notebook to desktop gaming comparison

Hey all - I'm thinking of moving from gaming on my laptop to my desktop and wondered how you think my performace may be when comparing my laptop to desktop. (Feel free to skip to the bottom if you don't want the detail)

I'm not huge into gaming, but still enjoy WoW and I play at high resolution so it actually taxes a video card a fair bit at 1900x1200. That's about the only graphically demanding game I play. My old Gateway NX860XL (17" WUXGA [1900x1200], C2Duo T5500 [1.66 GHz], Nvidia Go 7900GS [256MB, 256-bit memory interface, 20 PSUs, 7 vertex units, 12 ROPs, 375 MHz Core, 500MHz memory], 2 Gig DDR2 667Mhz RAM) did fine gaming at 1900x1200 with all settings maxed for WoW:BC, but when WoW:WoLK came out they allowed us to extend the draw distance and they added shadows and now I can't max all the details anymore. Time to upgrade.

Where before I'd be raiding along at 40-50 FPS, now I'm finding myself at 30-40 FPS with the draw distance maxed (no problem - still very playable and looks great). But I have to keep shadows turned off completly or I quickly drop into 20-30 FPS with moderate shadows, and down to 15-20 FPS if I max out shadow detail. While obviously WoW isn't that demanding a game if I can almost max every detail and still get good perfomace at 1900x1200 on a 3 year old laptop - I'd like to do better.

Upgrading the laptop CPU probably won't help much (if any), and of course there's no option to upgrade the video card. So that would leave me looking for a new laptop, but that's kinda a spendy option. Then I realized I have my old desktop (Home built Intel C2Duo 6300 [1.86 GHz], 2Gig DDR2 800 MHz RAM, Intigrated Intel x3000 graphics ) floating around and now that I'm not on the road anymore I don't really need to have my laptop as my primary gaming computer. I figured it be much easier/cheaper to upgrade the desktop.

I found a nice 28" WUXGA (1900x1200) monitor for $300 at TigerDirect (Happy Cyber Monday everyone) to replace my old 19" WXGA+ (1440x900) monitor and then stumbled across a referb Nvidia GeForce 9600 GSO (384MB, 192-bit memory interface, 96 stream processors, Core clock 550MHz, Memory Clock 800MHz - basically a rebadged 8800 GS) on Newegg for $60 to replace the intgrated Intel x3000 graphics. Add in a few cables and I'm thinking that for under $400 I should be ready to go. My 9600 GSO arrived this morning and dropped right in. I'm still using my 19" WXGA+ monitor so the resolution is terrible, but the FPS are through the roof with every detail maxed again (even shadows ). I won't have my 28" WUXGA monitor until Christmas (had to justify it to the wife somehow ) so I don't have a true comparison yet. But I wanted to get some 2nd opinions.

So after all that - here's my questions:

How's a desktop 9600 GSO compare to an laptop Go 7900 GS?
Did I skimp too much on my new video card?
Will my old C2D 6300 become my bottleneck?
Anyone have some sort of unreleased mobile ATI 4870's that will be a drop in replacement for my 3-year old laptop, and they're willing to sell em cheap? (hey - can't hurt to ask )

 

yea i think you skimped a bit on that card, 50 or 60 more will get you a much better card, like an hd 4830 or 9800gt

 

My friend plays WoW:WOTLK on an 8800GT at 1920x1080 maxed. I would have gone for the 9800GT as mentioned above. In Canada you can get them for about $120 on sale. I am sure newegg or TD in the US will have a better price.

 

If you can overclock your E6300 to 2.3GHz, then it shouldn't be a bottleneck. One of my systems runs an 8800GT with an E6320, at stock CPU clocks, the CPU does bottleneck it in alot of games, but at 2.3GHz there's no longer a bottleneck in any game. If your motherboard is capable, overclock the CPU, on the stock intel fansink you should be able to raise the FSB to atleast 1333Mhz with no issues. Your 9600GSO is probebly more than 3x faster than the go 7900GS, but this part I'm not sure about.

 

Hmm - thanks all. Well, I'll give it a few months then look at a new video card again (assuming frame rates aren't everything I want them to be). Hopefully the 4850's will come under $100 in 2009.

I was just searching some more and stumbled across a site called GPUreview.com - never heard of em before, but they do allow you to do a direct mobile to desktop GPU comparison which is nice. Here's what they have to say:

nVidia GeForce Go 7900 GS
Manufacturer: nVidia
Series: GeForce 7
GPU: G71M
Release Date: 2006-04-18
Interface: PCI-E x16
Core Clock: 375 MHz
Memory Clock: 500 MHz (1000 DDR)
Memory Bandwidth: 32 GB/sec
Shader Operations: 7500 MOperations/sec
Pixel Fill Rate: 6000 MPixels/sec
Texture Fill Rate: 6000 MTexels/sec
Vertex Operations: 656.25 MVertices/sec
Noise Level: ?
Framebuffer: 512 MB
Memory Type: GDDR3
Memory Bus Type: 64x4 (256 bit)
DirectX Compliance: 9.0c
OpenGL Compliance: 2.0
PS/VS Version: 3.0/3.0
Process: 90 nm
Fragment Pipelines: 20 (24)
Vertex Pipelines: 7 (8)
Texture Units: 16 (24)
Raster Operators 16

nVidia GeForce 9600 GSO
Manufacturer: nVidia
Series: GeForce 9
GPU: G92
Release Date: 2008-04-28
Interface: PCI-E 2.0 x16
Core Clock: 550 MHz
Shader Clock: 1375 MHz
Memory Clock: 800 MHz (1600 DDR)
Memory Bandwidth: 38.4 GB/sec
FLOPS: 264 GFLOPS
Pixel Fill Rate: 6600 MPixels/sec
Texture Fill Rate: 26400 MTexels/sec
Noise Level: Moderate
Framebuffer: 192,384,768,1024,1536 MB
Memory Type: GDDR3
Memory Bus Type: 192 (192 bit)
DirectX Compliance: 10.0
OpenGL Compliance: 2.1
PS/VS Version: 4.0/4.0
Process: 65 nm
Shader Processors: 96 (128)
Pipeline Layout: Scalar MADD+MUL
Texture Units: 48 (64)
Raster Operators 12 (16)

I'd been afraid that with a 192-bit memory interface the 9600 GSO could be too crippled, but it looks like it does pull slightly better memory bandwidth than the Go 7900 GS. Looking across that stats everything is pretty similar except texture - the 9600 GSO wins hands down there. Here's hoping that's where my WoW bottleneck was , but most likely I'll be a little better off with my desktop vs the laptop, but I'll still have to keep shadows turned way down.

Little disappointing I guess, but this just goes to speak to the power of the old 7900 GS -all this and it did it with only 20 watts of power too.

@555525 yeah - I was thinking about a moderate OC on my E6300. I ran it up to 2.4 GHz shortly after I picked it up (couldn't quite get to 2.5 with the stock HS & fan), but then I never really saw a point in keeping it OC'd as I only used the desktop for file storage so I dropped back to stock. I'll do some FRAPS checking at stock speeds and then again with a moderate overclock and see if that helps. I may look into OC'ing the GPU too - never done that, but should be simple enough. Hey - if I fry my GPU that should be all the justification I need to get a better one, right?

Thanks all for the help

 

You kinda did skimp on the GPU. The 9800 GT can be found for $90. With that, you could truly max out WoW and get 60+ FPS all the time.

The 192-bit memory interface doesn't matter much. What matters is the memory bandwidth. Even though the 9600 GSO has a 192-bit interface, the clock is 800MHz compared to 500MHz of the 7900M GS.

 

Ya 7900GS was awesome. I loved mine and it overclocked like crazy! I replaced it with an 8800GT, another wicked card for the price. Nothing worth upgrading to unless I want to spend $300+. nVidia FTW!

 

Actually the main improvement of the 8800GS over your 7900GS is the use of unified shaders. Your old card had.. (16?) pixel shader pipelines. and (8?) vertex shader pipelines. The 8800GS/9600GSO has 96 unified shaders (or nVidia "cores") which can act as either a vertex or pixel shader pipeline when needed.

I really don't think that for WoW, you'll need more than the 9600GSO, but if you want to be on the safe side, or it's just not cutting it, an 8800GT/9800GT or HD 4830 would be a great choice.

 

Keep the 9600 GSO until you want to run something that justifies an upgrade.

I think it matches up quite nicely with a moderately overclocked E6300.

 

LOL unkown, ONE OF YOU SYSTEMS.

Sounds like your are bawlin in the gaming PC department.

Just had to post that here.

 

You could overclock your GPU and upgrade your CPU & RAM to get an extra 20fps or so.

Save $$$.

 

I don't get it, I only have 2 gaming desktops, my crossfire one in sig, and one I built with an e6320+8800GT mainly for guests. It's great for converting console gamers.

How would that save money? A better CPU would cost upwards of $160 USD, ram would be $24 per 2gb stick, while returning that GPU and buying one much better would cost alot less..

 

The CPU and RAM upgrade is optional. I mean 2gb RAM to 4gb is always welcome upgrade for any notebook.

A mild OC should be able to increase 10-15fps in WoW

 

i Just meant that it cool that you have 2 high end systems thats all. I should do something like that too since im TIRED of console gamers thinking there systems are superior to a gaming PC.

Most console gamers i have spoken to about PC gaming think its the dumbest thing in the world.

So making a cheap 9800 gt system sounds like a good idea.