Desktop --> Notebook: What kind of improvement, if any?

Didn't know where to post this, so i thought gaming would be kind of appropriate. Mods can move it if needed.

My question is this: Can I, or will I get any improvement in gaming, overall improvements in casual use, etc etc, when going from a desktop (specs given below) to a laptop. Any comparison will be appreciated, in the forms of scores or just words like "vastly improved omgz!".

Custom Built Desktop:

CPU: C2D E6600 @ 2.4GHz, Not overclocked.
Vid: nVidia GeForce 8800GTS 320mb
Ram: 3gb Corsair DDR2 800mhz (PC2 6400)

Lenovo Y550 Notebook:

CPU: C2D P8700 @ 2.53GHz
Vid: GeForce GT 240M 1GB
RAM: 4GB PC3-8500 DDR3


From the specs, it looks like its going to be crazy faster. Slightly faster CPU (granted its different architexture), the video card is generations better, and the ram is a step up from DDR2 to DDR3, and a whole gb more of it.

But my gut tells me its not going to be that big of a jump. The 8800gts i have in my desktop is a huge video card, the one in the laptop is a tiny little chip. The desktop processor has a huge fan and heatsink on it, the laptops cpu is again, tiny. Along with the Ram. The PSU for my desktop is a big 800w one and the laptop has a battery (or little power adapter) to run it.

The desktop is a machine i built myself over two years ago and the laptop i bought last week, still waiting for it. So I am trying to see what i can expect from the machine. Im expecting a step up, but not a huge one, over a step down. Any insight you guys can give me would be greatly appreciated.

 

You're downgrading a lot if you're going with that Lenovo laptop. The Geforce GT 240M does not even come close to the 8800GTS 320. DDR3 RAM doesn't make a noticeable difference, and day-to-day application performance will be close to what you experience with the desktop. The desktop 8800GTS 320 will crush the GT 240M in gaming; you'll need to get at least a laptop with a Geforce GTX 260M or a Mobility Radeon HD 4850 just to match what your three year old desktop video card can do.

 

Everything will pretty much be the same except the videocard will probably be a little slower.

 

Now maybe if it was a GTX 280M, then it may be a little better than the 8800 GTS, but only just.

Another thing to factor in is price. A desktop with those specs would be $600, give or take depending on what condition and how old it is, but a laptop with those specs would be something close to $1000.

 

I think the GeForce GT 240M is roughly equivalent to the 9700M GTS, which is worse than the 8800GTS. So expect a small downgrade in gaming performance, and an upgrade in most other aspects.

 

Really? Wow. I wasnt expecting that much. I figured the new 240M midrange card would be about on par with 2 year old midrange card. Guess i was mistaken.

How does the 8800gts compare to the new GTX280m? Thats the top of the line notebook card now correct?

 

I built is from scratch and the total was $1700 including a monitor a lil over 2 years ago (March '07).

The Y550 i got for $740. Here is the thread i made on here about it.

 

The GTX 280M will be 10-20% better than the 8800GTS 320.

Let's put it this way, the GT 240M performs roughly the same as a desktop 8600GT.

 

That's because in a laptop you have a lot less space so miniaturization adds to the cost. However, it's not really maximum capability that distinguishes a laptop from a desktop since most people don't go anywhere near the limits of even basic laptops. The decision is mostly a matter of mobility. With only the purest (gamers, video editors graphic artist etc.) considering speed and graphic capability.

 

I totally expected the size of the card to impede on the speed, i just didnt think that it would be slower. heh.

As far as the actualy cards go, you reference the card to be about the same speed as a 9700M GTS. Isnt that a 3 generation old card?

I thought it went 8*** GT/GTS/GTX < 9*** GT/GTS/GTX < 1** GT/GTS < 2** GT/GTS/GTX.

 

Geforce 8 Series < Geforce 9 series < G200 series (GTX/GTS/GT 2xx/1xx)

 

So going back to the 240M. What can i expect in terms of performance for COD:MW2? I know its not out yet, but thats the only game im planning on playing. I have the desktop there to game on if needed, but im out a lot.

I was hoping to get 45-60fps in medium+ settings. Will that be attainable with the 240M ya think? I know its totally speculative, but i wanna be a lil prepared.

 

Thats one of those new strange nvidia cards, its part of there mid end department there high end cards are the 260/260M. You should be able to play COD:MW2 on it with medium settings if it has a similar demand to CoD4 but it will still be a downgrade from your desktop and your desktop will be a lot easier to UPGRADE and for cheap too.

 

I'm not sure it's fair to compare desktops to laptops since their components are exactly comparable. I've only once read about such a comparison between them and it was on an HP ELITE editing laptop. The unit cost over $4,000 and was the top of the line model. In rendering a certain video clip, it was beaten by it's closes desktop equivalent. However, the difference wasn't by much, even though the desktop cost more than twice the price.

Maybe that's different in gaming, but for the most part, a good laptop can do anything a desktop can do.

 

if you're paying for electricity you'll save some $$

 

the gtx280m is not the same gtx280 in desktop...
gtx280M is more like the 8800GTS 512 in desktop...
so the gtx240m is more like a mm 8600GT

it is the naming game...
even they sound similar... the laptop part is about half as good as the desktop version

 

Assuming we're all keen with our math, you're saying the 8 series is worse than the 9 series and so on?

So wouldn't his 240m be an upgrade over his current card?

I know it's a notebook version but none-the-less it has to be better no?

P.S. I'm almost 100% sure that the GTX 280m outclasses the 8800 GTS.

 

Absolutely! Laptops have a much greater efficiency level by far than do desktops

 

True but really this is over rated, a single lightbulb in my house uses 100w and is on most of the day. My HTPC when I tested it only used 65w of power when in use (I did design it with low power in mind) I would say my really powerfull desktop uses 300w of power when on and running something intensive, I may do that for what 2 hours if I am playing a game. That equates to pennies of electric cost and the laptop would still pull like close to 150w or 200w of power while gaming. So the difference is even less.

If you want to save money on power your far better off making sure you turn off your lights, have good insulation and use power saving primary devices like your refrigerator, washer & dryer.

I can leave my PC turned off all month and maybe see a $2.00 difference, but when we replaced our appliances with energy savings ones the power bill went down over $200.00

Also do not forget S3 sleep laptop or desktop both only use about 1w of power in that mode. This is where I keep my desktop when I am not doing something with it.

 

Off topic:

Normally power costs about 10cents per Kilowatt/Hour. So say your comptuer is pulling 333watts (for easiness sake). If you run the comptuer for 3hours, you have used a kilowatt/hour: 10 cents worth of power. Doesnt seem like much eh? But say you use it 6 hours a day every day for a month. 20 cents/day, 30 days: $6/month for powering your computer.

Granted thats fuzzy math. But it just puts it into perspective if you leave your computer on overnight all the time.

My math could be off, correct me if im wrong, but thats the logic i gave my gf when i told her she needs to cut her computer off every night.

 

That's not completely accurate since your desktop use a relatively large amount of electricity on average when turned off. Since computers are never really completely off, you'd have to unplug it, or use a power strip switch to make the power drain zero.

 

No your math is pretty much spot on but thing is you have to look at the bigger picture.

We are talking about Laptop vs Desktop

I have been measuring and tracking power use at home and at work for quite a while now and have the device needed to measure actual wattage a device uses.

Here is a spreadsheet I made to easily calculate cost in a flash, I added desktop & laptop on there just for a test.

From Misc

As you can see assuming the laptop uses about 150w of power and the desktop 333w of power and we follow your 3 hours a day every day of the year rule thats only about $20 difference in a whole year, thats like one trip to taco bell for me.

this is only if I used it every single day and I dont and I think most people dont. Its also at 0.11 per Kwh our current cost here for power.

For that $20 it is not worth it for me to sacrifice the power my desktop has for a laptop, and if you were buying a gaming laptop to game on isntead of a desktop I can tell you now you will pay over 2x more for the laptop and still end up with less power.

Average decent gaming laptop is between $1500-2500 and you can build a gaming desktop to max out any current game for $750 easy.

Now factor in that $20.00 saved and its not such a big deal anymore is it?

To summarize it is impossible to use these 3 words together "Gaming + Laptop + Saving" If you want to game use a desktop, if you have to game on the go then get a laptop but thats because your in a special situation not because its a good idea.

 

also. you need a hell of a rig to pull of 333w idle power, that or you game 6 hours everyday.

 

8800 GTS desktop is essentially a 8800m GTX in notebook performance.

 

Uses power when turned off? Ummm, my watt meter says 0 watts being used when it's off. Not sure how you get that idea. Maybe when in standby it might use 5-10W to charge the memory mainly.

 

the standby power on a decent power supply is roughly 6W, if you forget to unplug your laptop brick its ieasy for it to draw 5-15W doing nothing so standby power is a moot point in either case. if you want to save power use the switch on your power bars or do what we did and have our Home theatre and computer room wired with switchable outlets

 

I don't think we really have to worry about how much power our computers use...my desktop is on all day and so is my laptop, even if I am not using it.

 

You should get 26W CFL light bulbs (equivalent to 100W) or LEDs.

Stop comparing a gaming laptop to a HTPC lol. Normal laptops with 1 videocard are around 60-90W. If a laptop is 150W like you put it, it probably has dual videocards, dual hdds so a desktop like that will be around 700W+. And at 10 hours every day that desktop'll cost you $300 a year in electricity. Idling SLI/CF vid.cards still use 50-100W alone. That 150W laptop will cost you $75 a year @10 hours a day. Of course if you're gaming/watching hd movies or lol -> folding <- lol

 

hey guys, how are you calculating the power rating of your laptops?is it through the formula P=IV? my current voltage is 12.08v but the voltage is 240v at my power outlet...

 

use P=IV at the line side, or cheat and use a kill-a-watt unit, Laptops bricks waste alot of power as heat out the transformer and regulators

 

a lot of power gets wasted as heat... laptops arent cool are they?

 

Hi there OP

I moved to a laptop for a few reasons, the major ones being heat, noise, portability (regardless of what anyone says its much easier to carry a laptop, PSU and mouse than an entire base unit and screen!) and power reasons to still the family.

Unfortunately, I think a lot of your problems in chosing a spec have come from the twofold reason of laptop graphics cards being weaker than thier namesake desktop variants, and also Nvidias increasingly decietful naming scheme with thier current laptop cards.

Nvidia have basically renamed and re-labelled the G80/G92 8800 chips for the last 3 years; and because of this, especially the newer cards, are in no way comparable in performance to thier desktop kin.
With ATI at least, thier parts are a cut spec version of the desktop version, with Nvidia however the mobile GT2 series are in the mainstay, renamed G92 chips, and nothing to do with the desktop GT200 series at all (which I personally absolutely despite on sheer point of it being misleading if nothing else).

As far as it goes, the GTX280m is about comparable to a desktop 9800GTX (which is a bit faster than a desktop 8800GTS 512), the 4850 and GTX260m are about 10-15% slower, and roughly equivalent to a 8800/9800GT. Whilst all these cards are faster than your 8800 GTS 320MB, only the GTX280 will really be a decent bit faster, the 260 and 4850 will likely be about 5% faster or so, a little more at high resolution, as this was one of the main areas the 320MB GTS struggled, due to the limited framebuffer.

Personally for me, coming from a desktop 4870, the only 'acceptable' performance was via SLI/Crossfire setups, which crossfire 4850s were a bit better than, or the GTX280m in SLI, which are about equivalent performance to a single desktop GTX285, perhaps a little faster when SLI is getting full utilisation.
For reference purposes, in games where it is utilised, performance increase from SLI can be anywhere from 30% right up to 100%, but more traditionally will be somewhere in the 40-50% region

Here is an (admittedly older) graph showing rough performance difference between a GTX280(desktop) and a 9800GTX to help demonstrate why I consider the GTX280m SLI about equivalent. Being fair, drivers have come on since this graph, performance reports from owners with the GTX280M SLI in Crysis set to 1920x1200 with AA for example suggest they are seeing average frame rates in the 30s and 40s, rather than the 20s you might expect by doubling the 9800gtx figures below.



If you will be gaming heavily, I would consider this.

Also to consider is the fact that in the next 6 months, we should be seeing mobile card refreshes. These should be distinctly more powerful than the current offerings, as ATI will be using cut spec 5 series cards (DX11 parts), and Nvidia will be being forced over to a GT200 chip based design (rumours suggest it may or may not come with additional, official DX10.1 support), although depending on the involved timespans they may hold off until they can release GT300 based parts (big if).

 

I can't personally give any detailed explanation as to which is better, but I agree with the general consensus that any performance improvement would be negligible, if at all. What are your main reasons for getting the notebook? It may be more practical to use that $750 to upgrade your computer and get a netbook. With that amount of money it would be easy.

 

I'm surprised that some of you own top of the line notebooks, yet are generally clueless about GPUs.

The first number is the generation. The second number is the class. So, just because the 2 40M is a generation ahead of the 8 800, it wasn't made to be in the same performance class as the 8800.

Expect half of the performance, maybe less.

 

you could overclock your desktop cpu, buy a gtx260 desktop video card for $150 and smoke any $2000+ laptop out there. then, you could buy a laptop with a decent video card and not worry about it being so powerful.

 

Im not trying to get a desktop replacement, gaming isnt something i am going to be doing heavily. I just wanted to see what i could expect of it in comparison to what i have now.

But it all may have been moot. Lenovo *may* have cancelled my order, not exactly sure yet.

I just dont want to get a laptop with the integrated intel chipset, I would like to have some option to game a little while on the go.

I may eventually get an upgraded graphics card, i dont know. Id much rather get another monitor so i can watch movies full screen while i do homework. It all depends on how CODMW2 runs on my 8800gts.

 

Hey, what's your budget for this notebook?

 

Thats the notebook i ordered, but they may have cancelled it on me. The price was a steal.

 

Okay, from that thread I see that you're worried about finding those specs for that kind of price at a later date (~$940). Here's an ASUS for pretty much the same total, free shipping and the standard 2 year parts/labor warranty.

So, other than losing the LED screen, you don't have to be in much of a hurry to jump on that deal.

 

I dont know for sure if its canceled yet, imma call during business hours tomorrow. The total for that machine was $811 after tax/2 day shipping.

If it was canceled, im going to wait a few more weeks and probably get something in November, wait and see what comes of the i7, try and get something cheaper.

But i really like the build quality, design, and touchpad of the lenovo. So im not throwing in the towel yet.

 

There are laptops out there faster than the GTX260

 

No there aren't. Not even in the same ballpark.

Well, the jury is still out on the M17x w/ 4870 Crossfire, but it's the only contender.

 

GTX285 SLI by all rights should be faster, when SLI utilisation is high (yes I know vantage is a lot more optimised than games). Individually you're right the cards are nowhere close, but the SLI/Crossfire configs are much more competive.

If we were talking a GTX295 then no, not a chance.
I used to have a 4870 which is in the same ballpark as the GTX260 and I can contend that the 4850 Crossfire setup was often just as fast, if not faster in many cases.
Unless SLI GTX280 is majorly dissapointing in games, then there shouldnt be an issue.

This is the same reason with desktops SLI 8800GTs were so popular...for the price they were often faster than the GTX280.

As an example, a review I just compared showed the GTX260 (probably original version) as getting about 8k raw GPU score in vantage, performance (note GPU score, not overall score). My 4850s in crossfire got a higher raw performance score than that, drawing about 9.8, 10.6 when I overclocked them slightly.

edit - actually just checked some other reviews incase my figures were off, including a heavily overclocked GTX260 216 maxcore version, this got 9.3k GPU score, the normal got about 8.5k

There are people out there running GTX285m SLI pulling 12K GPU score, now I know utilisation is not always going to be as high as Vantage, BUT it shows the potential is there to be faster!

A desktop dual card setup will beat a relative notebook one, and definately anywhere near the same price point, it doesnt mean there arent machines out there though that are capable of giving a decent, single card, gaming machine a run for thier money in decent conditions.

Given these figures I'd say its quite possible for a laptop to rival and beat a GTX260 equipped desktop machine, albeit costing much much more.

 

Well depends, the desktop GTX 260 is a very good GPU and a fast one too. You are comparing older tech against newer tech. Compare high res with AA turned on and with AF instead and those GTX 280m will cripple against the GTX 260. The GTX 260 is really cheap nowadays.

 

Oh no I agree, with AA on the GTX260 will gain efficiency compared to the GTX280m, Im well aware its older tech, and in this sense the 4870ms in crossfire may well blow away the GTX280ms, as quite frankly the R770 architecture is better than the G92 one. Given a lot of peoples further tolerance of lack of AA on the smaller laptop screens at higher res (higher DPI than a desktop), and this point does become somewhat moot however. (ATI laptop tech is generally the same as thier mainstream tech anyway, its only really Nvidia doing falling back atm)
I dont disagree that desktop cards 1:1 are faster than, the point Im making though is that it is possible to get a laptop that will stand up to a desktop GTX260, and beat it, which Kevin was disagreeing with.

The 4870s in crossfire should continue this trend in that ATI cards are typically 20-25% slower than the desktop variant, leading to the conclusion that crossfire in theory could operate at 150-160% of the speed of a single 4870 1GB (maximum). In reality this may well be closer to the likes of about 120-130% of the operating speed, but again, thats still a fair chunk faster than the GTX260.

Still, as I mentioned previously, it might be worth the OP waiting until the next wave arrive in the next 3-6 months, or at least bearing it in mind, as they should be significantly faster...

 

I think too that the 4870 notebook GPU´s should handle AA better than the G92b counterpart if it´s the DDR5 version. Overall the G92 architecture is bad at handling AA.

There is quite a bit of a difference between my GTX 260 and my old 8800GTX I had before I switched to the GTX 260.

 

Aye, I used an 8800GTS 512 (G92) before going to a desktop 4870, before swinging back to 4850m crossfire (a bit faster than the 4870 actually) and now going to GTX280M SLI with an eye to upgrade to GT200/300 mobile parts when they arrive.

Funny how it works eh?

 

As far as comparison sake goes. What is ATi's card that is about equal or a little bit better than the 240M? (Or about equal to a desktop 8800gts).

By comparison, i mean performance and price. Cheaper is better tho.

I like nVidia's numbering scheme better than ATI's atm i think.

 

Mobility Radeon HD 4670 is the closest ATi equivalent.

ATi's upcoming 4830 (HP Envy 15) will kill both of them.