Little help please? 512mb GDDR3 vs 1GB DDR2.

Basically, im planning on buying my first laptop that I would like to play games on fairly well. After some scanning about I took a liking to the Acer Aspire 6930G but I noticed that every place that sold them each had different specs. I narrowed it down to two places:

Tesco's sells this laptop for £499 with a T7450 (core2duo) processor at 2.13GHz (3mb cache), 4GB DDR2 RAM, 320GB SATA HDD and with an Nvidia Geforce 9600M GT 512mb GDDR3

Or

Argos sells it for £549 with a T6400 (core2duo) at 2.0GHz (2mb cache), 4GB DDR2 RAM, 250GB SATA HDD and with an Nvidia Geforce 9600M GT which has 1GB DDR2

Whats everyones opinions on which should I get?

Get the cheaper tescos one with a faster processor and higher HDD capacity or the argos one with extra dedicated graphic ram? Or is 512MB DDR3 better then 1GB DDR2?

If someone could explain the difference between the two cards or another laptop which would be better for the same price budget of up to £570 it would be much appreciated! Cheers.

 

The GDDR3 will spank the DDR2, Go with the GDDR3..

 

GDDR3 > DDR2 in cases where the cards in question are the same.

Just look at the Dell m1530 with the 8600m GT GDDR3 compared to the Inspirons with the DDR2 8600m GT.

 

^In cases of similar GPUs yes.

However, for different class GPUs this isn't always the case. For example, the 64bit GDDR3 HD4570 doesn't perform better than the DDR2 128bit GT130M. It performs surprisingly good, but not that good.

In this case however it's fully true. The GDDR3 GPU will outclass the DDr2 one

 

Awesome, cheers for the responce guys, so im getting a better laptop all together and its £50 cheaper!

I will go instore tomorrow and see if they have one, if not I'll have to order one and wait!

Another question though, do you think that laptop will be able to handle new games on medium-ish settings? do you think it would play WoW, CoD4 etc smoothly?

I did see a video on youtube of someone with the 1gb ddr2 gfx card playing crysis on near high no shadows etc at an alright framerate so I think it should be good enough for my needs.

 

I am very doubtful that it was done using just the game itself without any modifications.

The person probably installed a ton of Crysis mods that tries to sacrifice as little visuals as possible for performance.

Long story short, that video probably misrepresents the real gaming power of the card.

 

That probably is what he had done, but I did search for other videos by different people and someone else had an FPS test of crysis going from low to high settings, on high it had about 9 fps whereas medium was around 20-25, games such as Fear2, Far Cry2, Oblivion, Grid and Prototype all seemed to run fine at medium-high settings so I think it should suit my needs, im not expecting it to be as good as my desktop especially at that price, I just wanted to make sure it would be a good choice of laptop for on the go gaming seeing as it is a pretty good deal at that price and as I only have a limited amount of money.

 

It is a good job you asked for advice here as the DDR3 9600M GT will perform roughly 20% better than its DDR2 counterpart plus you get the machine with a better CPU and save money. Also DDR3 cards are much better overclockers. You ought to be able to squeeze another 15-20% performance increase with overclocking over stock speeds. Too many people don't do their research and get burned but you haven't. Enjoy your purchase.

Just to add 1GB DDR2 ram is a marketing gimmick on any 128bit card as the narrow bandwidth and slow memory speed would effectivly cut in half the amount of ram it can actually use. The DDR3 card is much more likely able to use all of its ram as it runs much quicker pushing more data through that narrow bandwidth. Your new laptop will handle COD4 on max settings and resolutions although you may need to skip on AA unless you overclock.

 

Thankyou, and thanks to everyone here for your help, can't wait to get it now.

 

Processor, hard drive, and GPU, the cheaper notebook is the superior buy.

 

def get the first one, it is much better than the second, and it should also play all new games on at least medium if not high.

 

I went to the store today and they didnt have one so I just placed an order on their online store and it should arive on Thursday Cheaper then all the other Acers Aspire 6930Gs I found and with better specs too! Think I got a great deal and can't wait for it to arrive.

 

Is the deal for £499 at a well known supermarket? Mine was delivered today, came with 9600gt 1gb ddr2...instead of 512mb ddr3.

 

Yes it is.

Well, did you read all the spec's before ordering it? Did it say it should come with a 9600M GT 512MB GDDR3? If so, complain, tell them that the laptop you have received is not what you ordered and tell them that it dosn't come with the specified graphics card which it says it should come with asking them for a replacement/refund/partial refund for the loss of the 512mb gddr3.

If you didn't check then it may well have said it comes with the 1GB version. If I were you though I would get the page up which you ordered from and check all the specs over again, if they are wrong, complain with the argument above.

I know while I was searching around for this laptop I found various versions of it, all the same model but some with a T7450 processor and others with a T6400 processor. Some places sold them with a 280GB, 250GB others, 320GB HDD, most of the ones I had come across though had a 9600M GS card which didn't specify the dedicated RAM rather then a GT.

Now what I did also find which was my first post here, was that a few places had the geforce 9600M GT with either 512MB GDDR3 OR geforce 9600M GT with 1GB DDR2.

If you did indeed get the same deal as me from the same store then mine is being delivered today and I will reply back with what mine came with, if it did come with the 1GB version I'll be on the phone to them first.

 

Hmm, mine arrived a couple hours ago, it DID come with the 1GB DDR2 version of the 9600M GT, but it also came with a full HD 1080 screen which on their site says it dosn't have.

The other thing is aswell that on their site they only offer one 6930G model so im getting the impression that they only have the one we received and that someone accedently put up the wrong specs on their site. It did however still come with the T7450 processor which on the other versions I have seen with a 1GB 9600M GT all came with the T6400.

I think they have just made a mistake on the info in their site, but I dont know wether to complain and have my theory explained back to me or if they do infact stock two different models in the warehouse.

Maybe the unexpected 1080 HD screen compensates the lack of DDR3 9600M GT?

 

Well, you'll need to game at 1280x720 anyway, so the screen is wasted for gaming. The DDR3 will be missed.

 

Nice result on the 1080 screen..

Anway the specs listed on the site are:

"NVIDIA® GeForce® 9600M GT with up to 23037 MB of TurboCache™ (512 MB of dedicated GDDR3 VRAM, up to 1791 MB of shared system memory), supporting NVIDIA® PureVideo™ HD technology, OpenEXR High Dynamic-Range (HDR) technology, Shader Model 4.0, Microsoft® DirectX® 10".

It is definitely listed as gddr3, so I'm unsure what to do...i'm also not that pleased with the screen, the vertical viewing angles are poor. I've just returned a Dell Studio 1555 for that exact reason, hoping another manufacturers screen might be better, perhaps I'm too picky

At the end of the day will the performance be much slower with the gddr2 1gb card?

 

Well the thing is.. the 1gb is useless on a gddr2 card, as it cannot access all of the memory.. so you effectively have a 512mb gddr2 card. Also, you will not be able to play games at the native res (1080p) on even medium settings, so you unless you watch a lot of high definition movies (altho i'm assuming it didnt come with a bluray drive?) its wasted. I would ask them for some kind of compensation.. maybe get them to give you some store credit, return the laptop and get a better one.

I was actually considering this laptop myself when i saw the specs at such a low price.. but like many things, if it sounds to good to be true.. it probably is.

Good luck with whatever you decide to do

Blazin

 

It also shipped with Vista 32bit, would any performance be gained in 64bit seeing as it has 4gb Ram?

 

It would only pick up an extra 0.5gb of ram, and unless you plan on running lots of 64bit applications that are programmed to make better use of resources (new versions of cubase etc) it probably won't be worth the hassle for day to day use.