Few quick questions for Z-series owners

I've looked all over these forums and haven't really seen the answers I was looking for so I thought I would start a thread. Questions:

1. What kind of performance issues have any of you seen in the two different Z-series notebooks, specifically with light gaming? I know the Z540 is a 128MB card and the Z590 is a 256MB 9300GS. I was curious if there was any real downside to the 128MB card?

2. Have any of you heard any rumors about when the new CTO Z-series will be available?

The reason I ask both is that I am looking at a newly released Z-series on Best Buy's website:

http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp?skuId=9171521&type=product&id=1218043604946

Basically looks like a Z540 CTO with good options. My overall goals with the machine are writing code, basic web stuff and of course, WoW.

WoW is my biggest concern with the 128MB card because I have had a 9300GS before and it was pretty poor in the implementation and playing WoW. I was curious if anyone had impressions on the way the 128MB card handles WoW now on the Z-series and if the machine above would work or if I would need to wait for the "newer" Z's to come out and get the larger RAM card.

Any pointers would be appreciated.

 

1. there is no downside to the 128mb card, in fact, the Z540 would probably have higher fps than the Z590 because of its lower resolution (the only reason they bumped the 128 to 256 is to handle the higher resolution)
2. new CTO will be out soon, probably on the 5th of feb

i believe that the newer Zs will have the 128 and 256 distributed the same way as they are right now, the 128 will go to the lower resolution and the 256 will go to the higher resolution

i don't understand why you had a poor experience with your 9300 GS, it should be more than enough to run WOW, perhaps it overheated in your old laptop, i've experienced this before on my m1210 (you won't experience this in the Z). my 7300 runs WOW fine, and 9300 is much better

 

The Z590 has a 1600x900 native resolution, or almost 40% more pixels on-screen than the Z540. This means it's going to be far slower than the Z540 at native resolution.
And running a LCD in anything but the native resolution (or power-of-two divides of the native resolution) is always going to look ugly -- blurred, and with interpolation and scaling artefacts.

The 128 MB vs 256 MB on-card GDDR3 RAM has an impact for games that use a relatively large amount of textures. A game that would use more memory than 128 MB for triple buffering plus textures would have to borrow system RAM for the rest of the textures. This is slower than the on-card RAM (and also reduces how much memory you'll have left).

But a Z540 running at 1366x768 is always going to faster than a Z590 running at 1600x900, despite the latter having more ram for textures.

Both are going to be slow for running modern games, unless you lower the resolution and live with the blurriness and scaling artefacts. I sure can't.

WoW is an older game, so it may be doable, but personally, I haven't found a single game that's playable in 1600x900 on a Z590 (P9500, 3GB RAM), even at the lowest possible quality settings.

If you intend to play 3D games, I strongly suggest you look for a machine with a lower native resolution and a stronger 3D card.

 

The Z540 has a 1366x768 display, and with 32 bits per pixel, it requires 4 MB of memory for the screen display. 12 MB for triple buffering.
The Z590 has a 1600x900 display, and with 32 bits per pixel, it requires 5.5 MB of memory for the screen display. 16.5 MB for triple buffering.

The difference of 4.5 MB for a triple-buffered display is negligible compared to the 128 MB of the Z540 -- the Z590 could have run just fine with 128 MB.

The Z590 has more texture memory because it's a "premium" machine, plain and simple. Not that it helps much -- the 40% difference in number of pixels is always going to make it slower for 3D, even with more texture memory available.

 

Thanks to both of you for the replies.

WoW is really the only gaming I plan to do on the thing, and I dont need it to run on maxed out settings, I just need it to be a playable frame rate. My other machine that had the 9300 was the HPdv3510nr from Best Buy. I was only able to get ~15-20fps on it unless I had everything turned off in WoW. I guess I was hoping that with the Z-series they have now and a faster HDD and CPU that it would alleviate some of the load the game adds on the system. I know WoW is a pretty HDD intensive game, so in theory, I should be right

 

i was actually going to ask if you had an HP, i just had a feeling because hp laptops don't cool properly and their components start to malfunction and slow down dramatically

i am pretty sure 9300 can handle WOW easily

i am excited for you! a jump from an hp to a Z is as big of a difference as it gets, you're going to love this laptop

 

Sure hope so, thats a lotta $$$ to drop on something. I guess I need to figure out if I wanna wait for the CTOs to change or just hit up Best Buy and get the new one now.