The Official Graphics Card and PC gaming Thread

It's a Dell Latitude X300 Slim Notebook. Google it and check it out.

[EDIT]

Here's what I found.

http://reviews.cnet.com/laptops/dell-latitude-x300-series/1805-3121_7-30468821.html

It seems to be without the expansion dock in the battery life tests as that has its own 1900mAh battery as well. Looks like you can get roughly 5-6 hours on a full charge using both batteries.

[/EDIT]


I'm guessing it's a refurbished school or college laptop. That's where my sister gets all her laptops. She hasn't had a bad one yet. She still uses an old 850MHz Pentium III, 512MB RAM, 40GB HDD laptop(takes it to the gym) as well as her current 1.73GHz Core 2 Duo, 3GB RAM, 320GB HDD one(for home). The 850MHz Pentium III is surprisingly snappy in Windows XP with 512MB. I spent a lot of time finding the old style RAM to upgrade it, but it was worth it. She wouldn't take $200 for it last year when I wanted a cheap laptop

I'll hopefully have the laptop the Friday after next when I can pay her the $100. If I can snag my sis's camera for a while, I can lay it all out and post some pics. It's the full setup with all the peripherals and extras intact, and I've already had enough time with it to say everything works like new

There aren't any speakers on the laptop itself, but the dock has a fairly good set of speakers on it. They sound very good for laptop speakers and have some obvious power. The undocked laptop also has a headphone jack so I can plug in my Sennheisers and not have to worry about speakers

The case is scratched up a bit though, and the keys are obviously a bit worn. But, as far as I can tell, it's been babied a lot. Everything is in perfect working order, and it has fairly recently replaced batteries in both the dock and the main laptop.

The screen is only 1024 x 768 max so it must be like 12" or something. It's got the Intel Centrino platform as well. So ready to interface with my wireless network... If that's what it indeed means.

Anyways, I don't need much for a laptop. The Pentium M 1.4GHz is roughly equal to an Athlon XP 1800+ which is plenty of power for movies, websurfing, SNES/PSX emulation, and some old-school PC games. I figure it's better than spending $600 on a newer laptop that I won't be doing much else than that with. It's about as good as the $700 ASUS Eee PCs and, IMO, pretty close in size

I'm going to be reformatting it right away as it's loaded with viruses. I think that's why she wants to get rid of it. Maybe she's just being nice though

When I finally get it and finish the reformat, I'll be posting with the laptop to test it out, so look for it in two weeks or so.

Anyways, I don't know if I should call it a notebook or a laptop, lol. When plugged into the dock, it becomes quite heavy and is rightly a laptop. But when you remove the dock, it's like 1.5-2cm thick and weighs barely anything. Maybe 3lbs? It's really small and light.

Anyhoo... excited. The last laptop I had was bulky, weighed like twice as much, sucked at battery life, and only had 512MB of RAM. So this is a good re-entry into mobile computing for me. It really is pretty well featured and nice. Dell does make quality hardware, if overpriced

 

Agreed, Dell hardware is usually pretty solid and $100 for any laptop is good. As for a P3 being speedy, that's because they're twice as fast as P4s for the same clockspeed...

 

I'm mostly excited to see what I can do with it. I want to load it with some movies and all of my music plus a bunch of games with cracked exes. Here's a list of Games I know to have worked well with Extreme Graphics 2:

Call of Duty
Medal of Honor AA
Half-Life
Half-Life 2(lowest settings)
Star Wars Battlefront
Stronghold
Stronghold Crusader
RTCW
Wolfenstein ET
Unreal Tournament GOTY
Star Wars Jedi Knight 2
Battlefield Vietnam(possibly. last time i tried with EG2 I only had 512MB of RAM and it was doable, so 1GB should see a large improvement.)
Final Fantasy 7
Halo PC with the shader fix
Freedom Fighters

I have all the original disks for these and they're all pretty small games so there should be no problem with the 80GB HDD. They should work flawlessly on it so we'll see what kind of mobile gaming I can do

I can't wait

 

All of those games, HL2 included, are pretty damn old. To say Integrated graphics can't game at all is ludicrous due to titles like these, but to say they can play modern games is just as farsical. Games like STALKER Clear Sky have to be played at 1024x768 all minimum to be playable on even the best integrated chipsets, and that game actually scales pretty well. GRiD is a complete lost cause above 800x600, and even then it's laggy. You're looking at single figure frame rates at anything above 1024x768 all minimum for Crysis Warhead.

 

Intergrated GPUs aren't that good
The 64MB on my dad'd ol toshiba used to be able to play NFS UG, and halo, but I forget at which settings, it's 5 years old and still solid.

I got mine beacause I wasn't able to build a desktop, and I'm quite happy with this. it can never match a desktop, of course, but it plays all games at 1280x800 at medium high

If you guys want I'll post some benchies ;D

 

Indeed, but gaming laptops do exist, yours is a good example. Gaming integrated graphics do not.

 

Thanks

I get what you mean

 

oh chee, so we're on laptop talk now huh?

I want one too, but it's way too expensive for a gaming laptop. I was thinking buying a cheap one with good CPU and decent amount of RAM but intergrated GPU, then i can get a external graphics for the laptop which makes is much cheaper but don't know if that really works or not.

Last night i was seriously thinking of getting a HD4670, because it should be much faster than 8600GTS. The reason i want to buy that card is because it's cheap and it should last quite sometime, and because my 8600GTS sure can handle latest games with no problem then the HD4670 shouldn't have a problem too. Well at least with my 15 monitor that is.

 

I don't think the whole external graphics thing ever totally worked out.

 

external graphics solutions do work, but are nowhere near as good as the real thing.

 

NEWB QUESTION, but

what are external graphic solutions???

 

how come i thought, you can add a newer GPU to the "external gpu"?

 

An external graphics card that plugs into an expresscard slot in a laptop.

To my knowledge you can't, as only a certan few will fit, use an appropriate amount of power, and won't use up too much bandwidth.

 

Cool, I didn't know that was possible

How much better would they be, compared to an internal card

 

Well in most cases they wouldn't. I'd put them between integrated graphics and a proper card.

 

oh well, rather spend more on the laptop then.

is there a differnce between a mobile 9600 and a 9600GT?

 

Yes, the desktop one is faster.

 

K, thanks

Maybe that's why I haven't heard too much about them

 

i just saw a Dell XPS laptop...wow, SLi setup, 3GB of ram and a good 2.4ghz cpu but hell it's heavy! How the hell do they fit all these stuff in such a small space? wouldn't there be a heat problem?

 

Clever heatpipe design and fan location means they don't get any hotter than top-end graphics cards in desktop PCs, if anything less so to prevent them from being too hot to hold. Remember where a Dual core desktop CPU may use 70W, a laptop one will only use 30. The same sort of difference applies to graphics cards. A mobile 7900GTX for example is about the same size as a credit card.