G73JH-BST to a G73SW-XN2

Well, much to my wife's lament, I had a bit of a break down last night. I've been using my JH for the last 7 months as my primary gaming pc. It's not ideal, considering my much nicer desktop in the man cave, but my wife was pregnant, and now we have a little 6 month old to handle. It's made it easy to continue on my gaming habits in the living room where we can all be together.

Well, I've bought three games in the last couple months that have pretty much put ATI on my pass list. Brink, Rift, and The Witcher 2... My friends can play all on much slower nvidia cards with more performance and more stability than I can on my much faster 5870m, not to mention my GTX580 downstairs... I've been fighting the good fight along side the rest of my ATI brothers, but I think I'm done... The ATI Catalyst situation just doesn't seem to be getting any better. I installed 11.5a RC3 yesterday, and not only didn't it fix Brink, but it put a pretty surprising dent in my Black Ops performance.

I hopped on Newegg this morning and just flat out bought a g73sw... I know I was pretty bent out of shape, and I may have made a bit of a hasty decision, but I am willing to lose a few bucks on the resale of my G73JH in order to have an Nvidia card...

This isn't meant to be a QQ thread, but I thought I'd bring it here and see if you all have any feed back. I absolutely love the laptop, and have always had decent luck with ATI, but I just don't understand how such good hardware can be thwarted by poorly thought out driver development.

Anyways, what are your thoughts on the ATI software support? I know it'll take me a bit to unload the JH, so I'll have some time to compare them side by side. That should make for an interesting performance test. I figure if the SW doesn't correct my issues, I'll just send it back and continue on with my JH.

 

i saw that newegg now has the XN2 and from what I can see it looks pretty slick (lots of memory, nvidia 1.5gb gpu, and costs less than the best buy model... plus no tax

Take an unboxing video and run some benchmarks and let us know what you think.

To be Honest the ATI card in your current laptop should handle everything just fine for right now (Witcher2 is a bit of a stretch on max settings) but the rest should be fluid.

The best thing you can do to your G73-JH is to format the drive and start fresh on a base load of Windows 7 64bit and updated drivers. Check Chasity's guide on this.

 

The G73SW XN2 looks like a much better model , not only does it have Sandy Bridge which the JH lacks it also has an Nvidia graphic card ( which apparently you prefer ) so you made a good decision.

 

I also have heard of some nice driver fixes coming in 11.6, now that those games have been officially released.

 

I hope so, for the sake of every that still uses ATI. My best friend uses XFire 6870's in his home pc, and he's all but given up on buying new games until he's read that they're working properly. I guess that's pretty good practice for everyone, but it's hard to hold off when you've been anticipating a game for quite a while, like I was with The Witcher 2 and Brink.

Just got notification that the laptop will be here on Thursday. I'll just have to swap my spare hdd from my JH over to the SW, and format with a clean windows 7 install. Should be ready to get the games installed at that point and take it for a spin. I'm excited to see if there is actually a noticeable difference.

 

I am also planning on purchasing the new model that Newegg has just listed recently for sale. It seems very nice for the price compared to all the other models and I have been planning and researching for a while now. One thing I'd say about ATI is that I have a XFX 5850 in my desktop and it runs most games on max settings. I'm not sure what the problem is with your laptop but I think that there's something amiss. Just my 2 cents. I would also like to see an unboxing video if you can make one just so I can drool over the contents that I will be receiving later this week. lol

 

Only thing bad about the Xn2 is the 1yr warranty. So basically $1,290 for 2yr warranty.