computer question..

[brianv]

Okay, I'm pretty sure this is a good computer, but I just need to know for sure.

Is this computer good!:

Compaq Presario V5000Z customizable Notebook PC
ES188AV
– Genuine Windows XP Home Edition
– AMD Sempron(TM) 3100+ (1.8GHz/256KB L2 Cache)
– 15.4" WXGA Widescreen (1280x800)
– 128MB ATI RADEON(R) XPRESS 200M w/Hypermemory(TM)
– FREE Upgrade to 512MB DDR SDRAM (2x256MB)!!!
– 40 GB 4200 RPM Hard Drive
– DVD/CD-RW Combo Drive
– 54g(TM) 802.11a/b/g WLAN
– 6 Cell Lithium Ion Battery
– Microsoft(R) Works/Money
– HP Home & Home Office Store in-box envelope

It's only $500, and the specs are pretty good. (getting it from hp online shop) Well better specs than my current laptop anyway. PIECE OF SHIT.
But most importantly, is it good for games?

edit:
Or I might decide on getting this one:
http://www.buy.com/retail/product.asp?sku=202546015&loc=212

Dunno yet. The second one is apparantly better, not sure about graphics, help me decide? :P
Thakns

 

[Naga]

The CPU seems pretty good. The highest I've used so far is a 2800+ sempron, and that pretty much kicks ass.

A good amount of RAM as well should keep things speedy, and that graphics card is good for a laptop...So you should get a pretty decent performance from it.

 

[Sonict]

Compaq Laptop:

- The CPU is okay
- Graphic card isn't very good. What type of games are planning on running?
- 512 Mb of ram is pretty low. You can get away with it, but you have at least 1 Gb of ram

Acer Laptop:

- The CPU sucks. (celeron)
- Graphic card really, really, sucks!!! (Intel intergrated crap!)
- 512 Mb ram (look at the other comment)

.:Conclusion:.

The compaq is better, but I need to know what games you are planning on playing and how much money are you willing to spend? Is your currency in American or what?

Sonict

 

[brianv]

What type of games are planning on running?

Halo. That's pretty much it, except maybe Jedi Knight series.
I might also get vista.

Wait, I thought 128mb graphics cards were good. With like good graphics to make halo look good.

Well it's obviously better than the 64mb card this thing has.

And I'd prefer to spend no more than $600, I know I won't get anything really that good, but I just really need a new laptop.

 

[tails92]

The Compaq one is a pretty decent computer, actually.
But if you want to run Vista on it, it is better that you upgrade to 512 MB ram, as Vista is ram-hungry (Aero).

 

[Sonict]

Having lots of video memory on the graphics card doesn't mean that Halo and what not will run any better than your 64Mb one. More video memory just helps you when you want to run a higher resolution on your game.

Halo should run fine on that card. If I were you, I wouldn't get windows Vista when it comes out. Reasons: It will be expensive, It will be more bloated than Windows XP, You need a very good graphic card to run it with all of the bells and whistles, also the Operating System won't be out until around January of 2007. By then, most computers should be compatable with Windows Vista. You should wait a bit more before you buy another laptop.

This is my opinion afterall.

Sonict

 

[brianv]

The thing I'm worried about with the compaq, is it's a compaq presario, both my brothers had presarios, and both system's power system eventually malfunctioned. My hp pavillion is basically the hp version of the presario, and that's pretty much broken too.

-------
edit:

Having lots of video memory on the graphics card doesn't mean that Halo and what not will run any better than your 64Mb one. More video memory just helps you when you want to run a higher resolution on your game.

Will all the shaders(or in other words, the sexy shinyness) show though? Like this:

and not like this:

?
Looking better is the only important thing.

edit again:
K, I did a little research on the graphics card to the 2nd one...
Third-generation Graphics Core
256-bit graphics core
8/16/32 bpp
Up to 8.5 GB/sec memory bandwidth with DDR2 533 MHz
1.3 GP/sec and 1.3 GT/sec fill rate
128 MB maximum video memory
2048x1536 at 85 Hz maximum resolution
Dynamic Display Modes for flat-panel and wide-screen support
Operating systems supported: Microsoft Windows* XP, Windows 2000, Linux-compatible (Xfree86 source available)

High-performance 3D
Up to 4 pixels per clock rendering
Microsoft* DirectX* 9 Hardware Acceleration Features: Up to 4 pixels per clock rendering
Pixel Shader 2.0
Volumetric Textures
Shadow Maps
Slope Scale Depth Bias
Two-Sided Stencil

Microsoft* DirectX* 9 Vertex Shader 2.0 and Transform and Lighting supported in software through highly optimized Processor Specific Geometry Pipeline (PSGP)
DirectX Texture Decompression
OpenGL* 1.4 support

Advanced Display Technology
400 MHz DAC frequency for up to 2048x1526 resolution for both analog and digital displays
Two Serial Digital Video Out (SDVO) ports for flat-panel monitors and/or TV-out support via Advanced Digital Display 2 (ADD2) cards
Multiple display types (LVDS, DVI-I, DVI-D, HDTV, TV-out, CRT) for dual monitor capabilities
HDTV 720p and 1080i display resolution support
16x9 Aspect Ratio for widescreen displays

High Quality Media Support
Up and Down Scaling of Video Content
High Definition Content Decode
5x3 Overlay Filtering
Hardware Motion Compensation support for DVD playback

This any good?

 

[Omega the Hedgehog]

- 512 Mb of ram is pretty low. You can get away with it, but you have at least 1 Gb of ram

<- lol no, I run with 256MB and can play most modern games fine

The CPU sucks. (celeron)

<- lol no, I have a 2.5ghz Celeron that nearly matches my 2.5ghz P4

 

[brianv]

- 512 Mb of ram is pretty low. You can get away with it, but you have at least 1 Gb of ram

<- lol no, I run with 256MB and can play most modern games fine

The CPU sucks. (celeron)

<- lol no, I have a 2.5ghz Celeron that nearly matches my 2.5ghz P4

So will the 2nd computer run games fine? With crisp graphics?

 

[Shadow Hog]

Don't let Omega fool you. 256MB is a bad amount of RAM these days...

Besides, you can't have too much RAM. Ever. (Unless you're hitting 4GB or so, since XP can't go much higher.)

Oh, and Athlon > Pentium, if you're gaming. Dunno what the measurement is for laptops, though.

 

[brianv]

Well the ram in both is 512. I don't really care what the ram is since the only game I'll probably ever play on a pc is halo(min ram requirement 128mb). I just need to know if that graphics card is good enough. thanks

 

[Shuffle]

Don't listen to Omega, his definition of "Fine" is 5 frames per second.

 

[JJames19119]

Actually, I must disagree with the 256 RAM being bad. Granted it's not luxerious but with a good enough graphics card, it IS possible to play most modern games at 25+ FPS. However, I would suggest a must higher RAM if you're gonna be leaving your computer on a lot or using many apps all at once.

 

[brianv]

Actually, I must disagree with the 256 RAM being bad. Granted it's not luxerious but with a good enough graphics card, it IS possible to play most modern games at 25+ FPS. However, I would suggest a must higher RAM if you're gonna be leaving your computer on a lot or using many apps all at once.

Is the graphics card on the 2nd laptop good?

 

[Sonict]

No, It isn't. The reason is that it is using an intel intergrated card which is designed for business things, The ATI card in the first laptop is much better. The reason why the intel one is crap because it has less features than the ATI one. Example H&L (Hardware Texture and Lighting) The intel has a crappy software version and most games require the card to actually have H&L!. If you were to try it, the game may not even run! I use to have a laptop with an intel intergrated card, it really sucked, so don't get it if I were you. You should stick with the compaq laptop. I think that you seem to have bad luck with the compaqs if your other laptops have those problems that you have posted.

Regards,

Sonict

 

[Shuffle]

H&L? I think you mean T&L *runs away*

 

[brianv]

No, It isn't. The reason is that it is using an intel intergrated card which is designed for business things, The ATI card in the first laptop is much better. The reason why the intel one is crap because it has less features than the ATI one. Example H&L (Hardware Texture and Lighting) The intel has a crappy software version and most games require the card to actually have H&L!. If you were to try it, the game may not even run! I use to have a laptop with an intel intergrated card, it really sucked, so don't get it if I were you. You should stick with the compaq laptop. I think that you seem to have bad luck with the compaqs if your other laptops have those problems that you have posted.

Regards,

Sonict

I think I found the answer. On this page:
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/chipsets/display/i915g_10.html
I dunno, Halo looks pretty damn good with that card. Except for some shader surfaces..Where it says the FPS of Halo on the previous page, its definatly higher than my current laptop. So I'm going to take my chances with this laptop.

 

[Shadow Hog]

Trust me, man. Do NOT buy integrated graphics. I don't even know if you can upgrade on a laptop, but having integrated graphics - at all - is a VERY BAD SIGN.

 

[brianv]

Trust me, man. Do NOT buy integrated graphics. I don't even know if you can upgrade on a laptop, but having integrated graphics - at all - is a VERY BAD SIGN.

I know how integrated graphics are. As this laptop has them. The graphics on my current aren't that bad even though they suck(if that made sense). The only downside I see about it is after you close a game your pc just goes slow for a little while. And I don't think you can upgrade on laptops, I would have a long time ago if I could. I just need a laptop with better graphics and a faster speed than this one. Anything would do.

 

[Callum]

Compaq Laptop:

- The CPU is okay
- Graphic card isn't very good. What type of games are planning on running?
- 512 Mb of ram is pretty low. You can get away with it, but you have at least 1 Gb of ram

Acer Laptop:

- The CPU sucks. (celeron)
- Graphic card really, really, sucks!!! (Intel intergrated crap!)
- 512 Mb ram (look at the other comment)

.:Conclusion:.

The compaq is better, but I need to know what games you are planning on playing and how much money are you willing to spend? Is your currency in American or what?

Sonict

>>- The CPU sucks. (celeron)

Sure, Celerons are crap, but the Celeron M has 1M L2 Cache, which totally owns it's desktop counterpart.

>>- Graphic card really, really, sucks!!! (Intel intergrated crap!)
Agreed.

>>- 512 Mb of ram is pretty low. You can get away with it, but you have at least 1 Gb of ram.

512MB of RAM is OK, just make sure it isn't SD RAM. Hell, I've run an Athlon 64 3000+ Venice core on 256 RAM, no difference to 512MB.

Having that said, I recommend to find Notebooks with these specs for gaming:

AMD Turion 64 processor with at least 1.6GHz - Doesn't take much battery power, and is quite powerful considering it's a notebook processor.

NVIDIA GeForce Go 6600 128MB - The mobile version of this graphics card is a pretty good option.

512MB DDR400 RAM - Bare minimum for gaming.

14.1" screen - Best weight and size.

At least a 40GB Harddrive.

Windows XP Professional SP2 - Either that or just wait until Vista comes out.

-------

My 5 cents.