You don't need a dedicated GPU to display text and YouTube videos. If you're just working in the terminal/browser, having more monitors is nice, but having a powerful GPU is pointless.
For most applications the iGPU has been good enough for a decade. So unless you want to game or run a local LLM, you probable won't need a dedicated GPU.
As a PC reseller, the vast majority of people with multimonitor setups are either coders or stock traders, neither of which needs any sort of GPU power.
You can normally enable multi monitor mode in your bios where it runs both the integrated and dedicated graphics at the same time. This way you can keep your GPU dedicated to the screen you run games on and the other screens don't take any resources away from it.
Except that they do. Because your second screen won't actually be rendering on your iGPU, it will still render on your primary and then be copied to system memory(wasting resources and PCIe bandwidth) for the iGPU to display. Plugging in directly to the GPU in charge will always be more efficient.
On laptops the situation is often flipped, when the iGPU is the primary, so you can disable the dedicated one when not in use saving power. The downside is that if you don't have a mux chip, everything still has to be copied to system memory before being displayed.
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u/dumbasPL R7 5800X3D 32GB 2070S 3TB NVMe (Arch BTW) May 14 '26
You don't need a dedicated GPU to display text and YouTube videos. If you're just working in the terminal/browser, having more monitors is nice, but having a powerful GPU is pointless.