Radeon 9600 or XPRESS 200M for a notebook?

L

Liekomg

Limp Gawd
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Apr 26, 2006
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I know these are both mobility laptop chips, but since i'm asking about the video card, I was hoping you guys could help.

The 9600 has 64mb dedicated and would be coupled with an A64 3200+. The M200 has 128mb shared and is with a Pentium M 1.5ghz. Would it be worth the extra money for the 9600, or would the speed difference not be all that great? I'm probably not going to be playing anything all that high end - probably WoW or maybe titan quest at the worst. Certainly no doom3 engine games or anything like that.
 
Radeon 9600.

XPRESS 200M is not entirely horrible for games made a couple years ago provided you don't go above 1024x768 and you leave AA and AF off. Still, the Radeon 9600 will generally own it.
 
Express 200m is close to a Radeon 9000 IIRC. I've got it in my black friday laptop and it does the job, but nowhere near what a 9600 would do, I'm sure.
 
Go with the xpress and buy a replacement laptop pcie graphics card later.
 
UPDATE!!! I know I posted that the 9600 was better, but I played bf2 last night at a lan party and the laptop was overheating severely! It kept turning off (and we had VERY good ventelation on it, with is propped up and a box fan blowing on it).

I am agreeing with the above post, where you can replace the videocard later.. just make sure its an option before you buy the laptop.
 
BBA said:
Go with the xpress and buy a replacement laptop pcie graphics card later.
Click to expand...

Sorry, the graphics card is not replaceable with xpress chipsets...
 
lloose said:
UPDATE!!! I know I posted that the 9600 was better, but I played bf2 last night at a lan party and the laptop was overheating severely! It kept turning off (and we had VERY good ventelation on it, with is propped up and a box fan blowing on it).

I am agreeing with the above post, where you can replace the videocard later.. just make sure its an option before you buy the laptop.
Click to expand...

Thats not really an option as these are used laptops so my selection is limited. The A64/R9600 is the 7405gx so its a pretty hefty machine at 7.5lbs. The other is a Toshiba and is only 6lbs. I honestly like the look of the Toshiba more, and its a far newer model, though its not as speedy. I wish I could get some exact framerates of how this 200M chipset performs in some games, as there is a fine line between "adequate" and "unplayable".

Of course, before I purchase either I will run some stress tests to make sure nothing is overheating - one of my primary concerns.
 
The XPRESS 200M is about equivalent to an X300SE (it actually is an IGP which is based HEAVILY off of the X300). Look up benchmarks for X300SE and you can get the idea.

It will be playable for most games if you play at 640x480 and turn settings all the way down (at least with newer games). Older games you can probably bump up to 800x600 with maybe some settings turned up. My bro with an XPRESS 200M laptop can play FarCry at 800x600 with 2xAA and get 25 FPS.
 
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