TheShadowDawn
Cautiously optimistic
 Draggy
Ballkicks: (+82 / -11)
Posts: 595 (0.086)
Reg. Date: Apr 2002
Location: Melbourne, Australia
Gender: Male |
Reply 1 of 27 (Originally posted on: 02-05-07 07:43:26 PM)
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I bought a laptop before christmas so I wouldn't be bored at my girlfriend's house. I'd previously been attempting to entertain myself with my old Dell Inspiron 4000, but that's a P3 with an 8 meg graphics chip and 256 meg of ram. I had replayed Baldur's Gate 2 that many times...
So I went the opposite way with my laptop: went for the ridiculous processing power. Of course, you're entirely right - you might as well buy a desktop. But all I use my laptop for is games, so I don't require great portability: I set it up on a desk at my girlfriend's house, or when playing LAN games, and it doesn't move.

Mine is a secondhand HP Pavillion ZD8000 (around 10 months old - cost me $1400 AUD), a beastly 17" laptop with 1.5 gig of ram and a proper 256 meg graphics card. It is the antithesis of portable: you couldn't operate this on your lap, for instance, as it has three fans under the case which keep the computer very cool only if it's on a flat surface. Other strikes against portability: it's very heavy, and the battery life is just over half an hour (which is normal - new batteries have a capacity of no more than an hour).
It has a very sharp screen and every bell and whistle you could want (very good inbuilt wireless, bluetooth, more USB ports than you can shake a stick at, full size keyboard, good speakers, even a remote control which you can keep in the PCMCIA slot for movies).
I am happy with it, but I do honestly feel perhaps I should've spent more and gone for a new laptop with a more up to date graphics card. It has an x600, which fairly powerful for a laptop...but it's also older technology and there are already games that won't run well on last generation ATI cards. Oblivion, for instance, runs smoothly, but the card can't properly do Shader 2 for the pretty graphic effects. And I wouldn't be able to run Splinter Cell Double Agent at all since the graphics card doesn't support shader model 3.
Of course, the lesson there could be to go with an nvidia graphics card instead, since the last generations of nvidia cards have supported SM3, as opposed to only the current generation of ATI cards.
You live and learn. At any rate, you live.
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