Naturally, playing those games with the nVidia GT 550m was 'funner', but if you have low expectations and a low budget. I had to reload a few times in the last major battle on Earth with several waves of enemies including Brutes and Banshees. I also completed Mass Effect 3 in Insanity Mode using the low graphics quality the game was definitely playable. I was able to play Fallout 3 with a mix of low and medium graphic settings which gave me pretty decent performance, not great, but decent. Http /I was testing out the Intel HD 3000 in my laptop (Lenovo IdeaPad Y470 with 1366x768 screen). A the Intel HD 4000 in a quad core i7 'QM' CPU will be operating at full speed since these are the high end laptop performance CPUs where power consumption is not as important as in Ultrabooks. Ultrabooks will have the slowest version because the ULV Ivy Bridge CPUs are tweaked for low power consumption. The Intel HD 4000 more or less comes with 5 clockspeeds depending on which laptop CPU you intend on buying. Note that not all Intel HD 4000 in laptops are equal. The Intel HD 4000 is a fairly decent IGP especially since it is from Intel.

Intel graphics 4000 specs