Games a e1705/9400 can handle?

Hello, I just snagged a Inspiron 9400 off eBay with the following specs:

1.7 Ghz C2D
2GB ram
stock 7900GS
1440x900
Windows Vista (would be willing to go to XP to increase performance)

Considering notebooks generally don't compare to same-spec desktops, I was wondering what sort of games I could expect to run. Some I had in mine were:

Oblivion
Doom 3
Half Life franchise
Gears of War
Crysis
Assassin's Creed (don't have much hope for this one)

 

don't get assassin's creed, iv heard bad things bout it, i would think that you would be able to play all games on medium exception is crysis. crysis may or maynot run medium, high is out of the question

 

Okey, your GPU is the bottleneck here, followed by your 1.7 ghz cpu (what's the cache size? it may be the other way 'round if your CPU houses a large cache...)

Also, if you are running vista with 2 gigs of memory, you might experience long loading times due to vista's resource hogging nature, so either get another gig or downgrade to xp.

For the list of games:

Oblivion, since I can max it out on mine 1440x900 with HDR and AA, you should be fine playing it on max settings (might have to tune down some more CPU intensive tasks such as grass).

Doom 3: Nvidia cards generally handle Doom engine very well compared to ATIs, so you should have little trouble max out everything, but do keep the AA at 4x or 8x, 16x is simply unnecessary and would cause significant fps drop. Also, Doom 3 doesn't support widescreen by default, so here's the solution for running it 1440x900 (tested myself, and works perfectly fine):
http://www.widescreengamingforum.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=367

HL: Assuming you are talking about HL2, YES, HL2 is one of the more hardware friendly games on the market, so you should have little trouble running it on your card. Again, considering that your CPU is a bit weak here, so you might want to tune down Physics and View Distance...

Gears of War: You can play this game. It runs fine on an 8400 gs/gt, so the 7900gs should be able to handle it without a problem. NOTE: There has been problems with GoW slowing to a craw under Vista, if that happens to you, try to right click on the game's shortcut and select "Run as Administrator", that seems to solve a lot of the problems with the game(even though the game is made by M$ for M$...what a shame...)

Crysis: oh dear....yeah, you can definitely run it, the CryEngine 2 is very well optimized to accomodate even the low-budget PCs, but you probably won't be able to get past medium settings...before it slows down to a craw that is....

You have to realize that Crysis brings even the most powerful PCs down to their knees, so don't expect to run it all maxed out, but DO remember that the game still look spectacular even on Medium settings; however, if you do want to squeez every last bit of your hardware, follow this GREAT Crysis tweakguide which shows you how to best tweak crysis to look at its best:

http://www.tweakguides.com/Crysis_1.html


Lastly...but definitely not the least.....Assassin's Creed...

Yeah, Crysis under Vista has a recommended Vista Experience Rating of 5.0, Assassin's Creed: 5.5....

This game is Intense, but most likely playable on your PC.
You have to remember that this game is a direct console port, so if you meet the minimum requirements (which you do), there really isn't much settings you could do to the game...it looks just as good on min as it does on max, so just turn everything down and you should have a smooth gameplay.

PS. If you have Vista, AC runs in DX10 by default. However, if you go into AC's installation directory and run the DX9 version manually, it has been reported that you could get a 10-20 fps boost...and since there really isn't much difference between DX9 and DX10, it is actually recommended for you to run the game in DX9 mode.


--Then...if everything fails, you can always Overclock....or get new drivers from laptopvideo2go.com...

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That's all, hope this helps~~~~~~~~~

 

Can't the 7900GS be flashed to a GT? Or is it the GT to the GTX? Or GS to GTX?

lol, anyways. That is a good system.

 

Thanks guys. This has been very helpful.