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Quick Advice Wanted - Buying A Laptop


Mr Mike

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Can anyone quickly recommend a laptop for me? Essentially it's to carry on editing with the darkmod so must be comfortable running Blender, GIMP and obviously Doom 3. Other uses will also be to watch movies, so a decent sized screen would be nice, but the over riding factor is budget. It's a portable editing tool, so I don't want all the latest fancy crap if it isn't going to help me.

 

Cheers for any advice.

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I don't think I'd need a cutting edge laptop to run doom3 on, or maybe I'm wrong?

Don't forget, Doom 3 was pretty cutting edge only a couple of years ago. :) And laptops tend to lag behind desktops, especially the budget ones.

 

Laptops are renowned for having crap video cards. On that note, avoid integrated Intel video cards like the plague. They suck.

 

I would suspect that for Doom 3 you'd really need something from NVidia or ATI. Their laptop cards are special ones, so double-check to make sure that whatever video card the laptop has will work with Doom 3.

 

I just checked, and in my neck of the woods the cheapest laptops do not have decent graphics cards, even if their CPUs are adequate. You'll have to go up a few models for that.

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Whatever you do, don't buy from relatively unkown online retailers like Ibuypower or cyberpower.com, they have personally ripped me off bad, and their customer service is terrible.

 

It may be a little more expensive to buy from a retail store, but at least then you can actually talk to a person face to face, and not be told over the phone, once the laptop is in the company's possession for a minor repair, that the thing needs 600$ put into it because it "won't turn on."

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Well, after looking about it looks as though I'll have to lift my budget substantially, but then the 3D performance of laptops improves dramatically - geforce 7300 or ati 1600 etc and Intel core duo... will probably proove faster than my tower system!

 

A local dealer has some interesting Asus systems. anyone have experience of them as laptops?

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I've got an Asus notebook and it works very well.

 

Asus A6JA

Intel Core Duo 1,66 GHz

1 Gig RAM

ATI Mobility Radeon X1600

 

I can play doom3 (and NWN2,...) without any problems. (The only drawback is it's price...)

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No, I paid a little more (to be exact, my parents did, this was one of the best presents I got from them), it was about 1600 then.

 

I currently run Doom3 on High quality, but ultra quality works well too. Usually I get high enough FPS for fluent gameplay (I didn't with our bonehoard map at the beginning, but that was before we figured out what visportals and caulking was for... :D ).

 

One thing that is slow is testmap for example, because it fills and fills the RAM until it is 99% full...

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Okay I know this probably isn't for you, but I have an Inspiron 9400 from Dell. It's a $3000 laptop that I got for 1700 with coupon codes and sales stuff and free shipping and a free carying case.

 

It's got a core 2 duo, ddr2 ram, NVidia GeForce Go 7900 Gs (highest I think for the 9400) and quality components, and a gorgeous 1920x1200 17" screen.

 

It's way fast enough for Doom3 and I run the mode at 1920x1200 with 8xAF and everything maxxed out quality wise and it runs at 40-60 fps most of the time.

 

It's a nice laptop.

I always assumed I'd taste like boot leather.

 

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Okay I know this probably isn't for you, but I have an Inspiron 9400 from Dell. It's a $3000 laptop that I got for 1700 with coupon codes and sales stuff and free shipping and a free carying case.

 

It's got a core 2 duo, ddr2 ram, NVidia GeForce Go 7900 Gs (highest I think for the 9400) and quality components, and a gorgeous 1920x1200 17" screen.

 

It's way fast enough for Doom3 and I run the mode at 1920x1200 with 8xAF and everything maxxed out quality wise and it runs at 40-60 fps most of the time.

 

It's a nice laptop.

 

rofl :D sure sounds like a nice laptop... pretty bad its a dell though, i like mine Lenovo/IBM or Asus flavoured :D lol but then again i'd have to double the $$$ for the same laptop, good service though :D LOL

"Curiouser and Curiouser" cried Alice!"
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It sounds like you just simply have different priorities/needs than them. They want a portable desktop, you want a sleek and light laptop.

 

I have a somewhat heavy, wide, "desktop replacement" laptop myself, which I bring to work and back home every day in my backpack as I ride my motorcycle. I almost never use it unplugged. In fact I even have a separate power cable at work which I leave there, and one at home. I also use a regular full size mouse with a mousepad. I wouldn't have it any other way.

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It sounds like you just simply have different priorities/needs than them. They want a portable desktop, you want a sleek and light laptop.

 

I have a somewhat heavy, wide, "desktop replacement" laptop myself, which I bring to work and back home every day in my backpack as I ride my motorcycle. I almost never use it unplugged. In fact I even have a separate power cable at work which I leave there, and one at home. I also use a regular full size mouse with a mousepad. I wouldn't have it any other way.

 

Same here. I can't stand slow computers or ones with 15" screens or less. Minimum screen size for me would be 15".

I always assumed I'd taste like boot leather.

 

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I didn't want to make an entirely new thread for this, and I am by no means associated with NewEgg or any other business for that matter, but (while we're on the topic of computer hardware) I just felt it would almost be greedy of me not to show my fellow forum members this amazing deal on NewEgg I stumbled upon (well, it was more or less on the front page).

 

I know most here are cheap when it comes to buying new computer parts (as I am, especially with graphics cards), so when I saw the following offer I was siked. They have a Geforce 7600GT 256MB 128 bit GDDR3 PCI-E card for $80 with a rebate (down from $143). I've had the same card (actually, it's the same model, but it's a different brand--specifically mine is XFX) since early summer, and it runs today's latest games quite well (Any Source based games, RoboBlitz (Unreal Engine 3), Quake 4, Battlefield 2, ... ; I've run them all many times on this machine, even though I don't own many of them). I'm not sure how well this card will stand against games like Unreal Tournament 2007 (it will probably need to be run in low quality mode) in the Fall of 2007, but there aren't too many PC games I can think of coming out with such rediculous graphical detail. I know the card won't be capable of running Crysis (but whose computer will be able to run that anyways?), though.

 

Just figured I'd let you guys know. The rebate only lasts until the end of this month, so if you're at all interested, you have a limited time frame. Also, note that given the fact that this card is a different brand than mine, performance may be different than what I experience. You may want to do further research (or perhaps there are even better deals available at this time...I'm not really sure. I just figured it couldn't hurt showing you all this).

 

 

Oh, and here is the link to the card (almost forgot to post it...): http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?...N82E16814143049

 

(Did I just waste 5 minutes of my time to write all of this?)

Edited by woah
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