vostro 1400 deal: Lucky?

Hey people,

I just managed to snatch an awesome deal for a Brit on a Vostro 1400 if the ebayer is to be trusted, which i believe so. It was a returned dell with faulty speakers, which still don't work but give off no noise and the headphone socket and onboard sounds card work perfectly. Specs are 2.0ghz, 2gb, 160gb 7200rpm, 8400gs, 9cell and vista ultimate.

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=160174457043

This would have cost £900 on the dell site (just checked) although as of today the vostro prices have gone up abit it seems. Cost me £390! I'm crossing my fingers so badly till it arrives lol. It's weird that the speakers took the price down so much. I plug in to my big good speakers at home and use headphones when traveling so it's rarely going to be an issue as long as the headphone socket doesn't break.

Can someone give me an idea on if the 7200rpm drive will be noisy or wipe the battery life? I was going to get the slower one before this one showed up. What sortof real world benefits am i going to get? Any in gaming?

Thanks, Dave

 

A faster hard drive won't do much for gaming except loading the game faster. The speed of a hard drive is also determined by it's capacity too. You can purchase a 200gb 5400rpm hard drive and it will be just as fast as a 160gb 7200 rpm hard drive.
Some people have noted that the 7200rpm hard drives run hotter than the 5400, but in terms of noise, I doubt there is a noticeable difference.
In terms of battery life, yes, the 7200 will suck more juice out of the battery (maybe shorten battery life by ~20min?).
The GPU is really the bottleneck for all laptops for gaming. For 390 pounds, its a good deal, but the 8400 gs GPU isn't really a great card to play new or future games with, but is definitely a superb upgrade from the D410!!

 

Either way mate you got an excellent bargain, be proud 8400GS isn't THAT bad either it can certainly handle the popular games like BF2, CSS, WOW nicely (I assume).

 

Well, for BF2, 128mb of video memory is minimum. You should be able to run that on med resolution and low-med details. I was talking about games more in the line of bioshock and crysis. Heck, I can't even run crysis smoothly on any resolution except 800x600 with all high details on my C90S.

 

Thanks guys for the comments. Yeh I know the 8400gs isn't exactly going to conquer all but from a gma900 chipset it's one heck of a leap I'm generally 2-3years behind the gaming scene as i can never afford a powerful laptop and I just can't stand desktops. So playing farcry and hl2 will be about as advanced as I get. Though I may download the crysis demo just for fun haha. As long as I can push 1280x800 on some new ish games with the detail down abit I don't mind. I like gaming on my external 19in widescreen and any resolution below that looks abit uncomfortable. Although i've coped with civ4 at 1024x768 for months lol.

Shame about the faster harddrive taking a chunk of my battery time, it was one of the reasons I picked the vostro. Hopefully i'll still get 3-4hours doing basic office tasks(?). I'm generally quite happy with the screen on low.

Dave