Games for a new XPS 1530 ?

Firstly, sorry if i'm posting in the wrong section, but i thought this belonged to the xps section more, rather than the games section.

So what i want to ask is what are the sort of games that the xps 1530 can handle well and are tried and tested and known to work nicely ? Before i start investing money in buying games, i want to have an idea whether or not they'll look good on it. I know that the 8600m GT is a card that is two generations old and even then was a mid range card. The 1530 wasn't exactly supposed to be a gaming notebook either, but i am getting one (estimated delivery in 10 days) for other reasons anyways (price, everyday performance, looks and portability vis a vis competition and general paucity of better options at similar price points in my region). I would still definitely like to get some gaming out of this though. You see the desktop i am using till now is so antiquated, the "latest" games that i am able to play on it are GTA: Vice City(slow, choppy and laggy), F1 2002 (on lowest settings), NFS: Porsche Unleashed, Civilisation 3, Heroes of Might and Magic 4 etc.

As you can see there are innumerable titles from around 2003 till now that I haven't played or have much idea about. I'm open to recommendations from RPG, Strategy, Racing, Shooters, and Action/Adventure genres though i absolutely love strategy and racing. The 1530 had better be able to play Civilisation 4, Caesar 4, HoMM 5, Age of Empires 3 etc. at least , without a hitch.

What I'm interested in knowing is what are the other good games it can handle on 1280 x 800 resolution and with 30 FPS ? Settings can be low or medium, no problem, as long as it doesn't look too poor.

Can it handle a game like F1 challenge 99-02 at high settings and playable FPS ? How does it fare on later NFS games like Carbon, ProStreet or Most Wanted or a simulation like GTR 2 ? Would it be able to manage GTA: San Andreas or Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion ? If so, at what sort of settings ?

Is it even worth buying shooters like Crysis, Bioshock or CoD 4/5 for this, or will they just look so bad because they need to be played at lowest resolution and graphics settings ?

Another thing is, i have no intention of overclocking the CPU or GPU even a little.

What will be most efficient drivers for optimising gaming performance ?

My main specs are:
T8300 (3mb l2 cache, 800mhz fsb)
1440 x 900 lcd
3 gb ddr2 ram @ 667 mhz
320 gb hdd @ 7200 rpm
nvidia 8600m gt with 256 mb ram @ gddr2

 

the XPS M1530 has a 8600M GT which is a medium card.. u definitely can play full-res(1440x900) on medium with crysis (crysis and GTA IV would be themost demanding games right now)... GTA IV maybe on low

 

I am aware that the XPS 1530 can get quite hot...the games you are speaking of are very CPU and GPU intensive...
If you are up to it, there are great guides on heatsink modification, or arctic silver 5 application (to increase heat dissipation)
otherwise...overclocking will not really yield results greater than 10-20% in performance for laptops...and just in turn can reduce the life of the components if you overclock too high or stress the component too much.
the most efficient drivers tend to be the ones on the dell drivers and downloads website, otherwise, nvidia just added a feature to their site where you can download drivers for laptops, but the current one is a beta and i see no better results, actually worse with more frame rate fluctuations...

the games you are talking about can all be manageable, depending on the settings... GTA IV can be played at low res and low settings to achieve 30fps +, however at higher settings i am not sure...with crysis, you could probably manager a lower res and higher quality or higher res and lower quality...although it is a badly coded game and some areas will fluctuate down to 15fps if say you average 30fps. but once again, every game should be playable, just depends on the settings.

the older games you are talking about will definitely be able to be played, probably some at full resolution...the newer ones, not so much...your CPU is not going to be as much as a bottleneck as the 8600gt...

and to inform you, because of the defective 8600gt's and the overheating issues, download hwmonitor to monitor temperatures.

 

My friend runs CounterStrike : Source quite well one his XPS 1530.

You can always give http://www.systemrequirementslab.com/referrer/srtest a try to see if your computer will run a particular game.

 

You can max out Call of Duty 4, Command and Conquer 3, and play on all high settings in Red Alert 3. Thats what guys like to play right?

 

Well this sounds good to me if even Crysis can be run well enough if i adjust the settings and resolution appropriately.

Does this mean i could run GTA: San Andreas and Oblivion on native resolution and high settings ?

And looking at current games and those to be released in the future, what kind of games would be the most demanding of my GPU ? Racing or Shooters ? Would future iterations of NFS, F1, GTR series be playable ?

And I hope at least strategy games (which i think are least demanding) released even 2-3 yrs from now would still be playable ?

As for the system requirements check thing, as recommended by someone above, well obviously i can do that but that really doesn't tell me how well a game will play even if my notebook passes the minimum requirement. I mean even integrated graphics will be minimally capable of playing most games, but that doesn't mean that anything will look good on them and give decent fps.

Yes, I'm aware of the overheating problems which is why i said i'll absolutely NOT do any CPU/GPU overclocking. And I WILL carefully monitor the temps.

 

All games seem to work great on this laptop, playing Fallout 3, Pure, Mirrors Edge, Crysis Warhead, COD4, Oregon Trail, and Gears of War no problem on mine :-D

 

CoD 5 plays real nice on mine (although the game sucks),..Also GRAW:2 plays real sweet with the Ageia enabled.