Notebook Gfx

Speedway

Just looking at picking up a laptop and im looking at around the €1500 - €1700 mark. Just wondering what mobile gfx cards wud be best.Been looking at Geforce Go 7400s and Radeon x700s. I would like something to run f.e.a.r., COD2, etc at a reasonable quality. If i have to tone down the graphics a bit fair enough just once it runs at a respectable rate. I know laptops aint built for gaming really but im gonna be away from my gaming rig for around 6months and the laptop wud be used for gaming

cheers

8T8

Well the 7400 and X700 are in the low end of the midrange so with those kinds of games your going to have to sacrifice some detail and keep it to medium or low settings with a low resolution as well e.g. 800x600

Now this is a weird one OcUK are selling Dell gaming laptops (well not too strange I guess since that is market OcUk caters too) for €1750 [£1209] you can net yourself this;

Dell Inspiron 9400 Core Duo T2400 - XP Home (N02943) (LT-010-DE)
Intel Core Duo Processor T2400 1.83Ghz
- 2MB L2 Cache
- 17" Ultrasharp WUXGA with TrueLifeT Widescreen Panel (1920x1200)
- 1024MB DDR2 667MHz Memory (2x512)
- nVidia GeForce 7800 GO 256MB Graphics Card
- 80GB SATA 5400rpm Hard Drive
- Internal 8x DVD+/-RW Drive
- Internal 56k V.92 Modem
- Intel Pro WLAN 3945 Internal Wireless (802.11a/b/g 54 Mbps)

Newest Intel dual core CPU, 1GB of RAM plus a GF 7800 Go is a pretty nice system and you certainly wouldn’t have to compromise on the graphics with that. I had a look over Dell's Irish site and nothing seems to match this value wise. The 9400 system I matched came out at €2K but if you went with a smaller HD and slower CPU you would get it down to €1780.

It's a good deal hardware wise [however I would bet it gets quite toasty] the only thing with the Dell is I would wipe the system and do a clean install of the OS if you went for it.

Speedway

cheers for that 8T8. Ya the 9400 looks tempting alright,i just can't stand dell wud def need to wipe it and reinstall the OS. id def think bout it seriously if only i could do financing with overclockers. so u think a Geforce Go 7400 256Mb wud def not be up to the gaming?

ARGINITE

Try ACER and also check the laptop forum for more advice.

KdjaCL

X700 is perfect with 1gb + ram.

An X300 can run Bf2/Fear on medium settings 800x600 without any problems so the above would do a far better job.


kdjac

8T8

Speedway wrote:

cheers for that 8T8. Ya the 9400 looks tempting alright,i just can't stand dell wud def need to wipe it and reinstall the OS. id def think bout it seriously if only i could do financing with overclockers. so u think a Geforce Go 7400 256Mb wud def not be up to the gaming?

A Go 7400 would be up to the task as long as you compromise the detail for games like F.E.A.R as it is very demanding. CoD2 you probably would not be able to run even the DX9 mode with that game and have to revert to the DX8/7 mode so it looks like the original CoD but that is largely because Infinity Wards home brew DX9 engine was crap and only ran well on high end hardware.

You can get away with more detail in some games alright if you stick to these then most games should be playable;

No AA or AF in games
640x480-1024x768 resolution wise
Medium to low detail settings in game (of course this can vary between games particularly the latest, well optimized games like HL2 run well on even low end hardware plus so do older games etc.)

One further tweak you can do is lower the texture filtering quality in the NVIIDA control panel which will also speed things up, under the "performance & quality" section look for "image settings" and set it to performance that should net you a small boost as well.