A little advice from the wise.

[TimoH]

Hi there.

I've decided recently that I really want a laptop, and after a bit of a chat with my brother I ended up here. The one recommended by the Laptops page, the MSI Gaming GX700, looked pretty nice.

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=LT-003-MS

Here's its tech specs:
- Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo T8300 2.4GHz 3MB Cache
- Chipset: Intel PM965 (800FSB)
- Graphics: Nvidia GeForce 8600M GT
- Memory: 3GB DDR2 RAM

I was wondering if any of you clever chaps could give me any advice as to how it'd perform on certain games. I'd love to actually play Bioshock (I own it, but my current desktop's really out of date now...); if not on mid/high graphics settings.

I'm also pretty interested if it'd play Spore (When it comes out) as well as I'd like it to.

What do you think?

 

[fish99]

Looks a bit pricey TBH compared to other laptops with the 8600M GT. Also I would think the 1680*1050 res would be too much for the 8600M GT in quite a lot of newer games like Bioshock, so you'll probably end up running 1280*800. Me personally I would want a better video card for £931, assuming that's possible.

Someone posted this link which shows info on mobile video cards, including 3DMark scores-

http://www.notebookcheck.net/Mobile-Graphics-Cards-Benchmark-List.844.0.html

Also a couple of video of 8600M GT (although it's in a Vostro 1500 which has the slower DDR2 vram) running Bioshock-

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QwN6BlrTFs4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FzyBU0vCO64

As for Spore that's anyones guess but it doesn't look graphically demanding.

 

[Hodders]

Err - claimed...

Can someone explain what that means - I now that you can claim a new member before someone else has - but what now.

Do I put him back, like a carp, or does he have to do what I tell him or something ?

As a general point, if you want laptop to play games then the key things are the graphics card and the CPU - as far as I know dual core is better than quad core - although not many laptops have quad core CPUs.

Have a look for benchmark results for various laptop graphics chipsets and go from there.

Lastly consider the native resolution of the display. Some laptops come with very high res screens that may not scale well if you can't run the game at native res.

So you may be better getting a laptop that runs at 1280x800 then 1920x1200 as you stand a better chance of being able to run a game like crysys at 1280x800 than you would at 1920x1200.