Advice on new Laptop

Ok so I'm looking at dropping £700-£800 into Sony's coffers and buying a Vaio, possibly one like this

The ones I've had a look at, including that one in the link, come with either an Nvidia GeForce 8400M-GT or a Nvidia GeForce 8600M-GT (well as far as I can tell).

But the CPU speed is only 2ghz and they only come with 2gb of RAM.

I'm looking at playing The Elder Scrolls Oblivion and Company Of Heroes on it so please could someone tell me if the 2ghz cpu speed, and the fact it only has 2gb of RAM unless I upgrade, will let the gaming performance down?

As I understand it from looking at the GPU list thread both of the aforementioned video cards are performance video cards so that won't be a problem.

Thanks in advance for any advice/help

 

actually the 8400GT is pretty shiet house. twice as slow as the 8600Gt. from the benchmarks i have seen the 8400Gt doesnt perform much better than the 8400Gs. company of heroes will struggle on the 8400Gt at 17inch resolutions.

CPU and RAM are more than enough.

 

Care to back that up? I've actually had better experiences with my 8400GT than I did my 8600GT. Gran it, my 8600 was a little screwed up, but I have had a great experience with my 8400GT. Plays CoD4 1024x768, everything Extra, no AA at 45-60FPS. Company of Heroes doesn't struggle one bit. I could upload some pics from the demo if you would like? And I would say it performs quite a bit better than the GS, being as the GS only comes with 64/128m of onboard VRAM, slower clocks, and most have GDDR2, leaving smaller room for overclocking. My 8400GT I have OC'd to 550/650, with temps getting no higher than 74C. With those settings, it plays Crysis at medium/high (800x600, of course), UT3 1024x768, all sliders to medium. Crysis gets around 30FPS on average, while UT3 gets around 45.

Oblivion runs just fine with a little tweaking. I now (FINALLY) run it at 1024x(whatever widescreen format that is, I forgot), "Medium" settings, and with VSync of get around 35FPS outdoors, and 50-60 indoors.

It is actually hard to find a good benchmark of the 256m or 512m 8400GT. Most have the 128m.

*EDIT* Here are some benchmarks of the 8400M series. Obviously, they are testing a different 8400M GT, because I scored 1,000 points higher in 3DMark05 all at stock settings. I will upload my 3DMark06 score as soon as possible. All testing done at stock settings. I only OC for Crysis and UT3.

Benchmarks

My 3DMark05 Results, all stock. (450/600)

3DMark06 scores. Sorry about the random Vaio 10th Anniversary thing. It took a shot of my dual monitor setup. (17" notebook, 19" LG Flat)

 

Ok so the gpu wouldn't be a problem but how about the cpu speed - it's only a 2ghz cpu, that kind of bothers me a bit as my Acer 9302 with a nvidia geforce go 6100 that I currently have has a 2.2ghz cpu (albeit an AMD one) and it is a bit on the slow side, I have to put Vista into windows classic mode to get any decent speed out of it.

So the fact that the Sony Vaio models I've been looking at never seem to have a cpu faster than 2ghz kind of bothers me.

 

GHz do not mean much these days; a 2.0GHz Core 2 is like a 3.5 - 4.0GHz Pentium 4 (for single CPU applications) because it gets so much more done per clock cycle (much more efficient). A similarly-clocked Core 2 will be faster than an AMD at around the same speed.
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=200203

 

The bottleneck during gaming on this machine will be the gpu and not the ram or the cpu , even a 1.5 Ghz core 2 duo processor would be enough to play Oblivion with the same results as the 2.0 Ghz processor.

 

Cool. At least I know that the CPU will be able to handle my gaming needs. Thanks for the advice guys