dell 1520...what do yall think??

im buying my dell 1520 and im not sure about a few of the customize options i should choose for gaming. i play warcraft 3, wow, fear and i want to play bioshock and sc2. im not sure whether or not to get the 1.8 cpu or the 2.0 cpu and i was wondering if 120 gb hard drive at 5400 rpms would be enough. the way i custimized my dell was

2.0 cpu (if the 1.8 will word fine it will save me 75$)
windows vista premium
2 gb memory
glossy screen 1280x800
nvidia geforce 8600gt
120 gb SATA hard drive at 5400 rpms
9 cell battery

this all came to 1099 with the coupon. how does this computer look for gaming and how much would i lose if i dropped to the 1.8 cpu and should i upgrade to 160gb? thanks for all your help.

 

You defintly dont need 2.0 Ghz 1.8 will be fine, a 7200 rpm hardrive will help loading times, I think its 12% faster. But you dont really need either

 

I'd vote to go with the T7300 (2.0Ghz) due to the increased L2 cache (4MB instead of 2MB), but the increased L2 cache can be sacrificed...

 

I'd second that... Definitely take the T7300... It is the only upgrade actually worth it IMHO in CPU. The double cache really helps, while going from 2.0ghz to 2.2ghz won't really make a difference due to the same size cache, but the 1.8ghz to 2.0ghz has double the cache.

A 7200RPM HD couldn't hurt either, but it's not a much needed upgrade.

-Tzale

 

so the 1.8 will play all the games i mentioned before including biochock?

 

im getting ready to make my order. if i get the 7300(2.0) and i got the 120gb hard drive 5400 rpms instead of the 7100(1.8) with 160gb 5400rpms to save money would that be better and would i have enough space on my hard drive to play all the new games???

 

you will have tons of space. new games are usually around 1-2gigs of space and your laptop will hold around 100gigs of daya with the os installed

 

so i should get the 7300 with 120 gb hard drive?

 

ok the cpu doesnt matter much for gaming, the only things that matter are RAM and GPU. The rpm will decrease loading times. The CPU will help with some cpu intensive tasks (long equations, coding, etc...) but it wont make much of a difference at all in gaming.

 

I completely disagree, the CPU is extremely important. The GPU doesn't calculate things like the physics and so forth..

Ever playing HL2 or Garry's Mod and had a lot of thing bumping into each other? That's all CPU work, why do you think they made th phys-x cards? To lower the CPU work load. And all new games now have huge physics now, especially upcoming DX10 games.. a lot of dynamic stuff going on there

Okay, heres my advice, get the 2.0Ghz 4MB cache cpu, the more cache you got the faster it is, the cache is pretty much what makes or breaks a processor in a lot of ways. As far as that T7500 goes, you can achieve that with the T7300 with over clicking.. 200mhz ain't gonna make a difference..

The hard drive is a hit or miss. if you do video editing or anything of the sort, speed will help dramatically. gaming not really, because games load everything into ram until you, for example change levels. But after looking at benchmarks. theres only like 1 - 3 percent difference between 5400 and 7200.. if you want serious speed, get a 10,000 RPM drive. But they're super hard to find for laptops, more of a business technology for laptops..

I do plenty of gaming on my 1520, it's a freaking awesome gaming machine, Bioshock I don't know how it runs, I'm downloading the demo right now myself, I'll let ya know if you want. you picked the perfect resolution for you're screen to, it's not massive so you can run native and put less strain on the machine..

cheers

 

ok the cpu is important but, the T7100 would be fine

 

yeah it should be in theory, but, 75 dollars is nothing considering how much bang for the buck he's getting. The power may come in handy for new games and anything else he might venture into to down the road

My advice is always leave a little breathing room if ya'know what i mean.