My new laptop...

[shane0uk]

Ok so i bought this really nice laptop from PC World a few months ago. It was £850.

It's a HP, AMD Turion 64 mobile technology 1.7GHz, 1Gig of RAM, Radeon Xpress 200 series graphics, basic on board sound, stunning 17" widescreen display.

It's more of a multimedia laptop really, but recently i've been looking at some good PC games and i wanted to know whats my range in terms of what my pc can handle? I like FPS and stratergy games, both online only.

I downloaded the BF2 demo, it does play online, but its quite choppy and graphics wise, it looks about the same as the first Medal of honour.

Is there anything i can do to make it look better? i'm not sure if u can upgrade the graphics card in a laptop? I can't afford a desktop - poor student

Any advice would be great - thanks

EDIT : heres some info + Pics of it... http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,1870375,00.asp

[Nitestorm]

Don't think you can upgrade on-board graphics. Although newer laptops with PCI-E dedicated graphics are supposedly upgradable. As long as the replacement card is within the size and power restrictions of the laptop.

[Nobuo]

That's a very nice multimedia PC, but I don't think there's a lot you can do gaming wise, especially if you're after recent FPSs. The first MoH was a Playstation game, right? If you can't play that smoothly you're pretty sunk.

For £850 you could have got a pretty decent gaming desktop you know.

[shane0uk]

That's a very nice multimedia PC, but I don't think there's a lot you can do gaming wise, especially if you're after recent FPSs. The first MoH was a Playstation game, right? If you can't play that smoothly you're pretty sunk.

For £850 you could have got a pretty decent gaming desktop you know.

sorry mate, maybe i wasn't clear enough. I meant when i play batte field 2 on my laptop, its in such a low quality, it ends up looking like medal of honour. i can play the first 3 med of honours with no problem.

[Nobuo]

Yeah I understood, what I meant was if a game that is on par with a Playstation title graphically can't run smoothly on your system, you're not gonna have much joy with modern games. You did say it was running choppy as well as looking bad, didn't you? Or was that just in reference to the online experience?

I never played MoH games on the PC, so I can't fairly judge the performance there. When you said the "first" one I thought you meant the first one EVER, which was on the PS. Anyway if I was you I wouldn't be expecting a great PC gaming experience with that machine, I'd stick with emulation or something.

[nichomach]

As integrated graphics go, the XPRESS200 isn't bad, but it still falls way short of what you need for serious gaming; I had a shufti at the HP website to see whether the machine had something like a mini-AGP slot or MXM slot or something like that, but there's no mention of it, so I think you're probably stuck.

[shane0uk]

Yeah I understood, what I meant was if a game that is on par with a Playstation title graphically can't run smoothly on your system, you're not gonna have much joy with modern games. You did say it was running choppy as well as looking bad, didn't you? Or was that just in reference to the online experience?

I never played MoH games on the PC, so I can't fairly judge the performance there. When you said the "first" one I thought you meant the first one EVER, which was on the PS. Anyway if I was you I wouldn't be expecting a great PC gaming experience with that machine, I'd stick with emulation or something.

Sorry mate lol, i think you've miss understood me again.

What i was trying to say was, Medal Of Honour (all versions) play absolutley fine!

When i play the BF2 demo, It looks like medal of honour graphics, as in, it doesn't play well at all (because MOH is a much older game, as you said)

So to clear it up, i can play all MOH games perfect, but new games like Doom3 and BF2 play very choppy and poor res.

My initial question was, what sort of games could my laptop handle? I'm looking for a decent FPS, anything from WW2 to Space battles. I've looked into CS, but it's very dated. I guess i'll be looking at something from around 1999 - 2000 ish?

Any ideas?

Cheers

[nichomach]

Well, first on my list would be Deus Ex. The graphics are *ahem* nothing special, these days, but gameplay-wise, it's great.

[shane0uk]

Thanks mate, but i'm really looking for an online FPS - if you know any?

[shane0uk]

Do u think it could handle Unreal tournament 2001? My old geforce 4 played that perfectly.

[nichomach]

It should handle original UT, maybe even later, just fine; the specs for UT2K4 call for a GF2 or Radeon with at least 64MB of video memory; your machine should have 128, but I wouldn't expect to run it at ahigh resolution. Original UT called for an 8MB PCI local bus card or better. You could always run the demos and see whether they're choppy or not?

[shane0uk]

It should handle original UT, maybe even later, just fine; the specs for UT2K4 call for a GF2 or Radeon with at least 64MB of video memory; your machine should have 128, but I wouldn't expect to run it at ahigh resolution. Original UT called for an 8MB PCI local bus card or better. You could always run the demos and see whether they're choppy or not?

I can't find the demo's anywhere mate, do you know where their hiding?

[nichomach]

At unrealtournament.com?

[shane0uk]

At unrealtournament.com?

Thank you

[nichomach]

No worries, happy to help .

[Nobuo]

You're right, I'm getting very confused here:

What i was trying to say was, Medal Of Honour (all versions) play absolutley fine!

But then you say:

the BF2 demo looks like medal of honour graphics, as in it doesn't play well at all

I'm not being pedantic or anything, but what that sounds like is MoH is playing well, and BF2 is the same as MoH - playing badly. So obviously I'm getting pretty stuck when trying to gauge your computer's performance (bearing in mind I haven't played either title, and am going by what you're saying). What I'm assuming is that even though BF2 has a similar image quality to MoH, it's giving a bad framerate?

In any case, since you're now after game recommendations, you'd probably do better in a gaming forum instead of a hardware one.