Getting a new lapy, is the i3-380m ok for games?

juno_first · 12 Oct 2011 at 22:01

Im going to buy a laptop from a neighbour who bought it very cheap from new at the shop he works at, as they were getting rid of last years stock or something.
The shop were selling them off at £180, so with his discount my neighbour just wants what he paid for it: £162.
Now 99% of the reason im getting it is because of the price, even though I would have liked HDMI & am worried about the GPU performance as I cant find a performance review of the GPU anywhere.

Toshiba Salellite C660-1LD

Ive already learned this notebook is not the best in its class, but I'm mainly concerned about its graphics performance as once I learned it had integrated Intel graphics my heart sank.

Could this notebook play a game such as WOW? (im not a Wowaholic but my brother is) & how would it compare to a similar notebook with ATI or nVidia graphics. Thanks..

DotA · 13 Oct 2011 at 00:07

According to this it will play WoW but at very low settings. http://www.notebookcheck.net/Intel-Graphics-Media-Accelerator-HD.23065.0.html

TBH for the price that your getting it for i would snap a couple of them up.

GTO656 · 13 Oct 2011 at 00:43

It will play on lower settings im afraid as its built in. but great price for an i3.

juno_first · 13 Oct 2011 at 01:07

Ah ok, looks like a good cpu & ok graphics at low detail.
Neighbour only grabbed one unit, just shows how much profit they make.

Scrutinize · 13 Oct 2011 at 07:39

Games aside, this is a good value laptop.

If you want gaming then you need to set your budget at £500 at least to get you a GT525 or GT540M graphics or the Ati equivalent.

waveydave79 · 14 Oct 2011 at 18:30

agreed with scrtunize I can play wow on a GT525 at very good settings / lags a bit on ultra.

juno_first · 23 Oct 2011 at 14:26

Got the Tosh yesterday am happy except for 3D, wifi & touchpad.

Tried wow and it seamed to run slower than my previous laptop 1.6 sempron with go6600.

HD videos play well even though limited to software with no dxva vpu encoding, although a 1080p only uses 25% cpu time.

3D is a bit of a joke, WOW on good detail only managed 15fps and even though dx10 the Heaven benchmark did not show any dx10 features and ran as a slide show 1fps.
Quake2 runs well though lol.
The Fishtank website manages 20fps with 1000 fish using IE9 which was nicely limited by the GPU as the CPU time was not maxed. My games rig with a 480soc easily manages 1000fps.
Going get another 4GB stick of DDR3 when UCUK have the Crucial in stock, which should increase the RAM for the GPU from 533mhz to 1066mhz.

Having trouble with the wifi as the net is ok and can manage a constant throughput although any file access is intermittent at best. Eg. copying a large file achieves around 1mb/sec but then drops to 0mb/sec then resumes again. Also desktop sharing and video playback is seriously affected.
Same with G speed.
The router (Homehub2 as a repeater 8ft from laptop) has always worked great before and I got the latest drivers dated 06/10/11.
Onboard WiFi: RTL8192ce using drivers: RTL8192ce_WindowsDriver_1005.28.1006.2011.F0066.P0830_ISS_1.00.0180.L

The touchpad suffers from bad drivers as the Synaptic offer is rather naff and unresponsive with regards to vertical scrolling.
I have a remote keyboard that understands 2 finger vertical scrolling out the box with no drivers.

GTO656 · 23 Oct 2011 at 15:00

Good CPU but graphics is low so it won't play games too well.

nightmare99 · 23 Oct 2011 at 18:28

just shows how much profit they make.

It is a bargin, they would be making a loss on that there is no profit to be had there.