128 Mb card vs. 512 Mb SDRAM??

Hey everyone,

I'm planning on buying a laptop soon, and although it won't be its main purpose, I'd like to do some gaming on it. I want to keep the budget down, so I don't need any top-of-the-line card or anything. I won't be playing anything too new/graphics intensive I think, just games like Half Life 2, Age of Empires 3, and some older ones. I'm thinking a 128 Mb card should be sufficient. To keep costs down, I'd also like to have 512 Mb SDRAM. Will this amount of RAM have any negative effects on my gaming and the video card (meaning I should upgrade to 1 Gb), or will 512 Mb be fine?

Another couple questions, if you're still with me...

Is there a recognizable difference between an Intel Core Solo processor and a Duo Processor (ie. both 1.6 GHz or something). That is, would a solo be fine for my gaming experiences, or would I be better off with a Duo?

Lastly, is XP Media Edition a decent choice, or should I shovel out some more cash and get XP Pro (I have it on my desktop, and have had no problems with it whatsoever)?

Thanks!!

 

a 128mb video card would suffice for those games but the upgrade to 1gig of RAM would help a lot.

I feel the need to remind you that the amount of RAM on the video card is not what makes it great. Theres 128mb cards that will trounce 256mb cards. What makes a card good or bad is which core the particular card has and how many pipelines. No offence if you already knew this. It just came off that way in your post that you may not.

As for single core vs dual core, the only place you'd feel a difference is if you were multitasking a lot. Thats pretty much it.

 

Get the RAM. I have both HL2 and AoE3 and they run on medium-high settings and I'm using a Mobility Radeon 9000. That's right. 64MB is all that is needed to run those games. On the other hand, my computer chokes if I want to minimize any of these games and do something else quick. This is probably due to the fact that I have only 512MB of DDR installed. From personal experience, I would highly recommend spending your dough on more RAM; it will give your computer an allaround performance boost, whereas you'll only see your money well spent when you're playing the occasional game. Don't worry about the video card, almost anything out there can run those two games.

 

The price difference between the Core Solo and the lower-end Core Duos is minimal; absolutely jump for the Duo if you can. Much faster in any sort of multitasking, and also helps single-core performance a bit too.

RAM is the easiest and cheapest way to increase performance. Going to 1GB is the minimum you should go for.

Chaz

 

OK, thanks guys! I think I'll definitely get the 1 Gb of SDRAM, and probably just the 128 Mb card. I'm looking forward to it!...

 

Yeah they run, but you're running them in directx 7 or 8, not 9. So you lose a lot of the eye candy.

 

Yeah, AOE3 is *very* demanding at high settings, but it will scale down and run on even an Xpress 200M--albeit looking pretty terrible and running at a low resolution. 128MB of RAM is sufficient, but make sure it is dedicated RAM and not shared with the system (e.g. 7200, etc). You'll want a 7300 or X1300 at the minimum for games to run with decent settings and resolution, but obviously higher is better. 7600 or X1600 and up are the way to go for gaming if you can manage to find the right notebook with them that meets your needs.

Also 1GB of RAM is definately the way to go, and Core Solo should be fine for gaming since dual core hasn't really taken off yet for anything but multitasking (i.e. in games dual core does little as of yet).