Suggestions?

Hey Everyone,

I have been following posts for about 6 months but finally decided to register and post one myself. First, I'll give a quick background on what I have, what I've seen and what I've heard may be in the future...then I'd love some opinions..

I own the Gateway P7811FX and I have to say, I really like it. The price-point to performance is amazing. The only real issue I've had with it, is losing my microphone use when updating to the latest bios. I'll figure it out, but for the life of me I can't find any options for bios on gateways site so that I can flash to an older one. Quite irritating. I've also seen the forums here months back but none of the links work for the posted bios files.

That said, I'ts been a year since I've purchased this thing and...well I rarely hold onto laptops for more than a year...But

In my past experience with desktops, you'd have to substantially upgrade to see a noticeable difference when it comes to gaming and I would assume the same rule applies here

I don't really see any benefit to the newer P78xx laptops over mine, since they dropped down to 1440 rez, but upped the dedicated video memory to 1gb. Seems like a trade off that I won't make. That is, I'd rather not lose my 1920rez and I don't see how going from 512 to 1gb is going to make much of a difference in my gaming and everyday use.

What are peoples opinions of soon-to-be-released laptops or ones that just hit?

I did find something called the Gateway P79 FX...with dual 260M GTX probably at 1GB each? I think the machine is also set to be a quad core.

http://www.cnet.com.au/gateway-p-79-fx_specs-339297764.htm

I can't really say if a dual setup like this would be noticeably better than my 9800M GTS...

Any ideas?

And finally (and yes, I have scoured these forums but I can't find a determination).... could I just plop a faster centrino or Xtreme chip onto my laptop and make its lifespan last a bit longer? It seem like our bios for this doesn't support Quad Core..so Maybe , and if it could, would it be worth tossing a t, u, or x series core 2 duo into the machine? Something tells me the pins wouldn't match up, but since I don't know I can't be sure. It does seem like a lot of effort has been spent trying to put a quad core onto this laptop...why not the core 2 extreme? or the core 2 duo t9550? or the useries? Are they just not compatible with the mobo and is the bios flat out unable to recognize them?

I don't really see how a P9500 is a huge upgrade over the P8400

I hope that I haven't missed some data already answered here, that this will open up some good discussion and thanks for your opinions!

 

The top two CPU's for you 7811 will be the x9100 and the t9900 (both will run at 3.06gHz)
Unfortunatly you cant run a quad in the 78xx series of FX.


As to the 79xx series... i think cnet has the specs wrong (if not i'll be ordering from OZ) because it should have a single 500gb hard drive and a single 260gtx in the laptop.

It will be a marked improvement over the 78xx series in general, but not something insane that would just blow your mind (unless the dual GPU set up is a truth for the OZ version)
The Quad core is nice though and can help alot in most applications that are multi-threaded. (and can be upgraded to the QX9300, though i'm not sure if it will allow an over clock or not)

 

I don't even really care about the hard drives, there isn't anything out in that arena that currently beats what I already own (2x 320gb 7200rpm low latency drives). I'm sure I could go find a 500gb drive but for now, 640gb is plenty of space and they are fast.

So you think that gpu setup would be a single and not a dual?

Hmm. Well it looks like I may just go up to an xtreme dual core. I'm gaming oriented..not using mya or 3dfx or anything like that. I bet the X9100 would beat teh Qx9300 since its got higher clock speeds (for gaming)

Thanks for your thoughts!

 

If you're buying the CPU for games, make sure that the games you have and/or plan to buy support quad core CPU's. Most of my (addmittedly older) games don't. Otherwise, clock speed would be the more important consideration.

 

Do any games out right now even support a Quad core?

I usually like to get a system thats as up to date as possible every 2 years, but then I play games that are 1-2 years old after I buy it.

In fact, I don't think I've bought a "new" game since I bought Quake II back in the day.

 

The only game that really uses it is probably GTA IV.

 

How do you like the T9800 in your machine? Did you upgrade that yourself?

The cheapest X9100 I can find is around 400-450. So its pretty steep. For some reason, I can't find individual parts to buy for a laptop on pricewatch anymore, even if I click on notebook/laptop.

Maybe I need to take a look at the T9800-T9900