Long story short, my wonderful gaming desktop failed in an utterly spectacular manner, and since repairs will cost a minimum of $700, I’m thinking of just biting the bullet and buying a new computer.
Experience has taught me that I like laptops more than desktops, but since I game quite a lot, I’m understandably worried about finding a gaming laptop for a reasonable price. My upper limit is about $1,500, and so far this is looking mighty attractive: it’s fast, sports loads of RAM, has a decent HD, and the graphics card has tons of memory.
However, I’m not at all tech-savvy, so I’m wondering if anybody has observations or alternate recommendations? I’d especially like to hear about the graphics card: I’m having trouble finding reviews of the GeForce 9600 GS, and it’d be nice to know if it’s actually a decent card or not.
Based on this site, it seems a decent enough card. That site will give you a list of games and how the card (in this case, an equivalent) fared. Most were well playable, with a couple being not so good.
I’m no tech guru, but I believe you’re simply going to have to sacrifice performance if you go the laptop route (unless you want to pay a lot). So it’s just a matter of picking your poison.
Oh, thanks for the link! I realize that I’m going to be giving up performance with a laptop, but I have a bit of an advantage here: I’m a graduate student, and with the exception of Spore I don’t anticipate buying any new games for another 3-5 years, so I’m mainly just looking for something that’ll play Hellgate, Oblivion, and Spore right now.
I just finished Oblivion. Have fun with it! It’s actually the game I looked for when I read that review–if it hadn’t been there, I probably wouldn’t have used the cite. It should play just fine on Vista, btw (not sure what was on your old pc). Also, if that’s your only goal (games not particularly designed for dual core/vista), you may be slightly wasting the capability of the dual core and dx10.
Well let’s not get hasty here, I *might *be amiable to buying some new games…
I was just trying to establish that my main objective was to play what I’ve got, so I won’t be terribly upset if, in 24 months, I find myself behind the curve.
Out of curiosity, does anyone have some experience with the ASUS G50V? A friend is insisting that it’s slightly better for gaming than the M50VM-B1, but as far as I can tell from the specs, the only real difference is that it uses the GeForce 9700 GS instead of the 9600 GS. 0_0
It depends on whether you want to go with a laptop that has an ATI or nVidia GPU. Most of the laptops I’ve seen have integrated graphics. I prefer nVidia, myself, since I’ve heard horror stories from acquaintances who run Second Life on ATI machines. For the record, I haven’t bought a new laptop in a few years – mine’s currently a Dell E1505.
…ooh nevermind the ATI/nVidia debate, I see you’re going with nVidia
A site that may be useful: www.driverheaven.net – it provides aftermarket drivers for various graphics cards (caveat installer!). It also provides forums for discussing various cards and their qualities thereof. I recommend fishing through the forums to see what people say, but the forums are also extremely slanted toward hardcore gamers and modders so their opinions may vary.
