Soon to buy but need advice.

Here is my current build

COLOUR CHOICE Alienware M15x Gaming Laptop - Nebula Red

PROCESSOR Intel® Core™ i7 Processor 720QM (1.60Ghz, 6MB L3 cache)

OPERATING SYSTEM Genuine Windows® 7 Home Premium 64bit- English

GRAPHICS CARD 1GB ATI® Radeon™ HD 5850

MEMORY 3072MB 1333MHz Dual Channel DDR3 SDRAM

HARD DRIVE 250GB (7,200rpm) Serial ATA Hard Drive

LCD 15.6-inch Wide Full HD Display (1920x1080)

OPTICAL DRIVE DVD+/-RW (DVD, CD read and write) Slot Load Drive edit

PRIMARY BATTERY 6-cell 56Whr Lithium Ion battery edit

I mainly play wow and needed something to pack a bigger punch, in my experiance ATI cards seemed to handle wow better than Nvidia on latops so thats one reason why i went with the ATI 5850, however im still unsure to how it will perform on other games vs the 260M, tips please.

My main question is should i get the i7 or the i5? The i5 540M is £20 cheaper but i dont understand because the speed shows as 2.53ghz over the 1.6ghz.


I'm sure many of you will point things out so i will answer them now. 6cell battery reason is because i never use it on battery so didnt want to waste money on the 9cell. No BlueRay because again i dont really watch them on my computer.

With the RAM i wanted 4gb but this will put me over my budget, i'm going to try and barter for an extra gig with alienware when i come to make my order.

Thanks

 

Notebookcheck: Mobile Graphics Cards - Benchmark List

Check the graphic cards your thinking of, and compare their benchmarks.

Althought as I understand it, the 5850 is the more powerful card because of the GDDR5 memory, but older games and benchmarks run better on the 260M since they cannnot use the GDDR5 memory and have to switch back to the much slower GDDR3 memory.


To compare the processors, simply check the ones you want again and click restrict.
Notebookcheck: Mobile Processors - Benchmarklist

I myself went with the 720QM because its a quadcore(Which tend to have lower clock rates than equivalent dualcore) and because I believe all i7 processors use a more advanced architecture than the i3/i5 Processors. Althought, I've seen some benchmarks where i5 dualcores do better than the 720QM. Id assume its because the games are not optimized for the 4 cores. You could also go with the i7 620 since thats the only dualcore i7.


As for RAM, I dont think that going with 3GB at 1333mhz is better than 4GB at 1066Mhz. But Im not sure about that.

 

Added Bold.

 

well that took care of it, great job hobgoblinpie

 

Thanks for that guy's.

2 more things i would like to know is, does it have an intergrated mic and how well does this baby play world of warcraft? Is it good in raids etc.

Thanks again.

 

Yes and Easily

It's an extremely powerful machine

 

It would play it really good with that cpu