Best Game capable for £400?

FatRakoon

FatRakoon

FatRakoon

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My brothers LapTop has taken a dive and he has claimed off his insurance and they have sent him a voucher for £400 ( Its 429 to be exact I think ) and he is asking about a better Lappy than he had.

He had an Acer Extensa 4100, and I have a 1680 thats pretty much 100% identical apart from the GFX ( 9700 v x700 )

Now, I know that for £400 you can get a fairly respectable setup these days but he wants one for gaming.

So, what can we go for?

I have had a quick peek and the best I think I can find, would be :-

Turion x2
2GBRAM
160 or 200GB HD
8200M GFX

I know its not all that much cop, but its about as good as it can be with the money that is available.

Can anyone offer a better option?

I suppose I dont know what the fastest option is with low end Laptops, so what is the X1200 like? - I have an X1300 PCI and AGP card and they are close to useless, so I dare say its no different on a Laptop either, but how good ( or bad ) is the 8200? - But what does it compare to ?

What level of gaming can we expect?

Of course Im not ignorant, we are not going to play FarCry2 or Call of Duty 5 on it, thats a given, but what about UnReal Tournament 2004 perhaps or the Dawn Of War series... It should play those surely?

And what make would you recommend?

I have a Dell that I got the kids and that feels great quality, I myself use an Acer and it felt fine at first but I no longer like it due to the HD clicking like hell, and the keyboard feeling swampy, and I hear Toshibas are not doing too well in the reliability stakes, but what about CompaQ?
 
your not gonna get a 'gaming' system for £400.

You might get a good system with very average dedicated gfx.

For gaming you should be looking at a 8600m GT - minimum.

They are very common in the dell laptops.

XPS M1530 - is over your budget

Vostro 1500 - if you can find one. (make sure you check, because many of them use the 8400)

Inspiron 1520 - same as the Vostro.
 
I got a Dell 1530 a few months back... The kids have swiped that, isty a great Lappy for the price.
I myself am using the Aspire 1680... Well, no, Im not really cos I hate laptops but I get it out when the wife is doing her Ebay stuff.

£400 = no Gamer.

Yes, this is true, we all know it, but whats the fastest GFX option we have for this limited £400 ?

Like I said I think that the figure is really £429, and then of ocurse he can put a few notes towards it, but I have told him that he really should aim to add a good £200 for a good gamer, but he wants to stick to his voucher, so we dont have much to go on.

I have been looking at various options, and I have seen a few that really seem to look great on paper ( Dont they all )

Whats the ATI Mobility 3200 like?

Hang on... the inspiron 1520 is a celeron isnt it? Ok, ha ha. I get it.
 
FatRakoon said:
Whats the ATI Mobility 3200 like?
Click to expand...

The 3200 is an onboard graphics chip, and completely useless for modern gaming. I have just read that,

"Still older games like Doom 3 or Quake 4 should be barely playable."
Click to expand...

FatRakoon said:
Hang on... the inspiron 1520 is a celeron isnt it? Ok, ha ha. I get it.
Click to expand...

The 1520 was available with a celeron offering yes. But most were c2d based. I have used both the VOSTRO 1500 and the Inspiron 1520 (both the same really) and they have been reliable and solid.

Both have been discontinued by Dell so you would have to look on the second hand market.

As for your question about the best card available for the price.

You should be looking at these;

  • Mobility Radeon HD 3470
  • NVIDIA GeForce 8400M GT/GS
  • NVIDIA GeForce 9300M GS/G

non of the above can be considered gaming cards. But you may be able to run some older games on reasonable settings, and newer games on low settings (if your lucky).
 
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The 8400 is a vital minimum.

So, basically he is stuffed then?

You see...

My last 2 Laptops that I have actually had without the wife or kids getting to, are

Packard Bell E3242 - AMD XP2400 & 1GB
Acer Aspire 1680 - Pentium M 1.6 & 1GB

Both started life with XP and soon went to Kubuntu. Both do their jobs pretty much the same as each other, I only use a LapTop myself for general work, letters, my book keeping and so on, the only actual noticable difference is that the Packard Bell, which has S3 Graphics has no 3D Capability at all, unless you like to play at 1 FPS

Other than that they are pretty much on par.

Now, the 1680 has the ATI Radeon Mobility 9700 graphics, and I have tried to play Dawn Of War on it, but, while it has a shot, its absolutely bloody dire... Even at 640x480 I had to lower the details and it was still jerky.

Playing such games as Doom 2 / Quake 4 is never going to happen. But Certainly Company of Heroes / Dawn of War would be nice as he likes those ( So do I )

They play just fine on the kids Dell.

Anyway, Im going on. I will just leave it there I think.

Many thanks for the info mate.
 
sorry to jump on, but what is the cheapest laptop capable of playing Dark Crusade at reasonable performance?
 
Yes, Id like to know exactly that.

Why didnt I just ask that in the first place?

But Id prefer to know about SoulStorm....
 
FatRakoon said:
Yes, Id like to know exactly that.

Why didnt I just ask that in the first place?

But Id prefer to know about SoulStorm....
Click to expand...

you might be able to get away with it with an 8400m GT, just.

or at a massive stretch a 9300m G .

But both those cards are pushing it and both fall just under minimum spec for the game.
 
well i i bought my laptop from eb** and bough new hp laptop with

15"4
p8600 dual core 2.4 ghz
2 gig of ram
300 gig hard drive
9600gt 512 mb
windows vista 64 bit

for 700 £ u will not find anything better and 1 yea warranty.

it came from states but i did not need to pay any extra tax etc etc..

upgraded with 2 more gig of ram as it is cheap as chips
 
I recently got hold of an old acer 5220 with the intel x3100 chipset for gfx. It runs warcraft ok at medium settings and runs stuff like UT2004 fine at max settings at 1280x1024 rez. This is with 2g of ram and a cruddy 1.8ghz celeron.

Just to give the op some idea of what will run on chipsets like the x3100 upwards.

I would say any game released upto about 2005/2006 should run with various degrees of success.


My advice would be to get the BEST gfx solution and upgrade your ram/hdd/cpu at a later date when you have saved up. Afterall the gfx is the one bit you are stuck with.
 
i think you can get excellent second handed laptop: such as dell xts, or other..
many people selling because of money need and selling new for real bargain and gaming too.
would not recommend with AMD processor, as i have AMD 2ghz,1600mhz, 64bit TL-60 it is SLOW...(from this specs. would expect much better performance)
would recommend core 2 due or centrino 2ghz+
and about video card: everyone knows that laptops don't have good ones, but if GeFoce for laptop i would recommend 8 series..
 
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