how does this laptop look for general use and gaming?

[wintersquall]

i'll save you the boring background - i'm looking to buy a laptop, and i'm kind of a tech noob - i play games on console and use computers for work/internet only. This one i can get through the company although i still have to pay for it.

some of this is standard, some are minor upgrades.

- Dell Vostro 1500
- Intel® Core™ 2 Duo T5270 (1.4GHz/800Mhz FSB/2MB cache)
- 15.4 inch Wide Screen XGA LCD Display with TrueLife™
- 2GB Shared Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM at 667MHz, 2 DIMM (can upgrade to 3 GB for $125)
- 8X CD/DVD Burner w/ double-layer DVD+R write capability, w/ Roxio Creator
- 128MB NVIDIA® GeForce™ 8400M GS (can upgrade to 256MB NVIDIA® GeForce™ 8600M GT for $100)
- 250GB 5400RPM Hard Drive
- Dell Wireless 1395 802.11g Wi-Fi Internal Card



how does that look for gaming and general fun use? system as specced above will run me around $700. are the upgrades i listed worth it, and will they noticeably prolong my system's life? or since i'm sure most people know a lot more about this than i do, is there something else i should be looking at entirely?

thanks for any input, trying not to waste hundreds of dollars but i do need a laptop on a budget and want to be able to play games on it as well as do other things.

[Shuemue]

imo, definitely upgrade the video card, and if you're running Vista get the extra ram, 2gb is fine for XP.

[wintersquall]

it comes stock with a intel xma3100 integrated video solution that runs WoW fine (friend already got one w/o upgrades), so i figured the 128 upgrade was enough. is there anything out now that requires a 256 card? (yup, i'm a noob).


i'm going to get it with XP, screw vista from what i've heard. i could probably upgrade to the 3MB RAM sometime in the future if it becomes necessary i'd think.

other stuff look ok? 250G is a nice amount of storage... but someone said 5400 rpm was kinda slow.

[Shuemue]

5400rpm would be slow in a desktop, but it's pretty standard in a laptop. With the large amounts of RAM we run with these days, a lot of data can be cached, so you'll only notice a slowdown when you're reading/writing very large blocks of data.

As for the video card, I'm of the opinion that you really shouldn't compromise there if you can afford it. If you want to play any of the latest games that aren't FFXI or WoW, you'll be glad of it.

[Cephius]

That is a good laptop for your price, and I'm sure it will fit your needs. I'm going to throw this out there though, why don't you want a desktop?

I've seen a lot of people get laptops because they love the portability and the way it looks and whatnot, then it never moves from their desk and they complain how slow/bad/ect it is. I've been a PC gamer for a good amount of time and it's simple fact that laptops will never ever be as good as desktops for gaming. You can't upgrade them, adding stuff to them is difficult and laptop video cards have notoriously terrible support, especially from Nvidia. A $3000 laptop will struggle to keep up with a $750 desktop when playing games. My point is, unless you travel a lot, absolutely NEED the portability factor, buy a cheap Dell desktop for 300-600 bucks that will be better for gaming than a laptop. You'll save a ton of money in the long run by being able to buy cheap component upgrades instead of having to buy a new laptop.

Again I'm sure you have a legit need for a portable computer, but I see this all too often from people who end up regretting it (or expecting more than they get) and just thought I'd throw it out there.

[wintersquall]

i'm really going for the portability, for a lot of personal reasons i doubt anyone cares about. my main gaming focus is console, but i'd like to have a mobile platform to play either FFXI or WoW on (yes, i'm considering converting to WoW with all the SE bullshit going on lately... and yeah i know, good riddance and no one will miss me =P).

playing games on it at this point is pretty much reserved for WoW or any other nice MMORPG that i can't play on console in the future - and afaik a lot of good ones (Huxley, etc) are coming to 360 at least. it's more so i can lay in bed / go somewhere else other than home and answer emails / screw around on the internet without being tethered to a desk downstairs.

your point is totally valid, and i appreciate you bring it up though. if i could stand the thought of being chained to my desk all the time it'd be MUCH easier/cheaper to go for a desktop. that and i have a 37" WS LCD monitor i can hook it up to at home using a wireless USE mouse/kb, and putting the laptop somewhere close enough for this wouldn't be a problem but a tower might. also, this way i can watch news or w/e while LFG or screwing around, never been able to do that before lol.

i anticipate not having to buy another laptop for like 4 years... is that reasonable if i don't play a lot of games on it?

[Cephius]

i'm really going for the portability, for a lot of personal reasons i doubt anyone cares about. my main gaming focus is console, but i'd like to have a mobile platform to play either FFXI or WoW on (yes, i'm considering converting to WoW with all the SE bullshit going on lately... and yeah i know, good riddance and no one will miss me =P).

playing games on it at this point is pretty much reserved for WoW or any other nice MMORPG that i can't play on console in the future - and afaik a lot of good ones (Huxley, etc) are coming to 360 at least. it's more so i can lay in bed / go somewhere else other than home and answer emails / screw around on the internet without being tethered to a desk downstairs.

your point is totally valid, and i appreciate you bring it up though. if i could stand the thought of being chained to my desk all the time it'd be MUCH easier/cheaper to go for a desktop. that and i have a 37" WS LCD monitor i can hook it up to at home using a wireless USE mouse/kb, and putting the laptop somewhere close enough for this wouldn't be a problem but a tower might. also, this way i can watch news or w/e while LFG or screwing around, never been able to do that before lol.

i anticipate not having to buy another laptop for like 4 years... is that reasonable if i don't play a lot of games on it?

I find that for gaming purposes, 2 years is about the cutoff point where something begins to be too old to play new games. Of course there are exceptions and you can upgrade them, but from personal expierence around 2 - 2.5 years is when I start thinking about a serious upgrade. With a laptop, you're forced to buy a new one. The thing about MMOs is that they're exceptions to the rule because you play them for years. I have no doubt there are 5 year old laptops that can still play FFXI. Just like I'm sure if you buy a laptop now it will be able to play WoW 4-5 years from now. The thing is that laptop will die if you try to play anything that was made more than a couple years after you got the PC.

Again, this all depends on what you play. If the only game you plan to play is WoW or FFXI, grab that laptop and I'm sure you'll be happy with it and use consoles for everything else. As long as you realize you won't be able to play most modern games from here forward, you should be fine.

[wintersquall]

so is the 128 card normal for right now, and the 256 is slightly ahead of spec?

i ask because i was at a gamestop last night looking at PC games and it seems this rig could easily run anything they had there, being well overspec in almost all cases.

[Shuemue]

Remember that those are minimum specs on games, not what you really need to run them smooth and pretty like a console.

[Cephius]

so is the 128 card normal for right now, and the 256 is slightly ahead of spec?

i ask because i was at a gamestop last night looking at PC games and it seems this rig could easily run anything they had there, being well overspec in almost all cases.

Most games will list two different sets of specs; minimum and recommended. You'll find that 95% of the time, the recommended specs is actually the minimum needed to run the game at settings your average gamer would consider "barely acceptable". To play at high or max settings, you'll need substantially more than that. For most modern games, a 512MB 8-series Nvidia or comperable video card is standard to play the game at decent settings.

Your laptop is on the edge of what could run new games at semi-decent settings. Unfortunately the major bottleneck is the video card. They seem to keep getting bigger while laptops keep getting smaller. There's just no way to shrink the technology right now, so laptop users kind of get screwed in that area.

For example, I have a Dell E1505 laptop with 1 gig of ram and a Dual Core 1.6Ghz with a ATI 256 meg card. I also have a Dell XPS600 with a pentium D processor 2.3Ghz, 1 Gig ram, and a 8800GT video card. The XPS, while a year older than the laptop with an inferior processor but superior video card, runs Supreme Commander stable at medium settings. The laptop is unstable at medium and barely runs at low settings. Again, the only bottleneck is the video card.

[Wintermute]

Your specs remind me of a Desktop Replacement Laptop.

Only thing I recommend is if you're going for a dedicated Video Card get yourself one of those aluminium cooling units that elevates the Laptop and blows air against the case.

My Laptop has a tendancy to roast my palms when I play games on it. (Whilst elevated slightly on my Desk)

Good for keeping tea warm though.

[Killgannon]

i have the 8600 in my laptop, it runs both wow and ffxi beautifully (better than my desktop even... but thats and old 6600>.< im cheap need tax check/refund for new computer or lcd tv idk which cant decide>.<;;; ) but anyways, it looks good, i got the inspirion version of the 1720 (vostros are basically business class/stripped inspions...) and i love it, i even still have vista on it which i have no problems at all with after tweaking it a bit.

mine doesnt get too over heated, it does get warm, but its nothing blazingly hot like my friends shitty walmart brand laptop (i forget the real brand at the moment... everex??) does.

i also opted for the intel wireless (just because i dont like broadcom shit) but thats up to you. If you really wanna play with stuff up your proc to something higher (i got the 2.2 ghz core2duo (its hot))

now if youve been doing research before making this purchase im sure you've read dell's shipping sucks... but I didnt have a problem at all, in fact i got mine BEFORE the date they initially said they were going to ship it lol

[wintersquall]

awesome, thanks for the replies ^^

couple things that got me confused.

killgannon pretty much has the same computer (i'm going with the vostro over an inspiron model because i love black and it's slightly cheaper, and also won't raise eyebrows when i charge it to teh bizness account lol)... and the 256 meg card. so, i'm going to have to splurge and get the highest video card, ok, i can handle that. no sense in getting something totally weak out of the box.

as far as processors go (and this is a really dumb question probably) a dual-core 1.4Ghz is the same as a regular 2.8Ghz, right? i think i've been misleading myself by thinking this laptop didn't have much processing power compared to desktops.

so, a 512M card is standard... makes sense. to be honest, i haven't played an actual GAME on a computer since zork. and i'm not kidding. didn't take a dedicated card to process all that... text so i'm not familiar with not being able to run a game or having stutter or w/e - consoles eliminate that problem. but i can imagine it would make a lot of games unplayable.

there's a bunch of new MMORPGs coming out soon that i might want to try if WoW doesn't fit the bill... do you think i'll be ok to run those off this laptop? or do i need to wait a while and spend 1500 bucks? basically, i will be able to play anything out now at reasonable settings, and for the next 1-2 years, right?

what i'm thinking (long-term) is to buy this laptop now, then over the next year or two build my own desktop out of ebay auction parts (one part every few months, hell that's beer money) and eventually my desktop will far surpass my laptop in power/graphics, but i'll still have a good mobile option unless i absolutely have to play the newest games. sound like a good plan?

[Cephius]

what i'm thinking (long-term) is to buy this laptop now, then over the next year or two build my own desktop out of ebay auction parts (one part every few months, hell that's beer money) and eventually my desktop will far surpass my laptop in power/graphics, but i'll still have a good mobile option unless i absolutely have to play the newest games. sound like a good plan?

That sounds like a good plan. Though I'd hesitate from buying processors/motherboards/RAM ect off e-bay, you really don't want them used. Newegg, TigerDirect, and some retail stores offer good prices on new stuff, that'd be the way to go in my opinion.

[Niya]

as far as processors go (and this is a really dumb question probably) a dual-core 1.4Ghz is the same as a regular 2.8Ghz, right? i think i've been misleading myself by thinking this laptop didn't have much processing power compared to desktops.

nope. you can't add the GHz up, it's rather that the 2 cores share the work. programs can just "hop" between the cores when one of them is busy. (can mess the system load up quite a bit with certain apps/games, city of heroes for example produces a cpu load of >90%... when you force it to stay with one of the cores, the load goes down to ~50% meaning the one core is fully busy with CoH and the other one is idling)

about the graphics card. really forget about the 128MB one, they're crap no matter how powerful the GPU might be. 256MB is ok for laptop versions, have a GF go 7600 with that much on my laptop and the graphic power is acceptable, 8600M GT should be quite a bit more powerful and according to what i read is a really good choice for laptop standards. you'll just have to live with the fact that such GPUs get really, really hot when stressed, so depending on the position inside the laptop that might render the builtin keyboard unusable unless you want to burn your hands *cough* my GPU already has 51°C (~124°F) on idle, the max. possible temp is somewhere around 130° (266°F) according to the temp-meter of an older nvidia driver... <.<

well, long story short:
with the 256MB card and 2 gigs of RAM it should be decent for gaming, the extra gig RAM might or might not boost the performance slightly, so your choice ^^;

[wintersquall]

thanks - that temperature worries me though, if a laptop gets that hot aren't i risking something melting inside or... something? lol... i'd pretty bummed if i get this thing, start playing on it and all of a sudden it dies due to temperature.

i know you can get fans... at what temperature does it become dangerous for your laptop, and how in general do you combat over-heating? i assume this only happens while gaming, and not while using other simple load apps like IE or something.

[Niya]

overheating is impossible, all current pc systems have special "emergency functions" that throttle or halt the components when they get too hot. GPU and CPU have set max temps and lower their power output when they get near those values. so instead of "melting down" they would in worst case just turn themselves off ^^
you really have to try it out for each laptop, depending on the cooling strategy of the manufacturer there's the full range between "sounds like an airplane turbine but stays cool" and "keeps quiet but heats up the chassis alot"
the "standard" method to cool down a laptop is something like this, you just connect it via USB and place your laptop on top of it so the fans can "suck away" the heat.

[Avanarius]

overheating is impossible, all current pc systems have special "emergency functions" that throttle or halt the components when they get too hot. GPU and CPU have set max temps and lower their power output when they get near those values. so instead of "melting down" they would in worst case just turn themselves off ^^

Truth, my e6600 got up close to 100c because the waterpump suddenly stopped working and the computer turned itself off. cpu still works fine to this day. Technology is amazing!

[Osede]

I will recommend to upgrade your graphic card to 256MB if you ever considering play wow. Even thought wow seem like it doesn't use more memory or more cpu/gpu intense than FFXI, however it does

[Royal]

I will recommend to upgrade your graphic card to 256MB if you ever considering play wow. Even thought wow seem like it doesn't use more memory or more cpu/gpu intense than FFXI, however it does

I'm looking at a similar computer to wintersqualls but I'm really not sure about upgrading it to the 256 mb(its the same graphics card as squal). Is the 128 really that bad for wow? I'm sure it could run it with good fps at lowest graphics. I don't really care about bumping them up that much but is the 256 really that good of a buy for the cost?