well, you can run ut2k4 on high-ish graphics pretty well probably (i did it with an intel 945
) i dunno i think thats decent gaming. you probably wont be able to play anything made after 2005 though....so i dunno.
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| Author: | James [ Thu Sep 10, 2009 12:14 pm ] |
| Post subject: | Lap top advice |
A friend of mine wants to buy a lap top for around $500(U.S.). He is one of those guys who likes to rush out to the nearest best buy, choose a lap top and take it home. He likes to game some as well as do some school stuff on the computer as well. Any advice on brand, where to buy, or build it yourself? I know Bjossi knows a lot about computers/parts/performance, etc, so i hope he can give some good advice. Should he look into newegg.com or something? Any advice is appreciated. James |
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| Author: | Tyster [ Fri Sep 11, 2009 7:04 am ] |
| Post subject: | Lap top advice |
I have some experience with laptops. For just surfing the web and writing essays, there's no such thing as a new laptop that is not powerful enough. As for gaming, what are we talking about? How much gaming power is he really willing to pay money for? UT3, ut2004, or ut99? I can say form experience that the difference between Vista and XP/Win 7 is quite noticeable in terms of gaming performance and overall snappy-nes. If the computer uses Vista, it would generally be good to have 2GB of memory. Also, watch out for integrated GPUs that have shared memory. This is a limiting factor in terms of gaming power, as was the case with my nVidia 7000M. Dual core is something I would highly recommend, even if it means a slower CPU. For example, I would consider a single core 3.0GHz processor to be inferior to a 2.0GHz dual-core processor (and last I saw, Intel CPUs are about 5-10% faster than AMD for the given speed, but more expensive). |
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| Author: | Bjossi [ Fri Sep 11, 2009 10:20 am ] |
| Post subject: | Lap top advice |
Clock frequencies mean squat when comparing different processor families. They say how many times a binary wave (a wave that changes logical 0 to logical 1 or vice versa) is sent through the circuitry each second but say absolutely nothing about how much work the CPU actually does per cycle, which is the mean punch, fx. my old 2.2 GHz AMD slaughters a 3+ GHz P4 and my new 2.67 GHz i7 slaughters my old AMD (this is with single-core performance, so all 3 are evenly matched in that regard). Given that clock frequency has a mathematical/physical limit (for example if the circuitry doesn't get a chance to "relax" after the last logic change before the next one hits, the CPU will write back incorrect results to memory for the affected instructions) it makes perfect sense to increase the output of each clock cycle rather than making them more frequent. That way of thinking has brought technologies like super-scalarity, pipelining and whatnot to the table over the years, it is also more efficient when it comes to heat output. Anyway, I have no experience whatsoever with laptops, so I can't help there. |
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| Author: | siavash1989 [ Fri Sep 11, 2009 5:50 pm ] |
| Post subject: | Lap top advice |
i bought my old laptop from overstock.com, it has a lot of refurbished stuff and they are really cheap. mine never had a problem (other than it was a bit weak). my sister just got a new laptop from them. this is what she bought. http://www.overstock.com/Electronics/HP ... aef2e24c.2 its like 530 bucks and it has decent graphics and ram, good for games probably. you can also customize your computer from vendors like hp, dell, etc to suit what you need. |
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| Author: | James [ Sat Sep 12, 2009 6:31 pm ] |
| Post subject: | Lap top advice |
Thanks for the input guys! Unfortunately my idiot friend decided to not wait for me to get back to him on the advice and bought the first thing he saw... Slavash, that looks like a nice laptop! GeForce 8200M Is that a good video card? is says "vram up to 1919MB".... |
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| Author: | Bjossi [ Sat Sep 12, 2009 7:01 pm ] |
| Post subject: | Lap top advice |
James wrote: GeForce 8200M
Is that a good video card? Not even close. My dad's lappy struggles with FEAR 1 on higher settings and he has a Geforce 8400M. I would say that decent gaming performance starts with x500 for nVidia's cards, like 8500 or 9500, anything less is dodgy at best. |
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| Author: | siavash1989 [ Sat Sep 12, 2009 8:30 pm ] |
| Post subject: | Lap top advice |
well, you can run ut2k4 on high-ish graphics pretty well probably (i did it with an intel 945 ) i dunno i think thats decent gaming. you probably wont be able to play anything made after 2005 though....so i dunno.
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| Author: | Bjossi [ Sat Sep 12, 2009 9:31 pm ] |
| Post subject: | Lap top advice |
UT2004 is far more dependent on CPU than GPU, and it had pretty modest requirements even back in 2004. It was not a good benchmark candidate back then, and much less nowadays. |
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