Please help with laptop vid cards

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rgratto2

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Jul 22, 2005
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My friend is looking to buy a laptop from dell. However, it turns out i dont know anything about ATI cards OR laptops (i am a nvidia desktop guy). He can choose either the "Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 900" or a Radeon x300. I am kind of questioning the first because it is an integrated card. The games in question are nothing too fancy: warcraft 3, neverwinter nights, and Maybe battlefield 2. Basically, does the x300 offer much more in performance to justify me recommending it? As i said i dont know anything ATI so i dont know what to recommend.
Thanks.
 
The x300 is a weak card, but would at least be a significant improvement over the intel graphics. Don't know about the other 2 games, but battlefield 2 would probably be a struggle even on low settings.
 
Yeah, the X300 will struggle to handle BF2, even at low settings. I tried, just for fun, to run BF2 on my integrated X300, and I would not want to play it with that card. The lowest laptop card for running BF2 decently would probably be the 9600/X600. I am not sure about the other games though, but I was able to play Guild Wars with the X300.
 
Ok thanks guys, thats about what i figured. Where would you say an x300 stacks up as far as nvidia cards are concerned?
 
rgratto2 said:
My friend is looking to buy a laptop from dell.
Click to expand...

Does he have to buy dell? What is his budget? Too many people buy a $500 dollar laptop, and then discover that it struggles with circa 2000 games, nevermind 2005.
As far as I can tell, the words "cheap laptop" and "gaming" should never be used together in a sentence.
 
Yea its gotta be dell, hes got some gift cards. Hes looking to spend no more than about 1200. I highly advised him to get 1 gig of ram, and im thinking he should go with the x300 vid card. The ones that are primarily under consideration are:

inspirion 6000
and M140

Never said it was a "cheap" laptop, just not really expensive. Aside from the coupons hes footing the bill, and that gets a little iffy for us college kids some times...
 
With laptops, always get the lowest amount of memory you can configure from them and buy the rest on Newegg, you can save a good amount doing that.
 
rgratto2 said:
Yea its gotta be dell, hes got some gift cards. Hes looking to spend no more than about 1200. I highly advised him to get 1 gig of ram, and im thinking he should go with the x300 vid card. The ones that are primarily under consideration are:

inspirion 6000
and M140

Never said it was a "cheap" laptop, just not really expensive. Aside from the coupons hes footing the bill, and that gets a little iffy for us college kids some times...
Click to expand...

This is what I mean:
delldude7qr.jpg

This will smoke Intel GMA900 and ATI X300's ass, plus it's got a 17" screen.

Oh yeah, and
nobi125 said:
With laptops, always get the lowest amount of memory you can configure from them and buy the rest on Newegg, you can save a good amount doing that.
Click to expand...
QFT
 
yevaud said:
This is what I mean:
delldude7qr.jpg

This will smoke Intel GMA900 and ATI X300's ass, plus it's got a 17" screen.

Oh yeah, and

QFT
Click to expand...

That is a pretty good deal, similar to what I got. If he is looking to spend ~ $1200, he can definitely get a good laptop. Mine all together was ~ $1200 including the 2 GB of memory, although I was able to get into the 47% off deal since the company I do consulting for allows me to go through EPP. Try to get him to go for a similar deal to what I just quoted, minus the 750, go for a 740, that should save ~ $100 that can go for memory at newegg.
 
Wow that looks really sexy. Price is about right too. Thanks for such an in depth response! wondering where/how those coupons come in....im a dell noob :(

Edit: googling
 
Oh yeah, the reason that i suggested the 1 gig of ram was because of the DIMMs...could be problematic
 
i worked on a dell the other day with a removable gpu it was pretty cool, had vga and dvi out on it,.
 
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