Returning my vostro 1400, only one problem with it.

I got my vostro tuesday, just as i was leaveing for work which made the day at work seem like forever. Anyways, after bringing it to my buddies house for us to play WoW together i was completly disapointed. This laptop in genral is really awesome, and very atractive. But the miserable little 8400gs is just terrible. I didn't expect much of it, i was happy with the performance i came to expect from it. Alas it performs like my old integrated graphics on my desktop. The framerates in the game are fine, what kills it is that it only has 128 video ram, so it's constantly stuttering whenever i turn in any such direction. I really wish this laptop would have atleast come with turbo cache but it doesn't. So now, i am returning the laptop and i am going to order a vostro 1500 with the 8600 256 which is a must have.

Oh yea, and the webcam on this thing sucks really bad too, the video framerate and quality isn't much better then my cell phone's at the same res.

 

Recommended Specifications for Wow

Windows® System 2000/XP OS
Intel Pentium® IV 1.5 GHz or AMD XP 1500+ MHz
1024 MB RAM
64 MB 3D graphics card with Hardware Transform and Lighting, such as NVIDIA® GeForce™ FX 5700 class card or above

You GPU is far more powerful that the reccommended system req. Wonder why it didnt work. Are all the other specs met?

 

what were the specs of your whole system?

 

Actually your problem sounds like you had 1GB of system RAM, which is not enough for gaming on Vista. 1GB is borderline usable in XP for playing WoW as well. What you are descibring does not happen in WoW with a 128MB card, its a symptom of low system RAM. You would get the exact same problem with the 8600GT on a system with 1GB of RAM.

 

I have 2 gigs of ram, 1.6 core2 and 8400mgs

I decided to not bring it back as i've got this thing running at

575 core, 837 memory and it's still running relatively cool and i've increased my framerate in WoW from about 30, to 48... pretty nice boost. i'm going to get 3 gigs and see how that goes.

 

The Inspiron 1420 review mentioned the stuttering problem in Wow, which apparently wasn't present at all in Half-Life 2. Is it a RAM thing or a game thing?

 

WoW id extremely RAM dependent, and Vista being take up some extra resources compared to XP does not help.

 

maybe you should update the drivers on like laptop2go or whatever its called

 

128mb of dedicated RAM is more than enough for WOW and 8400M GS does have turbo cache(i believe its 256mb or 128mb,,, forgot)

 

Good luck finding another great deal...(if u ever do return it)