Performance Bottleneck Question-Help Please!

HI,

I am looking at Alienware in two configurations (m9750)

1. Intel t5550, dual 7950GTX 512 mb each, 1 gb ram, 80gb hd, XP

2. Intel t7200, one 512mb8700gt, 2gb, 80gb hd, vista home premium

The only thing i would consider upgrading in year or two would be ram. I do not care about HD space. My main question: WIll the first configuration processor and graphics bottleneck or lose performance? I am worried as t5500 is lower end chip but dual graphics are really powerful. Also, 1gb worries me. Do you think bottleneck will really happend with my first configuration?
Will games really suffer? Is second configuration better choice? Both around same price with warranty-need help! Any info will help!

I am looking for it to last for a few years with only RAM upgrade in year or two... overall which config is better? I do not need high fps, screen resolution or benchmarks-just a lasting system that can play game such as oblivion, cyrsis, hl2, COD4, etc on high settins. My main wory is 8700gt 128bit bus-it has been described as hurting gamin a lot. I could care less about DX10-really, when will a lot of true DX10 games come out! Please help-i may purchase soon and want to make right decision-no resotcking fees for return!!!

 

How about getting a T7200 + dual 8700M + 1GB + XP? I have Vista running on 1GB of RAM and games perform almost the same. My problem is the video card, which sucks. Why not buy the RAM afterwards?

 

the dual 8700 are more money than dual 7950s or single 87000-need vista for any 8700 config only xp for 7950 config

 

Also note that the RAM is the least important as far as future-proofing goes, as it is the most easily upgradeable.

 

Ram is easily upgradeable, but 2GB of ram is really the minimum for most of today's more advanced games.

Today's games seem to generally be more dependant on graphics power than cpu, that said Supremem Commander requires shedloads of cpu power. I'd probably take the T7200 and 8700M GT and then upgrade my ram myself. If you can get 1x1GB and upgrade to 2GB yourself I would as companies like Alienware markup ram upgrades to way beyond market price.

 

For an Intel notebok DDR2-800 RAM is completely useless, because the Santa Rosa platform only supports DDR2-667. The only chipsets that support DDR2-800 are AMD ones. DDR2-800 SODIMMs are likely going to offer no future-proofing as well, since Intel's next Montevina platform is going directly to DDR3-800 and there is no plans to ever support DDR2-800 SODIMMs. Secondly, holding out for 4GB SODIMMs is likely also a waste of time since I'm pretty sure mobile chipsets physically have no support for memory above 4GB regardless of running a 64-bit OS.

Of the two Alienware notebooks, I would think that number 1 is the better option since the performance difference between the T7550 and the T7200 isn't that huge. The 167Mhz difference in clock speed is irrelevent, the only niggling concern is that the T7550 only has 2MB of L2 cache, but that isn't enough to make the T7200 heads above the T7550. Dual 7950GTXs will obviously completely outclass a single 8700GT. My main concern with notebook 1 is that it only has 1GB of RAM. That amount is definitely the bottleneck rather than the CPU. Thankfully, RAM is easy to upgrade later. My other concern is the 80GB HDD. I'm not sure how much space you need, but I have a 160GB HDD and I definitely feel limited. Plus higher capacity drives have higher density platters, and are likely newer and come with bigger caches. It doesn't really affect gaming other than loading speed, but a faster hard drive does increase overall system responsiveness, which is subjective since it's what you perceive, but it's something to consider.

 

He's here to sell man . Right about the mobile chipsets, but the D901C (Clevo) has a desktop chipset . T7250 has 2MB of cache. I don't see a T7550.