T61 vs T61p battery life, noise, heat?

Hello all,

I just bought a T61p WUXGA with 256mb GPU and am returning it for a variety of reasons. I'm waning between exchanging it for a T61 WSXGA+ with 128mb GPU and T61p WSXGA+ with 256mb.

I was wondering if the battery life difference would be noticeable? Also, do you think that the noise and heat from the 256mb GPU be noticeably more?

I don't do enough gaming to NEED a 256MB GPU but am kind of drawn to it for the simple fact that it's more future proof than a 128MB GPU. But if the battery life, noise and heat are more significant with a bigger RAM GPU than I'd rather just get the T61.

I know it's somewhat subjective and difficult to ascertain unless you have both units, but I'm curious what your opinions are.

Thanks very much

 

obviously, the T61 will run hotter and use more battery life
i'd guess maybe 10-15% less battery life, and 20-25% hotter

 

you mean the t61p?

 

The T61 with the Quadro NVS 140M is going to run cooler because of the slower graphics card, ram doesn't have to much to do with how hot the graphics card gets. As for how much cooler, you'll need to ask around or find a head to head comparison.

Ram is there to keep the system from caching textures into the system ram. It may have a performance impact when running higher resolution textures but the gpu is doing most of the heavy lifting.

As for if you need the faster gpu, it depends what you run and how demanding the apps you are using.