m50vm-b1

I'm looking for a laptop for gaming and college and this was one of the computers I'm considering. $1600 is the max I want to pay and I'd prefer to pay less. Is this computer a wise choice?

Also can anyone tell me how good the graphics card is?

"1,024MB DDR2 nVIDIA 9600M GS"


And is it so big it will get too hot? I guess heat is a big issue on laptops? Apparently HP's new dv5t is having some heating issues and I'm looking for something that won't.

I'm a computer noob so I don't really know what all the graphics cards are. How does this one compare to say a 512mb 9600m gt on the sager np2096? I've read it's not necessarily mb that counts and a less mb gfx card can outperform a higher one...so how is the gfx card on this computer and how is the computer overall?

Thanks!

 

Its a great machine and I was very torn between the M50vm-B1 & the G50V-A1. I have a thread on it that may give you more info on the machine.

Long story short tho

The grapics card is good its roughly equal to a 8600gt GDDR3 and thats what was in mid/high end gaming laptops until just recently.

Its very cool running and its not very big.

It will be slower than the 9600gt as the order is GS --> GT --> GTS --> GTX but it should not be much slower.

The M50 is the "media" series if you want more video power look at the G50 the "gaming" series it has a 9700gt and thats faster than the 9600GT in that other notebook.

 

Thank you.

Mind linking that thread?

Is the 1024mb gfx card still nice because it has 512mb more?

I looked at the g50v-a1 but with vista ultimate, which is what I want, it puts me way over what I wanted to pay.

These notebooks are all new though no? Think the g50v-a1 and m50vm-b1 will go down in a month or two or is this cheap as it is now?

Thanks!

 

They are already being sold rather cheap, so not expecting price cuts for quite some time.

The M50Sv was the older model M50 and its still at full price. There is no older G50 model as its new, the closest thing is the G1S series and it did drop in price but well after it was worth buying.

As for memory differences. 1024mb of memory is indeed 2x bigger than 512mb but it will not make a performance difference as a laptop simply wont be playing a game at a high enough setting/resolution to make use of that much memory, often times in laptop world they use more memory to compensate for slower memory.

The 8600gt for example had 2 versions the 256mb GDDR3 and the 512mb DDR2, the 256mb version was 20-30% faster even tho it was half the ram. A double penalty for you if you do not use a x64 operating system is that video memory will take up system memory address space so say you had 4gb installed on a system with a 32bit OS, and you can only use 3.2gb of it with a 512mb card. Well with a 1gb card you would only have 2.8gb of ram to use as it has to hold space for the video card.

I'll find my thread and link to it in a sec.

Here it is: http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=276115