Please help me decide which vaio to get: Ar51su or fz31z

Hi, Im in the process of selling my vaio ux1xn and am aiming to gat a vaio with a larger screen for office work and some gaming, im aware of the newer models coming out soon but i have to take the plunge now and the prices of these old models are good. The AR51SU ans FZ31Z are similarly priced on ebay (around £850). Which ever one i decide to get it will be primarily be used as a desktop replacement and rarely used for portability. My few queries are:

1. Does the FZ31Z 8600gs have ddr2 or ddr3?
2. Does the AR51SU 8600gt have DDR2 or DDR3?
3. Will hese laptops run Gears of war and UT3 well at decent detail ie medium high to high at 1280x800+?
4. Does having 4 gig of ram make a huge difference in vista, I haerd vista doesnt use more than 3 gb or something, is that true?

Thanks in advance.
JK

 

The 8600GT performs quite a lot better than 8600GS.
http://www.notebookcheck.net/Mobile-Graphics-Cards-Benchmark-List.844.0.html

Since you're not going to carry it around anyway the AR seems like the better choice.

 

Im leaning that way so far, but ive read somewhere that some cards have ddr3 memory which has a massive improvement in gaming....

 

if you're looking for gaming laptop, you should check Alienware laptops. They are considered as the best GAMING solutions.

 

GDDR3 does not have a massive improvement in gameing! This is a (very)common misconception. It would show improvement in performance in some situations but not in most!

In practical gaming the 8600m GT DDR2 will always show improved performance over the GDDR3 8600m GS. If you want to play games the you should definatly aim for the 8600m GT or above.

The 8600m GT will run those games as you stated and only a small portion above 3 GB of ram can be read by a 32 bit os.

 

Cheers for the info looks like im gonna go for the ar51su