The x300 is definately the way to go here, I mean intel's integrated graphics were always really lousey for anything beyond WarCraft 3 and although the 900 promises twice the performance of the Intel Extreme 2's it's still pretty junky.
Yes the 900 is a DirectX9 solution, but not a great one,it uses "tile based rendering" and lacks any hardware T&L or vertex shader - so other than the essintial Pixel shader 2.0 for DX9, it's a pretty basic accelerator.
From the final page of that review (on andantech)...
The X300 is no beast, but its speed can often be measured in multiples of Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 900 performance.
While some games are actually playable, and performance is head and shoulders above that of Intel Extreme Graphics 2, performance is too abysmal for us to recommend the GMA900 for anything beyond 2D computing and pretty rudimentary 3D.