what should i get?

I am about to buy a dell XPS 1530 and need some help. I am a gamer so this will be used both for work and for games while im away from my desktop. I want to know if i would be better off getting the LED display or the 1920x1200 display? also i am on a budget so i want to know if the extra $150 is worth it for the 250gb 7200rpm over the 320gb 5400rpm one.
Thanks

 

Regarding the 2 displays, if you play at the native resolution say 1920x1200 its a lot more demanding on your GPU versus the LED whichs native rate is 1280X800. If you play in high settings or lots of AA and AF.

With regards to the hardrive some say the 7200 RPM drives are the choise for the power/gamer than the 5400RPM drive I would buy the 7200rpm.

 

It depends, I just ordered mine yesterday with LED instead of the 1920 for better battery life. I had a 1600x1200 on my Inspiron 8200 and it was a little small sometimes.

 

The LED display for the 1530 is 1440x900.

 

I say get the LED and 1440x900. I say this because you're getting the M1530 which has (at best) the gddr3 8600mGT. If you play a games at WUXGA, your frames will be horrible. And if you try to scale to a smaller resolution, the frames may actually be worse because of scaling. For the Hdds, that would really depend on what you're doing, i would think the 250 would be about a half step faster than the 320, but you get a bit more space from the 320 so which do you need, space or speed? I would personally go with the 320 as i like space and youre hdd will be your bottleneck anyway.

 

here are the specs for the laptop:

core2, 2.4 GHz
vista home premium
probably the LED display
4Gb ddr2
8600mGT
as for the hard drive i am still undecided. seeing as i don't really use to much memory is the extra $150 worth it for the speed gain?
although it will be plugged in most of the time anyone have a clue what the battery life would be? just curious.

 

Well, the 320 would give you a bit more battery life, but again, do you need the space? If not, then get the 250.

 

I would say LED, less heat, less battery drain and is more bright. And the 7200 RPM drive sounds great also it offers better performance but consumes more battery also has a bigger price, btw I think that 70gb isnt a great difference.

 

Is this a fact or your opinion? I mean have you seen any evidence of this with your own two eyes? The reason I'm asking is because I just ordered the M1530 a couple of days ago and I chose the WUXGA. I also ordered the 2.5 cpu, along with the 250gb (7200) hard drive.

Right now I've got the M1210 so anything is an upgrade at this point, but I will be sorely disappointed if I can't play Crysis with this new laptop.

 

right now i am playing crysis on very high settings on my desktop(8800GTX). on your 1530 you should be able to play it very well on medium settings and slightly slower on high. however it should run faster on the LED (by how much i do not know). my notebook should be similar although i still can not decide between the 2 displays.

 

The resolution of a screen is more of a personal choice. It matters what you like best. Personally, i like higher resolutions on a smaller screen and lower resolutions on a bigger screen. I also usually prefer 1440x900. It depends on what you feel most confotable with.

I would go with the 7200rpm HDD, its plainly just more speed. It will not really help during gameplay, but will in all loading times for games and programs. Including boot time.

 

As long as I can play it on medium settings I'll be happy. I'm not a heavy computer gamer (I play mostly on Xbox 360) but I've been wanting to play Crysis and my M1210 most likely wouldn't play it well.

 

This is a mix of both; i have the t7700 and the gddr3 8600m with WSXGA+ and as such my frames are decent playing assassins creed (30-40 on med high) which is decent, but im pretty sure if i tried to play crysis on this at med/high settings at my resolution, my frames would probably be <30. Also, as far as scaling, i know for a fact, my frames have dropped (only about by 1-5) when scaling to WXGA.

 

I would get the LED backlit screen over the WUXGA and the 5400 rpm hdd, your not going to get much of a speed increase but the higher rpm hdd will consume more battery, generate more heat and be louder! Your ability to games will not be changed with the higher speed hdd so why worry about it?

IMO, the whole point of a laptop is to be as slim and light as possible while using the least amount of power for the most amount of performance or else you should just buy a desktop!

 

Ditto on the LED screen and the 5400 RPM hdd. Like the previous poster said the speed difference is minimal but the heat, noise and battery life are much worse on the faster spinning hdd. For the screen, I think that anything higher than 1440x900 on a 15 inch screen is overkill. The print is too small and running games on native resolution is too taxing on the videocard.

 

I actually think the WSXGA+ is the perfect resolution, its too bad they dont make an LED Backlit LG WSXGA+ screen!

 

I wouldn't worry about WUXGA in the gaming aspect. Very rarely will you play a game at native resolution anyway. There's no doubt that 1920x1200 will produce substantially lower framerates than say 1440x900; however, during gameplay, scaling 1920x1200 to 1440x900 will be fine because of the size of the pixels in 1920x1200. The smaller the pixels are, the less you notice scaling. Your desktop won't look as good on a 1440x900 resolution running on a WUXGA screen; but if you feel that the text is too small, then there's always DPI scaling which provides a much cleaner way to enlarge text and images. Then again, if you are constantly lowering your resolution or changing your DPI settings, WUXGA is useless. I got it simply because I got the blu ray option in my computer, and i'll look great on that resolution.