Shake on a 9400m

Has anyone used Shake on the new integrated chipset? Does it work OK? I'm thinking of buying the cheapo firewire MB to tide me over until the UK prices die down again and quad-cores make it to the midrange macs. I currently only have an iMac G5 rev A (1.8Ghz, 2GB, GeForce FX 5200) at home and I'm pretty pleased with most of what it can do. I used shake on the first intel mac minis and was surprised by how well it ran, but I never did any big comps, mostly just prep/roto. I would expect that even tho moving to an IGP is a step down, its been so many years that it would really be a step up and I can't really justify the markup for dedicated gfx that apple charges.

What about FCP?

anybody?

To answer your question, agentmouthwash, I suspect Final Cut will run fine. Your main bottleneck would likely be your HD. I suspect a mac mini running off a striped external array via fw800 would make for a pretty zippy timeline, provided you use the right codec. I seem to remember that only motion requires dedicated gfx, and even then only for full functionality.

Of course, I can't say any of this for sure. It would be nice to hear somebody who's actually used some of the suite or even possibly Shake (which would be more GPU-intensive) on one of the new nVidia IGP macs.

PS I think its a real shame that apple has raised the bar so high for dedicated gfx in the desktop line that it works out cheaper to buy a macbook pro (here in the UK at least).

No matter how good the nVidia chipset is, the decision to make dedicated gfx a hi-end feature in the imacs flies in the face of the fact that most PC users cite poor gfx options in the midrange as the major deterrant against buying a mac (whether they're video enthusiasts, gamers or not, most ppl expect at least mid-range components for such high prices).