precision 4300

Good evening

I´m one step from bying a precision 4300. The only concern I have is the GPU. I work with Autocad but not with so demanding tasks (2d drawings) and the most demanding cad work I do, is drawings with airphotos or even simple satelite photos .

....Looked around in the forum for information about the quadro fx360m that comes as the only choice with precision 4300.

My question is simple yet not answered from what I´ve seen yet.

Will I be able to play games like call of duty 4 or crysis in this laptop (2,2 GHz cpu, 2 Gb RAM).

If not....will there be a difference if I order a vostro 1500 with the same charachteristics and an GeForceTM Go 8600M GT.

Help please because I´m really one step from ordering.

Thank you very much in advance and excuse my bad english

 

I don't know about the games specifically, but I do know that with the proper drivers, the performance of the FX360M is comparable to that of the 8400M GS since it uses a similar core. There should be a significant increase in graphical performance with the 8600M GT, but maybe not in "workstation applications".

But again, that's largely a matter of drivers.

And of course, a similarly configured Vostro is generally of a slightly lesser build quality than the Precision and a bit bulkier and heavier as well. Ultimately if you want the gaming performance, it's probably better to go with the Vostro.

 

See this page for a ranking of all laptop graphics cards:
http://www.notebookcheck.net/Comparison-of-Grafic-Cards.130.0.html
and here for specifics on the 8600GT:
http://www.notebookcheck.net/NVIDIA-GeForce-8600M-GT.3986.0.html

As you will see, the 8600 GT is a class 2 card (rank #30) while the the FX360 is a less powerful class 3 card (rank #59). So, according to this ranking, there should be a difference. However, I don't know enough to say whether even the 8600GT can play Crisis.

BTW I think I read that the 8600GT in the Vostro has DDR2 RAM, while the 8600GT in the XPS 1530 has DDR3 RAM.

I would suggest you check the Crisis and Call of Duty websites to check on GPU requirements.

 

What do you use now? How does it perform? The FX360 might be enough, or you might have to make the jump to a Thinkpad in the T61p.

 

I use an outdated IBM R51. Have it for 3 years now and I´m very happy with the sturdy structure.

Turned to the Dell´s because I hear very good things about them and Lenovo´s are much expensive here in Greece (otherwise I´d get a t61p).

Furthermore I just noticed that the compaq 8510w, and 8510p are available at comparable prices here in Greece. The 8510w has a quadro FX70m and the ´´p´´ has a radeon 2600.

I´ll use it for work though, as I said, and wondering if the compaq is a sturdy enough.

Thank you all in advance

 

Yes. The 8510w is a fantastic notebook. Excellent build quality, light for a high performance 15inch, and solid battery life due to the 8 cell battery. Be warned it has a single fan and can be a bit loud under heavy load, but nearly all notebooks are like that =)

 

You're in luck - I have the Precision M4300 and just the other day decided to try playing COD4 on it just for the heck of it. Now, I did overclock my GPU to play the game at reasonable resolution (I believe it was 1024 x 600, it is the lowest of the 1024 resolutions) and the game is playable, but average framerates were only around low 20s at best. So if you try playing the game with stock speeds (400/400), it'll be slow unless you drop the resolution which makes the game look not as good. And yes the GPU is essentially an 8400M GS with 256mb DDR2 (512mb turbocache). I havent tried Crysis but I really doubt that will be playable.