**Can My Notebook Run It?** - Ask about your notebooks here

The two laptops i am torn between have
ATI Mobility RADEON® HD 4670 and the other has a NVidia GTS 360M

is there a huge noticeable difference between these cards? If so what should I expect from each and how do they compare against eachother?

any help would be great. THanks

 

The 360M should be a fair bit faster, but it will run a lot hotter and use a lot more power, so you'll have worse battery life.

 

cpu:Intel Core 2 Duo P7350 2.0GHz
gpu:NVIDIA GeForce GTX 260M
ram:4
display:15.6(1366x768)

cpu:Intel Core i5-520M(2.4GHz)
gpu:ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5650
ram:4
display:15.5(1366 x 768)

how well will they run games like l4d2, fallout 3, cod 4

Buy the Asus G51VX-RX05 Refurbished Notebook PC at TigerDirect.ca

http://www.newegg.com/Product/ComboDealDetails.aspx?ItemList=Combo.383187.34-127-092

 

The Radeon is on the higher side of the medium range cards while the nvidia is on the high end spectrum.

The nvidia will give you better performance (also can play better even at higher resolutions), and will last you longer as games become more demanding. It is simply a better card in every regard.

Except of course, battery life, but my guess is that such a thing is not of your concern.

 

purely looking at gaming no it wouldnt be worth it unless diablo 3 is very cpu dependent. your 5870 is still going to be the limiting factor in gaming for the most part.

 

Alienware M15x
CPU: Intel Core i7 720QM 1.6GHz (2.8 GHz Turbo Mode, 6MB Cache)
GPU: 1GB NVIDIA GeForce GTX 260M
RAM: 4GB DDR3 1333Mhz
Display: WideFHD 1920 x 1080

I was just wondering what settings I should be playing Crysis, Crysis Warhead and Borderlands on.

Crysis Warhead is currently running smoothly at 1600x900 on Gamer settings. The "optimise system settings" option seems to be really inaccurate, as it drops the resoultion down to something like 1024x900 (which is the wrong ratio for this screen, anyway). Anyway, I'm just wondering how far I should be able to push it.

 

here are the Specs for my Acer Extensa 5630EZ. I cant play Mass Effect 2 as i need an upgrade in RAM and a new graphics card. Can anyone recommend me the best ones to get (also inexpensive?)

many thanks!

here are the specs anyway incase you want to know

CPU:Intel® Pentium® dual-core mobile processor with up to 1 MB L2 cache, supporting Intel® 64 architecture
Mobile Intel® GL40 Express Chipset

GPU: Mobile Intel® GL40 Express Chipset with integrated 3D graphics, featuring Intel® Graphics Media Accelerator 4500M (Intel® GMA 4500M) with up to 1759 MB of Intel Dynamic Video Memory Technology 5.0 (64 MB of dedicated video memory, up to 1695 MB of shared system memory), supporting Microsoft® DirectX® 10
Dual independent display support
MPEG-2/DVD hardware assisted capability
WMV9 (VC-1) and H.264 (AVC) support (acceleration)


RAM: DDR2 memory, upgradeable to 4 GB using dual soDIMM modules (dual-channel support)
* A 64-bit operating system is required to enjoy the ultimate performance of 4 GB memory.

Display: 15.4" WXGA high-brightness TFT LCD, 1280 x 800 pixel resolution, supporting simultaneous multi-window viewing via Acer GridVista™
16.7 million colours

 

can Fallout 3 runs on High settings on my ALIENWARE M11X?

 

CMIIW< but, i doubt you need high setting on m11x
and i strongly believe GT 335m is able to do it

 

You can't upgrade the graphics card on most notebooks, and certainly not on one with an integrated GPU.

Possibly. As the native resolution is low I expect you could probably get fairly close to high settings.

 

Ok cool thank you for letting me know!

Do you know a good laptop you could recommend for me?

Many thanks

 

It depends on all sorts of things such as your price range, whether you need it to be portable, how much battery life you need, etc. For example, my M15x is a good laptop for gaming but it's pretty expensive and not very portable; it depends on what you want.

The best thing to do would be to go to this thread, fill out the form there and post it to that board. We can then give you some recommendations from there.

Happy to help

 

yep, slightly better in performance, a lot worse in power consumption and also heat. Hence, 4670 makes more sense.

 

yes will run.. i would get i7 quad as for future proofing it will help a lot.. also with more and more CPU intensive games , especially diablo 3 type , the extra quad power will help.

yes but on low settings.

the G51 will run games better as the GTX260M is a high end card...

You cannot expect much from GTX260M nowadays.. but u can get a 5870 and really play on games on full HD.. of course , this is a unofficial upgrade.. if u want to know where to get it , i can point to u.. PM me.

 

the GTS360M will be better for gaming but u can usually find better for same price... u mind telling us ur budget and what notebooks u looking at?

 

Notebookcheck: NVIDIA GeForce GTS 360M

Notebookcheck: AMD ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4670

the Nvidia will give you significantly better performance.

 

i prefer the tomshardware gpu hierarchy chart

Graphics Card Hierarchy Chart : Best Graphics Cards For The Money: April 2010

but yeah its faster than the HD 4670.

 

Hang on, if the GTX260M is a high-end card then why should I not expect much from it?
I'd be interesting in hearing about this unofficial upgrade, but I am rather wary of ripping apart my two week old laptop....

I'm rather confused, what question are you actually asking. "I can get a constant 100fps" sounds like a statement, not a question. If you already know how well it runs then why are you asking?

 

Why do you want to do that? A screen can only refresh 60 times a second so running it at 60+ FPS makes no difference.

Counter-strike 1.6 is quite an old game now, so it may be possible for you to get 100fps by bumping down the settings but there really is no point.

I would, however, recommend getting some more RAM as 1GB really is the minimum for Windows 7 and yields pretty poor performance.

 

CPU: Intel Core i5 430M (2.26GHz Turbo Boost up to 2.53GHz, 1066MHz FSB, 3MB L3)
GPU: ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5650 (1 GB)
RAM: 4GB DDR3 1066MHz RAM
Display:1366 x 768


Can my notebook smoothly run games like:
Dead Space
Crysis
Batman: Arkham Asylum
Battlefield: Bad Company 2

 

I'll give this a shot.

I want to run Oblivion, Prey, Doom 3, Alpha Prime, Crysis, Half Life 2 and Stalker. All at at least medium settings. ( On Windows 7 64 bit)

CPU: AMD Sempron II M120 @ 2100 MHz (single core)

GPU: AMD M880G with ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4200 with 128 MB dedicated and shared up to 1 gig

RAM: 4 Gigabytes DDR2 800mhz

Display: 1366x768

 

You should be able to run batman and deadspace at highest settings without any problems, in order to run crysis and BC 2 smoothly, you are gonna have to lower the settings to medium/low.

You are expecting way too much for a single core CPU coupled with an integrated video card. Among all of the games you listed, you could probably run half life 2/doom 3 at lowish settings, no chance to run crysis/oblivion at all, let alone running them at medium settings. That laptop is definitely not designed for gaming.

 

But doesn't Crysis require DirectX 10 Compatible Graphics card with 512 MB VRAM?

And what about Metro 2033 and Dragon Age: Origins? Would my notebook be able to run them?

 

I knew someone was going to say that. I tricked you. I already know the answer.

I choose these games because yes, I can play all of these games on medium settings. Smoothly, fluently.. no problems. Including Crysys and Oblivion.

See.. yours is the type of thing everyone tells me.. still unless you try it out on a certain machine.. you really won't know.

Laptops may not be designed for gaming.. but I think this shows that today's laptops have more efficient processors and ram coupled with Windows 7's better ram and processing manageability are starting to change this old way of thinking about laptops.

I wonder how many people in this thread have been told their machine won't play something and go away sad and never try it. I say, try it.. you just never know.

Oh and this laptop, may not play the latest games for this year or last.. but for 350 bucks at wall mart.. it's doing pretty good as a cheap gaming machine.

 

You're either lying or your definition of smooth gameplay is VERY off. I'm sorry, but there is no way at all that a HD 4200 is going to play Crysis smoothly at medium settings, at all. Maybe at 15FPS, but that is most definitely not smooth or comfortable.

I for one, call BS on this.

Just because a card has 512MB or 1GB of VRAM, it doesn't matter. Of course, it does matter to a point, but the full power of the GPU does not rest in the amount of VRAM it has. It's more so about the card itself, the amount of shader cores, the bus width, and the memory type, and speed. The 5650 is a mid-range card of today's generation, and you will most likely have to accept medium, or high if you are lucky, and don't mind a little bit of choppiness in heavy action.

 

I am not lying. I don't think my definition of smooth gameplay is off.

I don't know how many fps's I get. I don't go by fps. As far as this laptop goes.. if the game is smooth and playable it could be the minimum 24 frames per second.. I don't care or need to know..anything over enough frames per second to make it playable is overkill. I wont get hung up on FPS as long as the game is playable. My desktop is a different story. In it I have an ATI 5750 with 1 gig of DDR5.

I have been playing fps games since the mid 90's I know what is playable and what is not. This game is smooth and comfortable for me.

I don't care if you don't believe me.. I'm the one who has to live with the laptop and fight with finding games that are playable on it.

Hey.. I'm not the only one doing it on medium settings on an ATI 4200. Look at this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUlFQ9yF9-A&feature=related

Who knows why it works better on some computers than others.. perhaps my clock from the factory is slightly higher than most.. I don't know.. but that's what people do say.. on some machines it preforms better than other machines.

If you watch enough videos of the 4200, you will find this does happen. Watch all the you tube videos to the right. People are even playing Borderlands and Fallout 3 with the ATI 4200 IGP.

 

Thanks a lot for explaining that... I'm new in this gaming business and this is my first ever notebook with dedicated graphics, so I don't know anything about GPUs

 

Warhammer : Age of Reckoning

On this wretched spawn of a laptop :

Aspire 5738ZG

Processor : Pentium T4300 @2,1 GHz
Video : Radeon 4570 512 MB GDDR3 @ 680 MHz GPU clock
RAM : 3 GB DDR2 @ 800 MHz
HDD : 320 GB

1366x768 resolution.

So? Will it blend?

 

Well the GTX260M is quite old tech based on a 2007-2008 architecture... the 5870 is much more newer and the 5870 litterally trashes a GTX260M.. anyways , the upgrade is quite straightforward from what i heard.. go over on the alienware forum and see how awesome it is... its worth the risk to rip up ur laptop.

Yes it should on quite high settings on 1366X 768 res...

yeh it will work.. low settings... due to crappy CPU...

 

Oh, believe me, after two mediocre notebooks and a stone-age pc one grows way too accustomed to low settings I was rather afraid it wouldn't run at all.

Thanks for bringing a sparkle of joy into my mundane existence, Sean473!

 

y don't u upgrade ur cpu. You will see a noticeable increase in most games.

 

CPU: Intel Core i7 720QM (1.60GHz Turbo Boost up to 2.8GHz)
GPU: Nvidia GTS 360m
RAM: 4GB DDR3
Display:1920 x 1080


I wish to play crysis warhead with an average of 30-35 FPS. What are the optimum settings?

 

It really isn't much difference, 60+ fps is considered a waste because you really can't see the difference. People claim that there is a difference but I've never seen anyone who can actually notice it. In fact, running at an FPS above your refresh rate simply results in screen tearing which significantly reduces your graphics quality.
More RAM would significantly improve your overall performance, not just in gaming but in general usage.
A bigger hard drive is always useful but will add very little to your gaming performance unless the current one is running incredibly low on space (less than 15% left) because the hard drive doesn't effect your rendering speed once the game has loaded.
Has it occurred to you that, depending on the resolution, you might have problems outputting that resolution on that GPU? If you want to run at 100 FPS then you won't be able to run it a high resolution and, if you're really into professional gaming then you'll likely find the appalling visuals a bigger disadvantage than running at a lower frame rate.

It might actually be possible to run it on medium if you turn the drop the resolution a lot, though you won't actually get get much advantage out of the higher settings.

If it plays Crysis "smoothly" then how come you have to fight to find games that are playable on it? Crysis is one of the most demanding games available.

To be honest, that video is not brilliantly smooth and the resolution is pretty horrible.

Have you tried playing the game all the way through (i.e. In heavy firefights, etc.)? I still reckon your processor would bottleneck you with lots of enemies onscreen.

I believe that you can probably get vaguely passable gameplay running it at medium at low res but you really prove nothing by doing it. Higher resolution and lower settings would probably yields better graphics, if not the bragging rights.

 

Would this laptop be able to run Starcraft II on high detail settings at native (or something close) resolution at playable (~35fps) rates?

Dell Studio 1558
i7 1.6Ghz
Radeon 5470
4GB RAM
1080p display

 

Would I be able to play Shattered Horizon on this comp?
G51vx-rx05
2.00GHz dual core
4GB RAM
260M

Minimum:

OS: Windows Vista/7 (Does not support Windows XP)
Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 / AMD Athlon64 X2 5600+
Memory: 2GB
Graphics: 256MB NVIDIA GeForce 8800GT / ATI Radeon HD 3870
DirectX®: 10 (Does not support DirectX 9)
Hard Drive: 1.5 GB
Sound: Windows Vista compatible sound card

 

Your gpu will be the bottleneck. Maybe medium settings.

Umm its playable on my g50vt x5 native res medium settngs although frame rates do drop once in a while. You should be able to run it though as your gpu is much better than my 9800m GS.

 

Mmm what about an Envy 14
i5 2.4Ghz
Radeon 5650

 

Shattered horizon is poorly optimized, you will need one heck of a laptop to run it smoothly at high resolution/settings. And as just a friendly reminder: GTX260M(AKA 9800M GTX) isn't much better than the 9800M GS as you think, especially the underclocked GTX260M in g51/71. Performance just doesn't increase linearly with the increased number of shader units.



High end desktop quad core processor was used in the test to eliminate any possible CPU bottleneck, 9800M GTX(GTX 260M) shows an advantage of around 10% over 9800M GTS in the BEST case scenario, in most of the games it's around 5%. And 9800M GTS is just an overclocked version of 9800M GS(12% overclocked core and shader, SAME memeory speed). The performance difference between these cards is not as big as people would think.

Nope, it's not gonna be enough for SC2 at 1080p with high settings, i5 2.4 probably will suffice, but the 5650 definitely will not.

 

What kind of games could this system play?
Its a notebook I am considering buying.
I appreciate any suggestions!

Asus k52JK-A1
CPU- Intel Core i5-430M (2.26GHz)
GPU- ATI 5470 1G DDR3 VRAM
RAM- 4GB DDR3 1066MHz (2GBX2), up to 8GB
HDD- 500GB 7200RPM
Display- 15.6" HD (1366 x768) LED
Price- $869.00

 

It could run any games you want, the only question is how well you expect them to run. I5-430M is powerful enough for most of the games, but the 5470 is just a mediocre video card, if you are serious about gaming, look for a system with 5650 or better.

 

Whoops I messed up the GPU is a ATI 5145 not a 5470. Does that make a difference?

 

The Envy 14 has a 1600x900 screen, which should help alleviate some demand on the GPU.

 

Umm the ATI 5145 is slightly slower than the 5470.
Source: Notebookcheck: ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5145

 

Thanks for the reply.

How about on low/minimum settings?

 

Looking at these three notebooks - will any of them be noticeably better with the latest (and not-so-latest) games? My budget is under $1K, so I won't be going much better than these. The only games I have my eye on at this point are Portal, GTA4 and Assassin's Creed 2.

ASUS K72JR-A1 17.3" Laptop
Screen Size: 17.3"
LCD Resolution: HD+ (1600 x900) (LED)
CPU: i5-430M (2.26GHz)
RAM: 4G DDR3
VGA: ATI 5470 1G DDR3 VRAM

ASUS N71vN-A1
2.0GHz Intel Q9000 Core 2 Quad Processor
4GB of DDR3 RAM, 2 slots, 4GB Max
320GB SATA Hard Drive (7200 RPM), DVD Super Multi Drive
17-Inch HD+ LCD Display, NVidia GT 240M Graphics with 1GB DDR3 VRAM

ASUS N71JV-X1
CPU Type - Intel Core i3 350M(2.26GHz)
Screen - 17.3"
Memory Size - 4GB DDR3
Hard Disk - 500GB (7200rpm)
Graphics Card - NVIDIA GeForce GT 325M with NVIDIA Optimus Technology
Video Memory - 1G DDR3 VRAM

 

You can easily get a much much better gaming laptop for under 1k. If you had to pick from one of them I'd get the Asus N71 but i recommend you do some more searches online.
EDIT: I stronlgy recommend this one!! On sale until supplies run out!
http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=5270805&CatId=4935

 

High settings on native res.

 

This is may be an out of place question as it is more general than most, but say I am planning on getting a Sager 8690 or Alienware m15x both with i7-820QM and ATI 5870/5850 respectively.

By connecting my laptop to my tv via hdmi (or vga), would I be able to play games (say Mass Effect) sufficiently or is the hdmi out mainly used for video playback?

 

Yes, in theory you could play games fine on an external monitor. What you have to be aware of is that your TV is probably running in FullHD and that your laptop won't necessarily be able to play all games at that res and that running a large screen at non-native resolution will look horrible.

 

Thanks for the reply