I thought general hardware would be the best place to put this for now but if it needs moved then by all means do so.
I needed a laptop to handle 3D graphics / modelling so after looking and reading reviews on quite a few for the last month or so I bought one on Saturday ... an Intel Centrino Dual Core T2300 with Go7400 dedicated graphics and 1 gig DDR2 ram, plus all the other "ordinary" stuff like DVD writer and wireless blah blah.
T2300 = 1.67 ghz running @ 667 fsb
I'll not mention the make of the laptop, as it's unimportant for this wee review and I don't wanna stir the wrath of any mods
... anyways,
Firstly I'm very impressed by the T2300 cpu, it makes every task seem pretty instant and effortless, no sluggish waiting times etc even when multi-tasking and when using it for rendering in C4D you can see both cores kick in cutting rendering times way down.
To be honest I sorta expected that to be the result, but the unsure tests were gonna be the Go7400 ... so here was my simple test.
Put on an older game first, just to see and give it an easy'ish start.
First up Serious Sam ... I picked this as it makes good use of detailed bump maps and has parts with hords of enemies on screen at once and all running about, if you've played the game you'll know what I mean.
I was pleasently surprised that it ran silky smooth at 1078, even tho' it's not the lappy's native res of 1280*800 (15.4 widescreen), no jerkiness or stuttering
Ok ... first test pasted, next up HL2
I put all settings to high and turned off AA / AF and put the reflections to simple. Chose widescreen option and it automatically picked the 1280*800 .. sweet ... the result ? ... excellent ... clean, crisp smooth graphics, no stuttering and no visible slow down even on the out door scenes with the normal running about and average amount of AI involved.
Maybe that would change later in the game with Striders and heavy fighting etc but for a Laptop that only cost me £799 I'm extremely chuffed with the results
One thing I'm slightly confused about is the amount of ram on the 7400 card, it was advertised in the shop and on the box as having 128 dedicated but when I checked it in the properties it's showing 256 physical ... ? ... and when I run Sandra on it and a few other diagnostic programs they all come back with the same result ... 256 dedicated, I'm not complaining tho' ... if they've put a 256 card in instead of a 128 I'll not worry too much lol.
All in all it seems like a very good combination and one of the most pleasing things is the cooling .. the cpu fan hardly ever needs to kick in and when it does it's only for a few seconds, the Dual-cores much be fairly efficient.
T2300 = Good, hard working, fast, cool, efficient cpu
Go7400 = Very capable card and nothing to be frightened off.
Cheers, hope you enjoyed some of this.
Jim
I needed a laptop to handle 3D graphics / modelling so after looking and reading reviews on quite a few for the last month or so I bought one on Saturday ... an Intel Centrino Dual Core T2300 with Go7400 dedicated graphics and 1 gig DDR2 ram, plus all the other "ordinary" stuff like DVD writer and wireless blah blah.
T2300 = 1.67 ghz running @ 667 fsb
I'll not mention the make of the laptop, as it's unimportant for this wee review and I don't wanna stir the wrath of any mods
... anyways,Firstly I'm very impressed by the T2300 cpu, it makes every task seem pretty instant and effortless, no sluggish waiting times etc even when multi-tasking and when using it for rendering in C4D you can see both cores kick in cutting rendering times way down.
To be honest I sorta expected that to be the result, but the unsure tests were gonna be the Go7400 ... so here was my simple test.
Put on an older game first, just to see and give it an easy'ish start.
First up Serious Sam ... I picked this as it makes good use of detailed bump maps and has parts with hords of enemies on screen at once and all running about, if you've played the game you'll know what I mean.
I was pleasently surprised that it ran silky smooth at 1078, even tho' it's not the lappy's native res of 1280*800 (15.4 widescreen), no jerkiness or stuttering
Ok ... first test pasted, next up HL2
I put all settings to high and turned off AA / AF and put the reflections to simple. Chose widescreen option and it automatically picked the 1280*800 .. sweet ... the result ? ... excellent ... clean, crisp smooth graphics, no stuttering and no visible slow down even on the out door scenes with the normal running about and average amount of AI involved.
Maybe that would change later in the game with Striders and heavy fighting etc but for a Laptop that only cost me £799 I'm extremely chuffed with the results
One thing I'm slightly confused about is the amount of ram on the 7400 card, it was advertised in the shop and on the box as having 128 dedicated but when I checked it in the properties it's showing 256 physical ... ? ... and when I run Sandra on it and a few other diagnostic programs they all come back with the same result ... 256 dedicated, I'm not complaining tho' ... if they've put a 256 card in instead of a 128 I'll not worry too much lol.
All in all it seems like a very good combination and one of the most pleasing things is the cooling .. the cpu fan hardly ever needs to kick in and when it does it's only for a few seconds, the Dual-cores much be fairly efficient.
T2300 = Good, hard working, fast, cool, efficient cpu
Go7400 = Very capable card and nothing to be frightened off.
Cheers, hope you enjoyed some of this.
Jim
