Hey guys
I made a post in the hardware forum a while back, where I was pretty sure I was going to get a desktop for gaming at university - turns out plans have changed, and I have no choice but to get a laptop.
From advice elsewhere on here, the Vostro 1500 has come to my attention as great bang-for-buck, without being a dedicated gaming laptop - bulky, hot and with a 10 minute battery life
The spec I'm looking at is:
- Duo T7500 2.2 GHz, 800MHz, 4MB cache
- Vista, which I'll promptly uninstall (can't get ubuntu or XP on it from Dell)
- 15.4'' 1280x800, not truelife (read it was stupidly shiny)
- 2gig 667mhz DDR2
- 160gig 5400RPM hdd
- 8600M GT, 256mb
The 8600M GT is the only component there I've found any significant information on... notebookcheck.net ranks it reasonably highly; I'd imagine as good as I'd get on my £600 to £700 target budget (correct me if I'm wrong). However, other than that I don't really have much of an idea of where, performance-wise, that spec would be.
Questions I have:
- Would 4 gigs of RAM actually be a worthwhile investment? The steam hardware survey seems to suggest most people are still catching up with 2 gigs atm.
- The recommended specs I've seen for bioshock or crysis, for example, don't mention CPU clock speeds, so if possible could someone enlighten me on how much the T7500 is likely to be able to take? Other options for the processor are the T7300 2ghz, 4mb cache, 800mhz, or the T7100 1.8GHz 2mb cache, 800MHz.
- If anyone out there has this, or a similar, laptop, could they comment on battery life, portability and heat please?
- I recently noticed that the HDD only 5400RPM. I'm not 100% on this, but I'd think this could be an issue when playing games. I also noticed that there is no faster internal hard drive available on any vostro. Will I need to buy a fast external hard drive?
In addition, I'd be getting:
- this bag
- a £20 kensington microsaver lock; the one dell are selling (if you know of a better/cheaper one please say, as I've yet to look at locks in detail)
- probably 2 years accident cover (reluctantly)
- a 9 rather than 6 cell battery, which I heard was good for battery life
- Medusa 5.1 headphones, for games and not for walking around with. My old ones are broken to bits!