Help Me Choose

Hello
I am going away to college in the fall and wish to get a laptop relatively soon. I plan on using it to watch dvds, play games (HL, Far Cray, UT,e tc), surf the net, word processors, etc.
After researching on the net and reading through many such forums, I have narrowed my search down to two potentials. Both are approximated $2200 and are both equipped with 1gb ram, 60gb 7200rpm, 128mb 9600pro, xtra batter, xp pro. The first one being the Battalion 101 SL-Series (ibuypower.com) equipped with amd mobile 3400+ processor. The other option is the sager 5690 equipped with pentium 4 3.2ghz.

Input is welcome.

 

I'd lean toward the Sager just because I feel their quality is better, though their support has been getting knocked lately. I don't haver personal experience with ibuypower, though I think a few others have bought or at least considered buying from them.

Editor in Chief http://www.bargainPDA.com and http://www.SPOTstop.com

 

The 5690 should have a Radeon 9700 graphics card, which would give you a significant boost in gaming performance.

If you're really interested in AMD64, the Ferrari 3200 has the AMD64-M 2800 chip with a 9700.

-Joshua

 

I second the Ferrari 3200 recommendation. Wish I had one [ ]. You'll want to swap out the 4200RPM drive for a 60GB Hitachi 7200RPM drive, and swap the pair of 256MB SODIMMs for 512MB's, but the notebook has everything else (including gigabit Ethernet, 802.11g, Bluetooth). While the CPU is a bit slower it's fast enough, it's the best of the low-voltage models ([email protected] core, versus [email protected] for the 3400+), and the better graphics chip more than compensates. mwave.com has the F3200 and Hitachi drives, get a pair of Crucial 512MB PC2700 SODIMMs with Micron chips from newegg.com (be careful not to get the ones with non-Micron chips, see the pictures).

 

The 3400+ is much faster than the 3.2 ghz pentium 4, I would definitely lean in that direction. It is even faster than the 3.4 ghz EE pentium 4, which costs about $500 more. I don't know about the quality of either of the two companies, but the athlon64 is a much better value. The overall configuration is a great bargain, better than I usually find at Dell.

Dell 8600
1.8 dothan SXGA+
128mb radeon 9600PRO TURBO
512mb RAM

 

But the 3400 machine he is looking at has a Radeon 9 600. That will have a much more detrimental effect on gaming than CPU speed.

-Joshua

 

Touche. The 9600 pro turbo runs at 337/242 mhz while the 9700 (equivalent of the 9600XT desktop) runs at 450/253, a huge difference. thanks for pointing that out, the 5690 is a buy.

 

With Omega Drivers for ATI, you can bump the chip speed up significantly (<450MHz, give or take). Also realize that, with the money you save going with the FASTER Athlon 64 chip, you can buy that 7200RPM hard drive and a 1gb stick of memory.

With that kind of hardware (at the same end price), any graphics difference will be negligible.

 

Whoa, forget about the speed bumping. I tried it myself, and It only went to 370 before it crashed completely (4 mhz incriments) that's 80mhz shy of the 9700, and it became terribly hot and unstable. There is no way it would match the 9700. The 9700 is about 25% faster in actual performance.

 

Some machines overclock easier than others (overall heat dissipation, for example...a 3.4gHz p4EE is going to heat the entire contents of a laptop case a lot more than, say, a mobile Athlon 64 3000+). Some folks with a mobile Athlon 64 processor and Radeon 9600 have been reporting numbers in the 400mhz range.

The motherboard must also be looked at. I have noticed with desktop machines that the better the motherboard, the more overclocking that can be done on all processors.

(Just as a side note, I still think that Intel should have swallowed its pride and worked in a way to make a mobile chip with 64-bit extensions. It would have been nice to see the new Dothans, which run at the same clock speeds as the mid-range Athlon 64's, go head to head when 64-bit Windows and applications come out. It might have put the kibosh on AMD (even though I happen to love their chips). I mean, they already stole the technology from AMD (http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1558,1561875,00.asp), why not use it?)

 

<blockquote id='quote'> quote:<hr height='1' noshade id='quote'>Originally posted by ReverendDC

 

<blockquote id='quote'> quote:<hr height='1' noshade id='quote'>Originally posted by Andrew