a review on Phoronix that seemed positive, but that wasn't with KDE. Any KDE'ers have experience with this chip?

Thanks!

Well, I don't have this particular Intel chip on Suse but I maintain A Kubuntu install on a GMA 950(I think) laptop so I have seen the Intel drivers at work.

If your only concern is smooth sailing with Linux then Intel is the superior choice.
The newest distro's run the driver is such a way (called Kernel Mode, I think) so that the driver is fully functional outside of X aswell. That means lightning-fast switches (ctrl+F1, ctrl+F7) in and out of X and full resolution outside of X. All the KDE desktop effects work perfectly too. It's very pleasant to see everything working flawlessly.

HOWEVER, the Intel performance really is very bad compared to the competition. If you have ANY ambition to run anything more powerful then one of the Quake1-for-Linux ports, Intel will disappoint.

Personally, I'd go for a laptop with an ATI chip. You may not get a to use an open source driver RIGHT NOW, but you probably will in a year or 2. ATI's open source drivers are catching up so you can look forward to perfect Linux support with good performance without the proprietary driver fuss.

I've just bought a laptop with GMA X4500MHD on board.
I was not successful with openSUSE 11.2 and Calculate Linux Desktop 10.2 (Gentoo-based) - it gang near starting xserver.
Though Ubuntu and Kubuntu 10.04 Alpha3 worked just fine in liveCD mode.

SeaJey wrote:I've just bought a laptop with GMA X4500MHD on board.
I was not successful with openSUSE 11.2 and Calculate Linux Desktop 10.2 (Gentoo-based) - it gang near starting xserver.
Though Ubuntu and Kubuntu 10.04 Alpha3 worked just fine in liveCD mode.

Sorry to hear that. I just purchased my new machine (Dell Inspiron 1440) with the Intel GMA X4500MHD (is that a mouthful or what?) and it works flawlessly with Linux. Screen res was detected automatically, dual montors are a breeze with KRandR, and a ll KWin effects a smooth and pleasantly fast; I am impressed on my end. Also using openSUSE 11.2 (though I upgraded KDE to 4.4.1).

Sorry to hear that.

Well, it's rather one of the "hot" models so I did not expect it would work out of the box.
Though I was surprised it dealt well with buntu alphas - composite worked nicely, there was sound from dynamics and headphones and it even slept into memory and successfully waked up

So I can wait several months for kubuntu release while testing other distributives.

There is a newer version of the Intel xorg driver (2.10) that will be shipping in the next generation of Linux distros (2.6.32+). This one may work better for you.

On my end openSUSE 11.2 has been a fabulous match with this machine; screen res was detected automatically, KWin compositing worked even in the LiveCD, multimedia keys worked out of the box; in short, the only system configuration I needed to do was to install the broadcom-wl package for the wifi card. Awesome machine, too.