Buying a new laptop

Tech Talk
#1

Greeting all,

So I’m looking to buy a new laptop. Currently I have a Dell 8600. I also have a pretty decent gaming PC. Athlon XP 2800+, GeForce 6800 Ultra, etc. As some of you may have noticed in the trading outlet. I’m selling all this stuff in hopes of putting some money towards a new laptop. The rest of the money I’ll get from my job at Outback Steakhouse.

I used to play WoW hardcore but have since retired. Basically I’m just looking for something to play some CS, the new Command and Conquer, WC3, and some sorta hack and slash (Dungeon Siege 2) on.

I’m not big into rediculous sized screens so 15.4 inches will probably work for me. After customizing an Inspiron vs an XPS system, the XPS costs about twice as much. In return though I’d be getting a 512MB GeForce 7950 vs some crappy go card.

I’m just wondering what people’s opinions are on getting an XPS style system versus something more standard. Does anyone know exactly what a “go” card is? I’ve been building my own computers pretty much all my life, but when it comes to laptop stuff it’s a bit more confusing. Any help would be appreciated.

#2

I can offer a bit of advice here. Owning a gaming PC and a more standard laptop mostly for class, I can say that you’re gonna want something a bit more tricked out than that if you’re gonna be gaming on it. The XPS from what I’ve heard are pretty decent machines, so it likely wouldn’t be a bad move. Not to mention having a 7950 (GTX I’d assume, since it’s got 512 MB GDDR3).

The Go 7 series cards are low power (Both in the required to operate sense and clock speeds) versions of the 7 series nVidia cards Not bad in any sense really, but not quite high end pieces of equipment.

The thing is though, every game you mentioned besides the new C&C game don’t really require top tier stuff to run at nice settings. Having not gotten a chance to play that game though (Nor have I read up much on it), I can only speculate that it’s gonna be far more CPU intensive than GPU intensive (As is generally the case in RTS games). As such, You might be perfectly fine with a more standard laptop running a GeForce Go 7600 with a decent processor (Core 2 or a nice Turion).

Hopefully that helps. Best of luck getting what you actually want here. Computer stuff is such a pain in the ass to shop for right now (And with laptops you’re always stuck with high costs).