Seems a reasonable mid-level dev system to me. At least as good as you'd get as your workstation at many companies.

Nothing to be excited about but no terrible gaps either. It'll do everything you need, it just won't be as quick as if you'd spent more money :)

Yeah, I think the HD 5000 graphics should be about as fast as a Geforce 840M, which is a crippled card due to memory bandwidth limitations and yet most people have a positive opinion of it. Both the HD 5000 integrated and 840M are crippled yet still adequate. I found out in chat that there are certain developers who dislike Intel graphics, but I'm all for it - one less layer of graphics drivers to worry about if you skip AMD Radeon dedicated/NVIDIA Geforce.

HD5000 isn't crippled, it's just not a dedicated GPU costing several hundred dollars. It's about 100X better than integrated graphics were 2 generations ago.

Seems a reasonable mid-level dev system to me. At least as good as you'd get as your workstation at many companies.

Nothing to be excited about but no terrible gaps either. It'll do everything you need, it just won't be as quick as if you'd spent more money

Yeah, I think the HD 5000 graphics should be about as fast as a Geforce 840M, which is a crippled card due to memory bandwidth limitations and yet most people have a positive opinion of it. Both the HD 5000 integrated and 840M are crippled yet still adequate. I found out in chat that there are certain developers who dislike Intel graphics, but I'm all for it - one less layer of graphics drivers to worry about if you skip AMD Radeon dedicated/NVIDIA Geforce.

Surprisingly, Intel drivers can suck pretty bad as well. You'd think that a major hardware manufacturer would make stable drivers...

Examples:
- Recent Intel 82579LM Gigabit drivers for Windows cause massive DPC latency spikes. Symptoms: Videos, music noticeably stutter. Mouse cursor stutters. Games are unplayable. You have to install a driver from 2011 to fix the problem. The 2011 driver has the checksum offload bug, so you have to then disable checksum offloading in the driver properties.

- Intel HD3000 drivers for Win8 cause crashes in many apps (including Visual Studio 2012 and 2013). I'm doing WP8 development on a Lenovo T520 and had to *uninstall the video drivers and remote desktop into it* in order to do my job. Tragically, the T520 has an Nvidia card as well, but requires the Intel driver to be installed in order to switch to it, and the crash is caused by a DLL that the Intel drivers inject into all processes regardless of which GPU the computer is currently using.

Wow, nypyren. I have experienced problems with NVIDIA and ATI over the years as well. Almost to that magnitude. I guess we are all screwed no matter what we do :).

- Intel HD3000 drivers for Win8 cause crashes in many apps (including Visual Studio 2012 and 2013). I'm doing WP8 development on a Lenovo T520 and had to *uninstall the video drivers and remote desktop into it* in order to do my job. Tragically, the T520 has an Nvidia card as well, but requires the Intel driver to be installed in order to switch to it, and the crash is caused by a DLL that the Intel drivers inject into all processes regardless of which GPU the computer is currently using.

Wonderful!