New Laptop for the Div: HELP!!!

[Divinus Arma]

Okay, first of all I am certainly buying a Dell Notebook. I cannot get the value that I desie with any other brand. I just get more for my money especially since a relative of mine can get me a 10% discount off the top.

I am pretty solid on the Inspiron E1505 with the followng minimum Specs:

Processor: Core 2 Duo T7200 4MB Cache/2.0 GHz
Video Card: 256MB ATI Mobility Radeon X1400 Hyper memory
RAM: 2GB DDR2 SDRAM 533MHZ
Hard Drive: 120GB 5400 RPM

I am also looking at the XPS M1210 which has the following incrases;
Video Card: 256MB Nvidia GeForce GO 7400 Turbo Cache
RAM: 2GB DDR2 SDRAM 667 MHz

I just can't see why these increases will cost me an extra $600 or so.

Is the 256MB Radeon x1400 a decent enough card? should be good for M2TW and RTW modding, right? And is the increase in MHz worthwhile for the RAM?

[Papewaio]

Is the video card dedicated memory or partially shared with the system?

[Divinus Arma]

Is the video card dedicated memory or partially shared with the system?

I dunno. How do I find that out?

[Papewaio]

Looking at their website (the aus version) it seems that video cards are not easy to upgrade on a laptop and they are cagey about the details.

Essentially if you can avoid intergrated graphics.

The other option is go for a cheap laptop and put the rest aside for a PC... PCs you get twice the bang for your buck... but you do lose mobility, and if you are always on the move/away from home for long periods then a laptop is the way to go.

[Sigurd]

I am pretty sure the graphic card has dedicated memory...
I have a DELL Precision M65 with a nVidia Quadro FX card and it has dedicated memory (256MB) in addition it 'lends' 256 more from the system memory gaining a total of 512MB.

I definitly bought mine a few months early and didn't get the Core 2 Duo
My machine can run BF2 on full settings though and that is all that counts.

Oh.. try to get a 7200 rpm disc... my previous laptop (Latitude D600) had a 5400 rpm and it was the bottleneck in that machine.

[Lemur]

For what it's worth, I found a two-part guide to laptop graphics for ya, Div. It's a little old (2005), but a lot of the info is still useful.

Part 1
Part 2

[edit]

In more current reviews, I found a fairly up-to-date forum with laptop video card rankings:

The Mobile Graphics Card Info Page

And here's a neat graphic that ranks the cards, although I'm sure one could quibble with the choices. Still useful.