HI Need advise on Dell Inspiron 9400

Hi

Good day mate. I am buying a laptop to play assassin creed and some high ends games but as all poor students I am tight on budget.

2 laptop to choose here. Please let me know which u think is a better deal and which allows me to run AC at full spec.

Laptop 1
Dell Inspiron 9400
Core 2 Duo T7200 chipset (2.0Ghz and 4m L2)
Quadro FX2500 512mb
2gb Ram
160gb SATA harddisk
"High definition audio" with sub woofer
Cost AU$1.3k (~US$1.25k)

Laptop 2
Dell Precision M90
Intel Core Duo T2600 2.16GHz 2M L2 CPU.
nVidia Quadro FX 2500M 512MB
4GB DDR2 677Mhz memory
Sigmatel 9200 Onboard Sound
Huge 160GB SATA hard drive.
cost AU$1.05K (US$1K)

Now the question is which is better and which is closer to my dream to play AC in max spec and finally if you are me which will you buy?

I had heard alot about FX2500 is not meant for gaming. Again I am a cheap student and FX2500 seemed to stand the highest rating in Notebookcheck.com for something below AU$1.3k. And that is kinda my limit right now.

Thanks heaps mate. Really need your advise here I had been troubling for days.

 

Well that Inspiron won't have a Quadro in it. The machine you are referring to is no longer offered by Dell either, unless you're buying second hand. Same with Precision.

If you want a gaming laptop, better off saving some $$$ to increase your budget, get an XPS M1530. Bottom spec is $1800, however as a student you're entitled to 5% off. I'd also wait until a more tempting deal is offered, because the current one is only an upgrade to 2 year warranty. They were being offered about $200 less at one point.

I don't know what the specs of Assassins Creed is, but if it has to be one of those the Precision's video card has the same amount of VRAM, the unit has more RAM, faster yet older CPU and is cheaper. I'd go that way if I had to choose one of those two.

 

Thanks for the reply. By the wway how accurate is notebookcheck.com? I mean the bench mark list I based everything on there thou. Hope it can be trusted.

 

Hi Bigkevracer,

The laptop u recommend has the graphic card that ranked 36 in the notebookcheck.com ---> see http://www.notebookcheck.net/Mobile...4.0.html?&or=&search=&sort=sorting&type=specs

Quadro rank 15 there so do you think XPS M1530 will outperform Dell9400 with FX2500 with 512mb?

 

They're designed for different things. The 8600GT in the XPS M1530 is designed for gaming, the FX2500 is designed for CAD and 3D graphics. How a Quadro stacks up against an 8600GT in gaming I don't know. The faster CPU of the M1530 will also help in gaming. Your call mate, but if it was my money I'd save a bit more and buy an M1530. I would have bought the M1530 but decided I needed a 17" screen, so bought a Studio 17 instead.