Hardware advice for gamming

[Joeyjoejoejnr]

Yeah sorry,


Have a laptop with ATI 9200 graphics card. Looking to upgrade or exchange laptop for one that I can use for gaming. I have a 60Gb hard drive and 512Mb RAM, with a pentium 4M 3.06 processor. The game Imtrying to Play is Starwars and it require Transform and Lighting Hardware.
Can you recommend weather I should upgrade or get rid of if, and if so what steps I should take/ do..

Cheers!!!!!!!!!!!!

[arthurleung]

If its using a 9200 right now, I'm pretty sure the machine won't take anything far bigger (like X800 or so). Upgrade to something like M9600 might be remotely possible. Fast GPUs draw so much power and put out so much heat that the notebook had to be designed to hold them. A laptop designed for 9200, you know.

Probably better to get rid of it and get one for gaming. Make sure you get at least 1GB ram to run games smoothly.

[kalniel]

Check with your laptop manufacturer to see if you can upgrade, but most laptops cannot upgrade the gfx card so you are stuck with buying a new one.

When looking for a laptop to game on, look primarily at the gfx chip it will be using - I would recommend anything from a x700 upwards - if you can get a geforce 6800 or higher even better.

Secondary to the gfx card is probably the ram, though this is less critical as even on laptops you can upgrade this later. 1gb is the minimum you should go for - if possible check how many memory slots your laptop will have for expansion - if you only have 2 memory slots, make sure if you get 1gb that it's 1gb on one stick, rather than 2x512mb, as that way you can upgrade by adding another 1gb stick later.

The next thing you should probably look for is a good, responsive screen - I'm a bit out of touch there, but a while ago screens made by samsung where among the best.

After those, CPU and hard disk space probably aren't very relevant - you might want to check the speed of the harddrive for load times, but once the game has loaded into RAM it's not really important.

[Memphis`]

If you're looking for a new laptop what budget do you have?

Im currently on a laptop as well, it has a 6800 ULTRA in it (big bonus), runs on a Pentium M 780 at 2.13 ghz. I know it doesn't sound fast but Pentium M's are very good for gaming, pretty fast too.

Got this laptop from dell but its pretty pricey, £1500+.

http://www1.euro.dell.com/content/pr...hs1&l=en&s=dhs