It's best to have dedicated NVIDIA (don't have much experience with ATI, but it is my understanding that they may be more difficult to configire sometimes). However, Intel on-board graphics has gotten much better recently (in fact, Intel releases drivers as open source (guess because they are not big players in video cards). I am not sure you'll actually notice any difference between NVIDIA and Intel integrated, since coot is not as demanding as the bleeding edge videogames for which high-speed graphics matters.
I'd recommend to search various linux forums for information about the laptop you are considering - if it's a fairly new model, there are often issues you'll need to resolve to get it going. Ed. On Sun, 2010-09-19 at 16:45 +0100, wrote: > Dear all, > > I wanted to know which type of graphics card is more suitable for a notebook > which is going to be used for structural biology. Integrated or dedicated? > ATI or NVIDIA? At the moment I have to choose between an integrated Intel HD > Graphics or a dedicated NVIDIA NVS 3100M Graphics. Any suggestions are highly > appreciated. > > Thanks! > > Eric -- "I'd jump in myself, if I weren't so good at whistling." Julian, King of Lemurs