New laptop: 7900GS vs. 7600

I'm looking at a dell and an HP laptops. The dell has a nicer video card the 7900GS. However the HP has twice as much ram, a bigger hard drive, DVD burner, and bluetooth all for around roughly the same price. My budget is between $1000-1300.

Anyways to the point. Is the performance of the 7600 terrible? I don't care about playing games at MAX settings, but I'd still like to play some newer games. But at the same time... a video card isn't upgradable. Where as ram and bluetooth and even hard drives are addable. Any suggestions?

Also if it matters the 7900GS is 256MB of memory, where as the 7600 could have 256 or 512.

 

Well, the 7900 is much more powerful than the 7600, but the 7600 can handle new games, just not at max settings. Maybe medium range graphics.

My opinion is to get the Dell if you really care for games, but the HP is better for other activities due to more RAM and bigger hard drive.

 

Well, the 7600 isn't a terrible GPU, but it's no 7900GS. And you're right, the GPU is not upgradeable at all, so that's something to consider. A good question would be to know how long you want the laptop to last. While you'll be able to run a few, but not all games at max with the 7600 right now, in a year and a half, the 7900GS will be struggling to play games at max, so a 7600 will be stuck with low-medium settings. Also consider that your GPU will usually be the limiting factor in a game.

It also would be nice to know the specs of the two machines you're comparing.

 

Well I do need it for more then games. I do alot of graphic web work. So the ram is essential. I mainly need the laptop to last for that kind of things. I still have my desktop to play games on as well. So thanks for the input. I'm probably gonna go with the HP and 7600.

 

You might want to check out the Toshiba A130/A135 custom on their website and it comes with the 7600 go also. I looked at HP, Dell, and Toshiba and went with the Toshiba. They should all be great machines though.

 

http://www.gpureview.com/show_cards.php?card1=394&card2=409

Take a look at the comparisons. The 7600 isnt bad for gaming, but the 7900GS is just too teriffic in performance compared to the 7600.

Here's my slighty, conservative overclocked 7900GS:

Manufacturer: nVidia
Series: GeForce 7
GPU: G71M
Release Date: 2006-04-18
Interface: PCI-E x16
Core Clock: 480 MHz
Memory Clock: 550 MHz (1100 DDR)
Memory Bandwidth: 35.2 GB/sec
Shader Operations: 9600 Operations/sec
Pixel Fill Rate: 7680 MPixels/sec
Texture Fill Rate: 7680 MTexels/sec
Vertex Operations: 840 MVertices/sec

And here's the 7600:

Manufacturer: nVidia
Series: GeForce 7
GPU: G73M
Release Date: 2006-01-05
Interface: PCI-E x16
Core Clock: 450 MHz
Memory Clock: 500 MHz (1000 DDR)
Memory Bandwidth: 16 GB/sec
Shader Operations: 3600 Operations/sec
Pixel Fill Rate: 3600 MPixels/sec
Texture Fill Rate: 3600 MTexels/sec
Vertex Operations: 562.5 MVertices/sec


If you want gaming, the 7900GS is the way to go.

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I'm planning to buy the HP DV9220US this weekend and this comes with the 7600 512MB card with it. I plan to even out my workload on this laptop with watching and ripping video/ surf the net/ use it as a test bed for my company network/ and play games. I do play games alot but I have a better PC so I don't need a kill laptop right now.

Here are this specs:

Core 2 Duo 1.6GHz
2GB of DDR2 memory
160GB hard drive
NVIDIA GeForce™ Go 7600 256MB dedicated video memory
Windows Vista Home Premium

 

Whether the GeForce Go7600 has 256MB or 512MB of dedicated memory makes no difference; the card can make use of 256MB of memory, but just isn't powerful to take advantage of an additional 256MB. Check the FAQ section of the GPU Guide for information on why. I put an analogy in there about video memory and why having more isn't always effective.

With the Go7600, you'll be able to play all the latest games with no problem. The Go7900GS can obviously do that too, but at a much higher level of graphical intensity.

Let us know how your purchase goes.

 

My thoughts are that if you're planning on getting a 17", you might as well go for the 7900GS. If you're going to settle for the 7600, you might as well get a smaller laptop like a 14" or a 15.4". Not to mention, you will save a load of money buying some RAM separately. I just bought a 1GB stick of RAM from Newegg for $75, meaning you could get 2GB for about $150. I don't know what HP charges, but Dell will charge you about $250 or more for 2GB, so I can't imagine HP would be much better. But just my opinion, not telling you what to do.