Vostro 1500 for gaming

[megajames]

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!

[staffsMike]

theres a difference in cores between the T7100 and the T7300 onwards if i remember correctly, probably the cache. I'd personally ( and i have) go with the T7500 just for the little extra performance but the t7300 will be very worthy. The 1.8's are pretty good but i've noticed a difference between them and the 2.0ghz T7200 (previous generation C2D).

RAM and Hard Drive upgrades are best to do yourself to be honest.. it will certainly be cheaper to do a 4gb upgrade for yourself but you won't need more than 2gb for a long time.

Hard drives are available from pretty much anywhere.. scan for example. You can get a 100gb 7200rpm for about £80 i think.

This is the best laptop you can get for the money at the moment. The 8600GT is actually very overclockable as well.

Dell truelife screens are very nice..dell matte screens are imo awful at the moment so i'd go true life it was me.

The vostro is avaliable with XP as far as i know as its a business laptop.

[unreal]

I would go for truelife too if I were you, the quality it gives is nice.

A faster hdd would prove its worth with loading-intensive games, such as World of Warcraft and Test Drive Unlimited where things are loaded as you play. Stick with 2gb of RAM atm because you can only use all of it with a 64bit operating system, and it's pretty expensive from Dell.

T7300 is the best bang for buck in terms of high performance laptop CPU's at the moment, since it has 4mb Cache and the T7100 has 2mb I think... but I got the CPU upgrade to T7500 for only £30 after speaking to a Dell sales rep so see if you can do any haggling with them over the phone.

And Vista isn't actually all that bad...

[megajames]

Thanks for the help guys - you've been very useful.