Not quite sure I know which you're asking about, but that could just be the fact that I'm running on a double latte, a Bawls, and a heaping tablespoon of Guarana(sp?). I'm SOOO tired right now :P Anyway, built-ins have some ups, but many downs. The up side is that they produce little heat compared to separate cards, they leave a slot open for extra cards to be installed, and being made for that specific setup, don't often have conflicts. Their downs, well... If they ever go out, it often causes problems with the rest of the board, they often conflict when trying to install cards whether you disable them or not, they are very often below standard and many chipsets are not supported by some applications(though eMachine began packaging GeForce4 chipsets in some of their PCs). For example, FFXI refuses to run on ATI Rage MOBILE and many other built-ins. They take up board area that could be used for other components to improve board performance and if you choose to use a card in place of the onboard, it's wasted silicon. In the case of video chipsets they often have very limited RAM, or even worse, share RAM which is slower than dedicated video RAM and otherwise impacts systemwide performance. Again, just my opinion.
