NVIDIA GeForce 8400M GT, andWay too many letters and numbers for me. :)
NVIDIA Quadro NVS 140M.
Depends on what you plan to do with it. The Quadro card is for vector programs like Solidworks or Autocad. It will still play games, but behave like a tier lower card.
The 8400M GT isn't bad. Will play most games, but it really isn't a superb performer in games. If it's something you do on occasion, it'll work. If you don't play games at all, either are fast enough for anything you might do.
I am a gamer, if I were to get a laptop, it'd have to have the 8800M GTX. My desktop has an 8800GTX that cost me about $650. I suspect the upgrade on graphics would cost about the same extra for a laptop.
“I’ve actually found a couple cards that are better than the standard junk you find, but I’d still like to know if they’re worth the additional cost. If anyone’s curious, they are the:
NVIDIA GeForce 8400M GT, and
NVIDIA Quadro NVS 140M.
Way too many letters and numbers for me. :)”
These two cards have very different purposes. The quadro line of cards from nvidia is genearlly geared towards 2d & 3d rendering for industry uses (such as cad work & 3d design). The GeForce line of cards is typically geared towards video games. Both can do what the other does but not as well as its geared focus. So if you are a video gamer go for the geforce line if you are about business go for the quadro line.
Also the 8400 series is a directx 10 video card(the newest 3d toolset from microsoft that only realizes its full potential with vista. Only the very newest of games support directx 10 features). The 8400 is the lowest end video card of the 8000 series. The 8800 being the highest end. To make things even more confusing each card usually has an acronym like (8800gt, 8800gts, 8800gtx, etx.) to denote how fast within each series the card is.