Acer AS5024 Graphics Card

Hello, first post here. Looks like a great place!

I've been researching laptops for the past week or so and the resources on this site are excellent, thanks everyone. Basically what I want a laptop for is wireless internet surfing, photo editing (Photoshop, Nikon Capture, etc) and some drafting and design applications. Also moderate gaming, games such as Warcraft 3, Halo, Grand Theft Auto 3 and up, etc. Nothing TOO intensive.. I've got an Xbox for those games.

A laptop that I was reading about and that I almost bought was the HP DV8120CA ( http://www.futureshop.ca/catalog/proddetail.asp?sku_id=0665000FS10070826&logon=&langid=EN ). I would've bought it, but my dad got talking to the Futureshop salesman (to my dismay) and the salesman plugged their $300 'Extended Warrenty Plan'. Thus, my dad thought that was a good thing to have, but brought the total from 1399.99 + tax for the laptop to a much higher price, too much infact.

But now it seems that even just the laptop itself is a bit too much, so I've been researching alternatives. Things I really liked on the 8120 was the:
*Dual hard drives
*AMD Turion 2.0 GHz
*5 hour rough battery life
*Built in b/g wireless
*Ability to play DVD's without booting the OS.

So now I'm looking at the Acer AS5024 laptop ( http://www.compusmart.com/Product/Default.aspx?CatalogID=0&SupplierPartNo=388117&ShowSpecs=True ). Seems very nice, I can live without the HP's 17" screen. The Acer is less 'pretty' and has less features on the outside, but I think I can live without that stuff. It's what's on the inside that counts, right?

My main question is about the graphics card for the Acer though. The HP had the ATI 200M with 128 dedicated (with ability to use 128 shared, also), but the Acer laptop has a better card, the X600, but has less dedicated memory (64mb). Reading the notebook GPU guides, I'm assuming that the Acer will have better gaming performance despite the smaller amount of memory. Does anyone have suggestions or comments on this card?

While we're at it, I'd also love to hear any comments or suggestions referring to the Acer laptop itself. I think the specs are pretty nice. A few people commented to me that Acer is a very poor quality manufacturer. Any thoughts?

Thanks everyone.. I really appreciate any help!

-Jay Brooks
Woodstock, Ontario, Canada
http://jay.thegrebs.com

 

The x600 will indeed perform better then the 200m, but the lack of memory really really restricts the x600's true performance.

Acer is 'allright', not the best but not the worst at all, for what you pay, it's often a really good deal

 

The X600 can't use 128MB of memory effectively even if it did have it, but it can use more than 64MB. You can't expect blazing performance from an X600. I'd expect no higher than medium settings in the latest games.

 

Thanks for the help, guys!

I wasn't expecting blazing performance, but if it the 64mb X600 will outperform the 128mb X200M, I'm happy!

I'll see if the local shop can get the Acer laptop with more memory for the X600, or maybe even the X700. But that's not a huge deal, I would've been 99% content with just the X200M in the HP laptop.

Any more comments still appreciated.