Onboard graphics card is just fine for DAW work. If you want to run 2 monitors, it will need to support it, tho.

Reasonably modern Intel on-chip graphics should be fine in a DAW. Most Macs used as DAWs and maybe most Windows laptops used as DAWs use the Intel chip gpu rather than a seperate one.

A seperate card can pay off by saving a little time if you use applications like Photoshop which can leverage the high-speed gpu to do calculations instead of the cpu, but there are very, very few - if any - audio related applications or plugins which do this. Perhaps because a dedicated gpu card in a laptop, though they are available as options, is still pretty rare because of the need to dump the heat somehow and their effect on battery life.

The only reason the PC in my sig had a dedicated gpu is for Photoshop/Lightroom and a few older 3D games - most of which will happily run on HD4000 or later graphics chips anyway.

If in doubt, try the Intel graphics and see what happens.

Thanks for the replies guys, what you describe is what I had assumed (hoped).  
 
On to the final (hopefully minor) obstacle: MIDI.  New topic coming....

Beware of the ****ed WinXP "10 midi devices" limit. If you run a couple of virtual ports or even ASIO4ALL this can give heaps of trouble.

Coming to this a bit late, but I recently retired from Logitech, where I was working on videoconferencing products.
 
Every Intel i5/i7 chipset for the last 3-4 generations has had good enough on-chip graphics to support two full HD (1080p) screens, and that's with H.264 going on all the time (with semi-dedicated hardware support). I believe all the current generation i5//i7s can handle two 4K screens, too.

If you're running a recent make Intel CPU, the onboard GPU is fine for straight up audio production.
If you're doing video editing/rendering with Vegas Pro, Premier, After Effects, etc... then you'll want a GTX video card.

I don't know about Premier or After Effects but GPU acceleration in Vegas Pro is severely limited and insofar as it does work, AMD does much better than NVidia so I definitely wouldn't recommend a GTX for that. Unless something changed in the last couple of months, I haven't needed it for a little while.

Folks working with video often use several different applications (3D Studio Max, Cinema 4D, Vegas Pro, Premier, After Effects, etc).  If you want to use something like Titler Pro (plugin), you can't do that with onboard graphics.
 
The clients we have that render a lot of video; they're running GTX-1080ti video cards.
For the casual user... not worth the cost.  For someone rendering video 12-hours a day, easily worth it.
 
A video client in Nashville recently upgraded from an older hex-core machine with Quadro video card... to a 7900x with GTX-1080ti.  What used to take an hour to render... now takes 15 minutes.  
The CPU is obviously making a huge difference.
Very expensive machine... but this particular guy is constantly rendering video.
Any significant time savings means more earning potential.  
Factored over a year, the time savings is enormous...

I have very little experience with video rendering - I only know some Vegas Pro which keeps being recommended on this board so I bought it when I needed something. Much to my dismay, Vegas Pro only supports OpenCL up to the GTX 5xx series (IIRC) and AMD somewhat further up the product line. Anything newer really doesn't do anything (I have a 980), unfortunately, hence my comment.

How do you switch over to onboard graphics when you have a graphics card installed? I have been suspicious that my graphics card may be getting wonky and, would like to try the onboard to see if there is any difference.