X600 Vs. X700

I'm trying to decide if I want to get a DV4000 or a ZD8000. I primarily want it for gamming. The major differences for me being the 8000 has a 7200rpm HD and a X600 graphics card, the 4000 has a 5400rpm HD and a X700 graphics card. One of the major bottlenecks for gamming on a laptop can be the hard drive speed, so I am concerned about that, but is the X700 that much better than the X600 or should I go for the faster HD?

-Morgan

 

Hard drive can be upgraded, the video card cannot. Hard drives affect load times for games, not much else.

 

Graphics card is a bottleneck for gaming. HD is probably the last thing you should worry about in gaming. Graphics, Mem, CPU, screen, mouse, sandwiches, drink and then HD I'd say. Ok don't take it too serious, but I would take x700 for sure.

Cheers,

 

It sounds like what you really want is a MSI MS-1036. Better CPU, 256MB X700 GPU, 17" screen, lighter and way better battery life than the zd8000. I'd say get the dv8000z but HP refuses to offer a decent GPU with it. See the MSI forum on this site.

IIRC, the X700 is about twice as fast as the X600? Major improvement anyhow.

 

If you had to pick one of the two, get the DV4000 for sure, the X700 is quite faster than the X600 and don't worry too much about the hard drive, besides, you can upgrade that but not the video card.

 

Though in general, if you have a 4200RPM HDD like I do, you would rather upgrade that first because that just about affects everything, not just gaming. More RAM is good, but a slow HDD will kill any system since you need to load from it sometime, especially for crazy games that need 1GB+ to lay extremely smoothly.

 

Yeah, for RAM I was going to get 2gigs at Outpost. Does anyone know if the ram in that link will work in a DV4000? If so ram shouldnt be an issue. My question was mainly about the difference between an X600 and an X700. Anyone know what the difference is or if it really is a 2X better difference? And thanks for the responses already too!

-Morgan

 

1) The zd8000 weighs about 8.9 pounds and only gets a meager 1 1/2 hours on battery. The dv4000 is only 6.5 pounds and can get upto 6 hours of battery life(with the 12-cell battery).

2) An x700 is always better than an x600 in gaming regardless of HDD speed.

3) Hard drive speeds do not matter AFTER a game has been loaded. That is where you are going to be spending most of your time, right?

4) A hard drive can be upgraded, a video card cannot.

5) A 7200RPM HDD is only truly useful when doing video editing and other tasks that require large amounts of data. Sure a 5400RPM HDD will be slower than a 7200RPM HDD, but since your are considering getting 2GB of RAM, it's only going to load once. The cost is not worth the performance in my opinion.

 

Hi dagamer34

I totally agree. I can see you already have x700 and hd is probably first on the list for upgrade. Your last post actually covers most of the general ideas and 4) is I guess true for notebooks mentioned here. I'd like to point out that there are also notebooks with mxm and axiom gpu cards that can be easily upgraded. One of them is my Prestigio built on uniwill 259ea1 barebone. It actually can accept even mxm type II cards. And 2GB ram with 5400 hd is in my opinion a better solution than any 7200 with 1GB or less ram. You pointed out that well.

Cheers,

 

I believe the X600 that is being described is 256mb where the X700 is 125mb...but you guys still think the X700 is better? Also, speaking of cards...I see on the various threads that the 200M is being stated as 125mb dedicated, and some share it's shared...anybody have the scope on what it really is? Also, the HP website says it 125mb dedicated with another 125mb of shared...what do I change to achieve that? Thanks.