British technophiles needed! Options

[BlitzGeneral]

Sorry if this is in the wrong area.

I'm looking for a new laptop at the moment. I've had my old (but loyal) desktop for years, but I can't exactly take it to uni with me when I go.

I'm not looking for something INCREDIBLE per see, but something good enough to play fairly modern games (I love Generals the most) well, and at a fairly low price (neither myself or my parents have much money).

Any ideas for something I could get in the UK? If you have, answer A.S.A.P!

Thanks!

This post has been edited by BlitzGeneral: 1 Jul 2009, 16:13

[Pickysaurus]

A laptop like that would set you back £200-£300 new.
Try eBay?

[BlitzGeneral]

A laptop like that would set you back £200-£300 new.
Try eBay?

Heh, awesome sig!

That's fine, I could afford that!

I just need something that would allow me to run Generals at highest setting and fast. And be lightweight. S'all! =D

[The_Hunter]

for generals you don't realy need a totaly amazing laptop to run it most new ones that includes the cheaper ones should be more than capable of running it

[Pickysaurus]

Put it this way.
My current laptop cost me £300 a year ago and it runs generals fine. (Cept it overheat, but when it was new it worked)

Now technology doubles in capacity every year.
So you can get a laptop twice the power of mine for £300 currently (or less) meaning it'll run Generals fine

[accomplice]

A couple of things you might want to consider when you buy a notebook for gaming.
I generally advice you to dig through the articles on this site concerning all kinds of hardware inside a notebook

CPU:
Go for Intel, but avoid anything that is a Pentium 4, a Celeron or Centrino, even when titled 'mobile'. These are outdated, power hungry, rather slow and fast heating old timers. Sure, they beat down the cost, but it's still not worth your notebook overheating and turning off every 45 minutes when you play a 3D game Go with a core duo, they are nowadays common enough to be still quite affordable within a decent notebook.

RAM:
3GB should suffice for a cost-conscious player

GPU (Graphic Card):
IMPORTANT: Do not buy anything that features a Turbocache/Shared Memory GPU.
These kinds of graphic cards do not come with their own memory to support your CPU and RAM, but instead, it occupies RAM memories when processing complex graphics => it burdens your notebook instead of relieving.
Anything Geforce 8 or higher, or ATI HD 4xxx will serve you just fine with Generals. Just make sure it's not a shared memory rubbish card

These points I listed might be quite obvious, but that might help you not to fall for cheap but unsound offers.

Over here, a decent gaming laptop with a fast core duo, about 4 gb ram and a good GPU can be bought from € 600 on (that's about 500 pound). Below that price, it's only netbooks and so-called office notebooks, that lack a decent GPU.

(No idea about the notebook market in the UK though)

[Shock]

I think your specifications are a bit high priced still for something that should be called 'budget'. Blitzgeneral you should specify your price range.

The only thing that I would suggest you to do and in which I might agree with accomplice when you want to play some (Generals like, not recent games) games, is to look for a laptop with an nVidia or ATi video chip. No matter what type it is, you can bet that those chips are a hell of a lot faster than onboard intel chips and will enhance your gaming experience.

With the quantity of RAM nowadays, Shared memory chips aren't really such a big deal anymore. The point is that most chips which use shared memory are utter crap themselves. Shared memory on laptop is essentially the thing saying ''my GPU sucks".

[accomplice]

Oh well, at least here on the other side of the water, notebooks with decent GPUs start at 600 €.

I would assume some decent GPU to be a must when you'd like to play fairly new games, such as CnC3/RA3, bioshock, stalker and the likes RAM is not much of a price issue, the difference between 4 GB and 2 GB ram is less than 30 €.

Maybe rather cut short on stuff like a DVD burning drive or just go with a 150 GB hard drive instead of 500 GB, but the biggest money eaters are doubtlessly the CPU and GPU ^^

As for generals, it runs "fine" on my stone old 2005 notebook with a centrino 1.7 GHz, 1 GB ram and a mobile geforce 6. ShW makes it lag terribly when the AIs go all out

---

It's hard to find any decent ANd cheap notebooks, so all we can do is just to tell you what not to buy

Like geforce cards with the name extension "go". Read stuff about a GF 8400 Go not able to play Counterstrike on 1024x768

[Prophet of the P...]

Dell Vostro 1320 with GeForce 9300M GS
Total cost is 480 quid.

[Shock]

Not to mention the Geforce 8xxx Go series has overheating problems. I don't think they are sold much anymore in favor of the 9xxxGS series.

[beefJeRKy]

Also Centrino is not a processor but rather an intel platform that includes a chipset, a CPU, Wi-Fi among other things. For example, a laptop with Centrino2 spec MUST have Draft-N Wifi and a Core 2 Duo chip. I can imagine once Nehalem based mobile CPUs are out, we can expect a Centrino 3 platform.

[BlitzGeneral]

Hm...ended up choosing something called a Dell Studio 15. Not bad for about £450?

Intel® Pentium® Dual-Core Processor T4200 (2.0GHz, 800MHz, 1MB cache)
Genuine Windows Vista SP1â„¢ Home Premium (64 BIT) - English
15.6in Widescreen High Definition (1366x768) WLED with TrueLife
512MB ATI Mobility RADEON HD 4570
4096MB 800MHz Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM [2x2048]
250GB (5,400rpm) Serial ATA Hard Drive

Apparantly the memory was upgraded to 4GB for free in some sort of special offer?

What could this thing do for me?

[Pickysaurus]

It can do everything you asked in the first post

[Overdose]

To me its a bit overpriced but it is from Dell after all. At least you get a nice warranty.

[Shock]

Do you have a Windows 7 upgrade license with it?

[BlitzGeneral]

Do you have a Windows 7 upgrade license with it?

Yup.

Overpriced...probably. I did some searching around and it said that it could play even modern games at medium settings. Sounds about right?

[accomplice]

Pretty decent.

Quote for that GPU:

The gaming performance of the ATI Mobility Radeon HD4570 should be very similar to the desktop HD 4550 which features similar specifications. Benchmarks of the desktop card showed, that the most DirectX9 titles can be played fluently in high details and 1024x768 (like Call of Duty 4, F.E.A.R., UT3, World in Conflict). Demanding games like crysis only run in low-medium detail settings in decent frame rates.

So as you see moderate details + resolution and you're on the safe side

[beefJeRKy]

The Radeon 4000 series of cards is brilliant. Good find

[Prophet of the P...]

Why the hell doesnt dell sell these in india. i have to deal with shitty 8600gm models.