8600 GT worth it over 8400M GS?

I know the 8600 wins, but I can't find one reasonably priced (around $1000) on a 14". I found a 319MB NVIDIA GeForce 8400M GS on an HP 14" and all seems good, but I don't know if it will handle Bioshock and Crysis when they come out. I would be happy playing it on Low w/ a constant 30 FPS, I just want it to be playable.

I have a desktop if I want the eye candy but considering I will be going to class everyday carrying this thing around, I don't know if the 15.4" is worth it in size for the extra FPS. I will be using this laptop about 3+ hours a day and play WoW and CS:Source on it mainly between classes, but I just want to make sure a 8400 GS will last into the next few years or if it's lifetime is already up.

 

If you are gaming, definitely. It would get priority over the CPU, RAM and HD if you want to game at all.

The 8400GS is no slacker though, it'll last for a bit, playing upcoming games on low.

 

For Bioshock and Crysis, definitely go for the 8600M-GT. You'll have to go up to 15.4" to get one in that price range though.

For WoW and CS:S, and 8400m-GS is more than sufficient.

 

i played wow and css on my GeForce 4 MX 420 with 64mb ram lol, the 8400 should be perfectly fine considering the processors available these days :0

 

it would also have a T7300 Core 2 Duo processor and 2G DDR2 so the main thing slowing down the FPS would be the video card i think? so could a 8400 handle bioshock, crysis, and most likely unreal tournmeant 3? i just want it to be playable, no less 25-30 avg w/ dips in maybe like 15-20 when it gets crazy...to be exact...

 

bioshock and crysis are gonna need higher end cards to create an enjoyable experience, if i were to play cysis on a 8400 i think the laptop would be in pieces after about 15 seconds of gameplay lol

 

damn...alright then thanks

 

If you really want to play the new DX10 games I would REALLY recommend the 8600.. I'm sure the 8400 will play ut3/crysis/bioshock but it will definetly be at low settings and possibly not at native resolution. Bioshock performance is looking really good so far though, desktop 7600GTs are playing max in 1024x768 smoothly and using DX10 doesn't appear to reduce performance. I don't think bioshock would be very enjoyable like that though since a large part of the game is the atmosphere it creates and low settings would hamper that..

It will however handle games like css 100% fine

 

not worth getting a 15inch instead of a 14/13.3inch for it but if its a upgrade then definately yes.

 

very few 14/13.3 have 8600 GTs. 15.4 with 8600GTs are abundant and often a better deal. I'd spring for the 15.4 to get a 8600gt myself if I was playing Bioshock and Crysis on the lappy. (I got a beefy desktop for that.)

 

IMHO, the only 8400M GS worth getting is the one in Dell's new M1210 because it's in a 12". All other 8400M GS cards are in 14.1", and some boutique stores like Zepto have 14.1" models with the 8600M GT. Ditch the 8400M GS unless you're getting the M1210.

BTW, DX10 is still crap. Even the Geforce 8800GTX is struggling to run Call of Juarez in DX10 mode. The desktop 8600 GTs and GTSes are don't get past the 10 FPS barrier. ROFL.

 

An 8400M-GS is not avaialble in a 12" machine. The smallest it's available in is the 13.3" Sony SZ6 series and the 13.3" Dell XPS M1330. The best GPU available in a 12" is the 8400M-G.

 

Oh, sorry about that. Yeah, it's the Dell M1310. The M1210 just kept on popping in my head.

 

Wow, Directx is just an api to be used by developers to create games. How can an API be crap? Its called poor encoding and optimization by developers and drivers that have not been fully optimized yet. Look at bioshock, the gap between the difference in dx9 and dx10 is closing in terms of performance. All this dx10 has worse performance is due to vista, new series of gpus, drivers for gpus, Directx10 being recently fully utilized, and developers trying to figure out how to fully optimize these games to cooperate well with gpus, vista, and directx 10.

Seriously I thought by now we were done with all this Dx10 is crap stuff.

 

Plain and simple the 8600GT with DDR3 ram is TWICE as fast as a 8400m GS with DDR3. The 8400m GS is great for people who want a great entry-level dedicated graphics option in their notebook. It's not for "serious" gamers, unless you're serious about older games which the 8400m gs will provide plenty of power for. I'm a WoW player, so the 8400m GS lets me crank everything up to max except for Antialiasing and still gets me about 50~ fps in Azeroth and about 30 to 40~fps in Burning Crusade. The response is amazing either way.

 

That's cause all of the DX10 games out weren't really dx10 and just used brute force to add the dx10 elements. And this isn't speculation anymore, it's fact. Look at the bioshock demo, desktop 8600s are running it max smoothly (12x10) and 8800gts's can handle 1920x1200 max. Still though, there isn't much of a visual difference yet and I don't expect that to change much with Crysis either..