Not long ago I got a Dell XPS 17 laptop. Most of my gaming is done on the XBox 360 for sheer convenience, but for many years I was a PC gamer.
I’m wondering what kind of games I’ll be able to play on this, and how high I’d be able to crank the settings. I know the best gaming rig is a tricked-out desktop; this is really my work/workhorse laptop (main OS is Linux but I keep a Win 7 partition for those times when I need it). Just curious how this measures up to modern games.
Yes, it is an i5 because I was more concerned about noise and heat than in getting the power of an i7.
I just signed up for a Steam account so I’m curious how this laptop would fare against some of the titles on there, and also if anyone has any burning recommendations for Steam games in particular.
Here are the specs:
Dell XPS 17
Intel Core i5-560M 2.66GHz / up to SC 3.2GHz / 3M
6GB,DDR3,2 DIMM
NVIDIA GeForce GT 435M 1GB graphics with Optimus
640GB 7200 RPM SATA Hard Drive
The games on Steam do mention recommended specs, but I’m always wary of those since “recommended” ≠ playable in my experience.
Some day, I will probably again build my own desktop games machine, but the expense and the constant nagging feeling of being “slightly out of date”, as well as the never-ended quest for the latest nVidia drivers, keeps sending me scurrying back to the 360.
As usual, your Graphics card is your limiting factor. Here’s a page on it. Based on that, you should be able to handle 2010 games, as long as you don’t mind medium settings.
I’m looking at 2011 games, and I’m still finding it hard to find a game that actually requires a better card, although some do recommend a better one (the GT 8800). But, assuming the stats are correct, you shouldn’t run into any game you can’t play on at least Low, and probably can handle medium on most of them.
BTW, you listed more than one CPU. Not that it matters, since even the lowest one is higher than the most CPU-intensive game I could find.
Does anyone konw of a site that acutally keeps a database of all these games? Looking at forums and then looking up the recommended game’s specs is not the most accurate way to be doing all this.
The “Can You Run It?” site should theoretically automatically evaluate your computer to tell if you can run a game or not, but for me anyways half the time it just gets stuck. It’s here: Can You RUN It | Can I Run It | Can My PC Run It
Re: more than one CPU – I thought that was some kind of a fancy “turbo boost” thing where it occasionally gets up to the higher speed? I thought I remembered reading some technobabble about that in the Dell literature. In any case, Linux says it says 4 of these:
I’m looking towards buying a new graphics card. Currently I have: NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GTX+ 512 MB but I don’t know how to pick a card that’ll be compatible with my motherboard, etc.
If you’re running a 9800 GTX, then your motherboard should have a PCIexpress 2.0 slot, which means you should be able to install any of the current crop of video cards (even the PCIe 2.1 cards are slot-compatible with 2.0 - 2.1 doesn’t offer any speed difference, as it’s mainly a placeholder for the 3.0 spec which is still some time away). I recently got a GeForce GTX 460 and I quite like it as a bang-for-the-buck performer, at around $150, but there are tons of options.
I’d take a look at the tech website benchmark charts, like Anandtech or Tom’s Hardware, and find out which card has the best benchmarks with the types of games you prefer (of course, CPU often factors into game performance as well, but that’s a whole other thread).