ultrasharp screen - graphics card - inspiron 6400

One of the options available at dell.com for the inspiron 6400 is to have an "ultrasharp" panoramic view screen of 1440x900 resolution. Instead of the 1280x800 screen.

Nevertheless, the graphics card options is fairly limited, since only the 256MB ATI® MOBILITY™ RADEON® X1400, PCI-Express x16 and the TurboCache™ Go 7300 de NVIDIA® GeForce™ de 256MB are available. I was thinking on getting the ATI model following the recommendations of most posts in another thread around here.

How can I know for sure that the graphic card will be able to handle this better screen and really make the most out of it? Or is this one of those consumer traps where you're upgrading for something with big numbers that really mean nothing at all?

I´ve been consulting this forum for a while now, you've got a great community here, great quality. Congrats for that. First post though.

 

The ATi card is really the only option. It's cheaper and faster than the 7300 (not sure why Dell prices it higher than the x1400) Any of the graphics options will be able to handle driving a WXGA+ resolution during normal office tasks (word, photoshop, etc) but it might be hard to game at native resolution. Don't worry too much though because most games are able to scale to a non-native resolution (and still look good). Screen preference is personal--I have owned a WXGA e1505 and a SXGA+ 14.1" T60. I can't imagine going back to a lower resolution screen; others may disagree though.

In summary:
1.) if you intend any gaming (and even if you don't), get the x1400.
2.) your should be concerned about how the higher resolution screen will treat your eyes rather than how games will treat it.

If i'm not making any sense let me know

Welcome!

 

The graphics card is more than enough for the screen, and it will be fine. If you want to play games, however, the resolution may be somewhat taxing for it, and the card itself is low end. The Mobility X1400 is still better than the Go 7300, but the difference is small, and to most people, it won't be noticible. Either way, pay less and get the Mobility X1400.

 

Thanks a lot. It does make sense after going through wikipedia a bit and reading about WSXGA+. When you mean that my eyes might be hurt you mean that the 1440x resolution might be a bit too much for a 15,4'' screen right? Like icons'll be too small I suppose. Since I can handle the budget for now I think I'll do it.

It seems to be a very uncommon aspect ratio. I hope that doesn't mean the image will be distorted.

I'll definitely get the ATI then. Thanks for that too.

I don't intend on gaming at all. But I want to be able watch nicely a couple of movies sometimes. My real priority is to have a machine that can put up with multitasking without giving me annoying delays. Like hearing some music while downloading on emule, while surfing the web with a couple or two of tabs opened, while chatting on the messenger, and having opened a couple of pdf files without it all collapsing. That's why I got the T5600 CPU and 2Gigs of RAM at 667Mhz.

Another question on that (I'm not really sure if I should post this in a new thread) can I run both OSs in paralel (as in, ubuntu and XP for instance) and just switch between them with a couple of buttons? or should I reboot everytime? As an example, I might want to have opened a VHDL tool on XP and swiftly change to linux to do some stuff on the console for a moment and then go back to XP.

 

If you want to switch between OSes in a flash, you're gonna need some sort of software based OS running, like Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 or VMWare. This way you can run an OS natively, and the other OS emulated thru those programs. Otherwise, as far as I know, you need to reboot to switch to another OS.

 

ok. thanks. I'll check them out.