Anything to wait for before purchasing a laptop?

Colibri

I'm currently needing a laptop for photo work, gaming and all around multimedia usage. My budget is around 600€

I was looking at this laptop and some users here have bought and liked them, but I was owndering, is there anything I should be waiting for (hardware wise) before I purchase, so I won't be kicking myself in a month's time thinking I bought my laptop too early?

Thanks

Overheal

Colibri wrote: »

I'm currently needing a laptop for photo work, gaming and all around multimedia usage. My budget is around 600€

I was looking at this laptop and some users here have bought and liked them, but I was owndering, is there anything I should be waiting for (hardware wise) before I purchase, so I won't be kicking myself in a month's time thinking I bought my laptop too early?

Thanks

Its the Q1 Sales: so yes, something newer, and shinier is on the way. Thats how the hardware markets work, they sell off last year's inventory to make way for new models. If you want "new" you Pay new.

Normally I would laugh at you for wanting gaming at that budget mark, but that laptop does appear to be fairly marked down, and quite probably worth the asking price.

The AMD ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5650 is a middle class DirectX 11 graphics card for laptops. Its based on the Madison (LE, LP or Pro) chip and is produced in 40nm. Like its predecessor, the Mobility Radeon 4650, the HD 5650 features a 128 Bit memory bus for dedicated DDR3 and GDDR3 memory chips. GDDR5 is not supported on the HD 5650 (only in the higher clocked versions like the 5750 or 5770 cards based on the same chip).

In our benchmarks with the HD 5650, the GPU is performing on a level with the previous Mobility Radeon HD 4670 or the Nvidia GeForce GTS 250M (with DDR3 graphics memory). This means the performance is sufficient for high details in nearly all DirectX 10 games (only Crysis and GTA4 are not fluently playable in high details - see gaming list below). Upcoming and current DirectX 11 games (like DIRT2) may not run in full detail settings. That means some of the new DirectX 11 features (Tesselation e.g.) may not run fluently on this gaming graphics adapter. Currently the HD 5650 is a good gaming pick for well priced laptops with a 15 inch screen and a resolution of about 1366x768.

The Mobility HD 5650 supports Avivo HD to accelerate HD videos using the graphics card. The improved UVD2 processor in the DirectX11 models of the Radeon HD 5000 series is able to decode up to two streams in parallel (if the card offers enough memory bandwidth). It is not clear if the HD 5650 using (G)DDR3 offers enough bandwidth for this task.

Another novelty of the HD 5650 is the possibility to transport HD Audio formats (8-channel Dolby True HD, DTS Master) over the HDMI port.

Thanks to Eyevision, up to 6 monitors can be used with the HD 5650 in 3D and 2D applications (if the laptop features DisplayPort outputs). In most laptops this is not the case, and therefore only 2 monitors are supported at a time.

The power consumption should be (due to the modern 40nm process in 2009) relatively low and according to rumors about 10-15 Watt.

Compared to desktop graphics cards, the Mobilty 5650 is similar to a ATI Radeon 5570 with lower core clock speeds and slower memory speeds (the desktop 5570 is similar to the Mobility 5770).

http://www.notebookcheck.net/ATI-Mobility-Radeon-HD-5650.23697.0.html

Colibri

Thanks buddy! Yeah I was looking at it from one of the links posted here and it does seem like a very good deal. Now I don't know if I should wait or not :P

The desktop won't be replaced when I get this either so I must consider that as a factor.

Overheal

if you have a desktop for gaming, you will rarely find yourself on the laptop. desktops perform better and can be built cheaper for the purpose.

Colibri

Nah, the desktop is too old. It'll be a basic home computer once I get the laptop. This desktop stutters on HL2:DM on low settings with a low resolution! Ah well

The laptop I'm looking at isn't JUST for gaming (and I won't be expecting to be running Crysis on ultra or anything)