How much ram / processor reqd for gaming

I was looking at best buy and they have this: http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage...t&productCategoryId=cat15107&id=1158317339247

This is with

(1)Intel 1.66Ghz 2Gb ram and 256 7600Go

I want to compare it to CTO i did:

2) Intel 1.83Ghz 1Gb Ram - 256 7600 Go

3) Intel 1.83Ghz 1Gb Ram - 512 7600 Go

4) AMD 1.8Ghz 1Gb Ram 256 7600Go

How much performance variation could there between the 4 models?

 

1,2, and three will give comparable performance. 4 will not be quite as good, the core duo and core 2 duo processors are superior to AMD at the moment.

having a lot of system RAM is also important, 1gig+ should help. I see that the one you have linked to has 2 gigabytes-that will be great for gaming.

If you need a more powerful gpu-consider the e1705 with a 7900gs.

The x1600/7600 is the most powerful chip you can get in a 15.4 inch at the moment, if you are set on having a a 17 inch you can get a little more power.

 

Well, here' what I can tell you:

1) 2GB of RAM will help a lot with modern games.
2) The 7600Go is only powerful enough to effectively use 256MB of RAM. As long as the 256MB is not 128 ded/128 shared you'll be fine. If it is 50/50 you might want the 512 version. However, NVIDIAs turbocache works a lot better than ATIs HyperMemory...so the degredation in performance would not be as great.
3) The processor doesn't matter as much in games any more. The Core 2 is better than the AMD anyway, but the 1.66 would probably be fine. The only thing I don't know about is the 2MB L2 Cache...the T7200 (2.0) is the first one with 4MB and I don't know how much better it is with respect to gaming.

 

Looks like a fairly good deal there at Best Buy actually. Pretty much your gaming is not going to be restricted by any of the CPU's that you have listed there including the one at Best Buy. All of them have the 7600 so you would have basically the same performance on all of them. I don't think people have noticed much difference between the 256 version versus the 512 version. Check out this thread for information on the 7600:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=74146

Good luck and happy computing!

 

lappyhappy is right...

 

You actually wouldn't notice much / any difference between the 1.6Ghz Core Duo and the 1.8Ghz Turion X2 (I assume you mean X2), fyi. The difference in clock speed essentially erases most architecture-related inequalities, and the Turion actually performs better in certain benchmarks. The Core Duo gets a little bit better battery life.

Option 3 would be best for gaming, I would think. As long as you're not running a lot of programs in the background while gaming, the difference between 1GB and 2GB is significantly less than the differences in RAM between 128MB and 1GB.

Edit: Wait, these are Core 2 Duos? Better even than the Core Duo,