Screen resolution and few other questions.

Hi.

Let's say a laptop has a screen with maximum resolution : 1200x800
It's specs are : T7250 [2Ghz] 2GB Ram and 8600M GT 512MB.

Now, you can play some games with really high settings when the resolution is 1200x800.


But if that laptop would have screen resolution 1440x900?

How much would that affect gaming with that laptop?
Do you have to reduce quality of the game (lower some settings) in order to play it with maximum resolution?

If yes - then wouldn't it be better to get the 1200x800 one, rather than the 1440x900?


[And some offtopic questions] :

* Will it do some nice gaming or is better to look for and high-end card?
* Will the proccessor be enough? Or is it better to get more powerful one?


Thank you and happy new year!

 

i dont think it would fit your screen
so it would not be better in games

 

Upgrade the processor to the T7300 with more L2 cache.

 

I think the original poster was referring to 1280x800, which along with 1440x900 both have a 16:10 aspect ratio.

Akuma - Yes, because of the higher resolution framerates will drop when moving from WXGA to WXGA+. However, I don't think it'll be a problem lowering from 1440x900 to 1280x800 in-game, Nvidia does a pretty good job scaling resolutions. Also, your processor is good enough.

 

You have to get the T7500 now, Intel stopped providing the T7300 for some reason.

 

First of all, increasing the resolution in a game will give you either a drop in fps (frames per second - smoothness of play) at the same settings or similar fps at lower settings.

To use Bioshock a an example, an Nvidia 8600M GT 512MB GDDR2 will get between 15 and 35 fps at Highest settings at 1280*800 resolution, most people probably have settings bewteen medium and high and get 20-40 fps, it depends on how you like your game set up. If you were to have the same laptop with 1440*900 resolution, to get the same fps you would have to turn that down to probably all medium. With 1680*1050 you would have to have it on medium-low.

To answer your other two questions:

The 8600M GT is mid-range for current laptop graphics. It'll play most games released before 2005 at maximum settings on most resolutions. It'll handle advanced new games like Bioshock well, good fps at medium-high at 1280*800 and Crysis on low-medium at 1280*800. It really depends on what games you want to play. If you want to play the latest and greatest games like FEAR, Bioshock, Oblivion and Crysis it'l handle them ok, very playable but not the best. If you play a lot of mmorpgs, older games etc. it should be more than enough.

The T7250 is a good sweet spot for games, having a highish clock speed and high FSB speed. If you intend on playing reasonably demanding games I'd go for at least the T7250. If you wanted to upgrade above that, the T7500 would be the next cpu worth upgrading to, but it's certainly not essential. The T7250 will handle most things very very well.

Note: If you are buying a gaming system you should probably aim to have 2GB ram or more, 2GB is about right for most games. Hope this helps.

 

Wow, alright people!

Thank very much, now I can't wait to get the computer .. it'll be two days from now.

I'll take then the 1200x800 screen one, and I'm glad I can play Oblivion and some Bioshock.

Thanks again!