8600GT 512mb DDR2 vs 256mb DDR3 - Which is better for me?

Hi, I'm buying my first notebook ever. I need something that is portable (as I travel between the east and west coasts somewhat frequently), but at the same time I need something that I can game on.

I narrowed it down to the Asus G1S-A1 and the C90, and while looking on GenTech I saw that with the C90 I could take a 512mb 8600GT but that the memory is GDDR2, and for a $75 upgrade I could decrease the memory capacity to 256 but get GDDR3, which I understand is significantly faster than GDDR2.

So, I play first person shooters, and I've been known to play MMOs in the past. The way I saw it, the 512 might be better for MMOs that load a ton of graphical assets, where the faster 256 might be better for FPSes like QW:ET. So, I'm really up in the air here... any input or statistics that anyone can help me out with would be awesome.

Also, if you want to weigh in on the C90 vs G1S-A1 debate, that'd be cool because I really can't decide between the two, but I'm leaning toward the C90 for the extra power.

 

I'd go with the 256MB ONLY if you don't play many MMOs. What games exactly?

 

ddr3 is the faster card

 

Uh, well I'm not a huge gamer right now because my rig is junk. I used to play a lot of Lineage 2, which can have up to 400 people on screen at times, and definitely could use the extra memory.

But, I won't be going back to that, and I think the only MMOs I'm looking at in the future are Age of Conan, Warhammer and Pirates of the Burning Sea. I don't think I'll be able to go too hardcore in any of them because I work a ton these days.

All my friends are playing Quake Wars Enemy Territory, so for the immediate future it's all about the FPS. I also might want to give Team Fortress 2 and Portal a go. I know I'll be able to run all of those games fine on either card, but... Hrm, hard to pick one for the future

Thinking about going with the 256 now though.

 

Something else you might want to ask, what resolution will you be playing games at? The extra vRAM is really the most effective when loading very large textures and such, if you run at 1440x900 then the GDDR3 is the clear winner, above that and things get more even. I'd consider most MMOs don't need much more than 256mb of vRam to function very well. The only 2 MMOs in which you couldn't run at max settings (with above 30 FPS) with 256mb of vRAM would be Vangaurd and maybe Tabula Rasa. But vRAM isn't the primary bottleneck in those games [when using a mobile GFX card], graphics processing power is. So by switching to the GDDR2 card, you'll experience a net loss in FPS even considering the 512mb RAM.

If you are talking about games like WOW, you shouldn't worry about the vRAM, anything over 128mb will be more than adequate.

Personally, I'd go for the GDDR3 model, you may not have quite as much ram available, but the memory is zippy enough that it will be better utilized. The GDDR2 falls somewhat short, in this regard. There are cases where the memory is not fast enough to properly utilize all of the 512mb of vRAM, but maybe only 384mb.

I'd like to see other people's points.

 

I tried to play Vanguard (unfortunately) on my current ****ty desktop (unfortunately), which packs a 256mb Radeon 9800, 1.5g of ram, a 2.something Ghz athlon XP, and a crappy IDE hard drive thats tiny and slow, and that was probably the most agonizing gameplay experience that I have ever had.

Also, I doubt I'll give Tabula Rasa a go... it doesn't look like my kind of game. At all. One game I should bring up though, is Huxley, because it's an MMOFPS, so it's going to require some ridiculous amount of everything I'm sure. I remember when I first started playing Planetside with only 512 megs of RAM... oh what a nightmare.

I appreciate your input a ton StormEffect, it seems like the GDDR3 is the way to go.

 

Yup, the GDDR3 card is definitely the way to go.

 

gdd3, like everyone else. And as far as i know, there's no 8600 with 512mb of dedicated ram....it's 256 dedicated + 256 shared....

 

Nope, the C90s and Compal IFL90, among others, both have 512mb dedicated VRAM for the 8600M-GT. There's even supposedly a 512mb GDDR3 version, though I'm not sure it's been released yet.

 

C90 has gddr3 now. Its a 75 dollar upgrade from the ddr2.

Go to Asus forums to see tons of c90 vs g1 threads.

 

really?! hmm..thanx for the correction