Help on Laptop

Hi, I was wondering which laptop to choose. I have found 2 within my pricerange which look good but I was wondering which one was best:

http://www.ebuyer.com/customer/produ...uct_uid=127306

http://www.ebuyer.com/customer/produ...126844&_LOC=UK

Which one is better? Like for gaming etc. Keep in mind that my price range is around this price up to about £850. ATM I prefer the second due to the larger screen size.

The first is more "future proof" as it's DX10 but benchmarks show the 8400 is fairly crap.

The 2nd is alright but the 7600 will struggle to run full res on the 17" screen you really need a 7900gs for that.

If I was you I'd save a little more and either wait for a decent DX10 model or go with the laptop I have

http://www.rockdirect.com/viewNotebo...ME%20CTX%20PRO

the first one has a faster processor, the second one has twice the RAM. the two video cards are probably similar in performance, but the first one has dx10 (with unknown performance in dx10 games).

since the first one has a smaller screen size and lower resolution, games would probably run faster on the first one... if RAM isn't an issue for the game you're playing. upgrading the RAM on the first one should be within your budget, if needed. the first laptop is more convenient to carry around, since its lighter and smaller...

Granted unknown performance in DX10 games but the 8400 is a low end card. CPU speed isn't an issue unless yoU plan on doing major multi-tasking/3D CAD? 2GB is vital for vista but in most cases its cheaper to get a notebook with 1GB and upgrade to 2GB yourself

My advice still stands, wait, to get a decent gaming laptop you need to spend over £1000. If you wait til September time the price on the 8600 models should drop because the 8800go (or w/e they will call it) should be released around that time. The 8800 will be the only card that will match the 7950GTX in performance in DX9 games.

This site is very useful, they helped me pick mine

notebookreview.com

Thanks for the help guys. I probably will wait now until I have more money and prices come down.

But One more question: How does this compare to the second one - i don't know much about ati graphics. Is a ATi X1600 better than the geforce 7600? Oh and also the screen size is smaller on this one.

http://www.pcnextday.co.uk/products/...Code=3354-6601

Here are the scores
-------------6800 go------------x1600 mobility---
3dMark01: --17654----------------18149------
3dMark03:---7840-----------------7167------
3dMark05:---2256-----------------3810-------

x1600 is better on paper but I doubt you will see any real difference between the 2 when compared side by side. That laptop isn't bad but I've never heard of the brand before so do some more research into them first. I still think you should wait for a mid/high end dx10 card to come out though. The 7600 will be pretty dated 6 months down the line...games like crysis/hellgate london would benefit form being either dx10 compatible or a high end dx9 card aka the 7950gtx which only ships in with laptop over the 1k mark.

Cheers Malice (and eggrolls)! - you've answered all I needed to know. Thanks for the advice.

Not true at all. Plenty of games require CPU power, not to mention audio and video encoding/recoding and plenty of other tasks. Get a fast CPU, within reason, unless all you're planning to do with the machine is GW and word processing (I'd strongly recommend getting something with a Core 2 CPU right now). CPU power is vital to multimedia tasks. It also doesn't hurt to try to find one with a 7200rpm hard drive, although it's not likely to happen in the OP's price range.

The 7600 is not a bad mobile GPU, and should run GW just fine at 1600x1200. Anything above that is going to be out of the OP's price range right now. I would definitely opt for a GPU with more horsepower over a weaker GPU that supports DX10. DX9 will still be supported for quite some time, and the DX10 support isn't going to do you much good if your GPU isn't powerful enough to run games at a decent framerate anyway.

A T56 (1.8Ghz) or a T72 (2Ghz) would be more the suffient. Anything above that is a waste of cash unless it is being used for heavy CPU based work.

Since when is anything "sufficient"?

Right. The T72 would be great. Beyond that the price jump isn't worth it, but you might as well get a good processor since it's not going to make any sense to upgrade it later. I certainly wouldn't buy anything below the T56, as there's not much savings to be gained. You don't want to go "bleeding edge", but don't skimp...that's a waste of money. I'd also skip on the AMD CPU in this case. Intel's mobile offerings are much nicer (lower power consumption, fast, etc.), not to mention the fact that the Core 2 is the CPU to watch at this point.