Considering Inspiron 1720, a few questions

My XPS 1530 order was cancelled due to price mistake, that's made for a horrible day so far. I have moved on and accepted it and now looking at the Inspiron 1720.

SYSTEM COLOR Jet Black edit
PROCESSOR Intel® Core™ 2 Duo T8300 (2.4GHz/800Mhz FSB/3MB cache) edit
OPERATING SYSTEM Genuine Windows® Vista Home Premium Edition SP1 edit
DISPLAY High Resolution, glossy widescreen 17.0 inch display (1920 x 1200) edit
VIDEO CARD 256MB NVIDIA® GeForce® 8600M GT edit
MEMORY 2GB Shared Dual Channel DDR2 at 667MHz edit
HARD DRIVE Size: 250GB SATA Hard Drive (5400RPM) edit
OPTICAL DRIVE CD / DVD writer (DVD+/-RW Drive) edit
WIRELESS NETWORK CARDS Dell Wireless 1395 802.11g Mini Card edit
INTEGRATED WEBCAM No Webcam Option edit
BATTERY OPTIONS 56Whr Lithium Ion Battery (6 cell) edit
SOUND OPTIONS High Definition Audio 2.0 edit

with a 2 year warranty, this is all coming out to $1040



my main concerns are the monitor. How would games perform at this level? I can't imagine the 8600m GT pushing games very well at 1920x1200. How would games look at non-native resolutions, if I was to move it down to 1440x900 or somewhere along there?

I'm not going to be playing any amazing games on here, maybe CS:S, civilization 4, and red alert 3.

I'd just like to get an idea of how it's going to be, any recommendations people may have, etc.

thanks!!

 

IMO games look fine at non-native resolutions when you have pixels as small as with a 1920x1200 screen.

 

Hey, those ARE the games I play it on my Inspiron 1720 too! And no, there won't be any problems. I ran it straight on those resolutions and it was fine. (1920x1200) However for CS:S, whenever there was a smoke grenade being hurled at your screen, you might want to turn away from it, as your FPS will drop by 10.

So I ran CS:S on 1680X1050, and it was fine. There wasn't any pixelation whatever. The higher the resolution on screen the smaller everything goes on screen even fonts. So pixelation is hard to notice.

However don't expect very high results on the 8600 GT ddr2 on g the inspiron machine as compared to XPS 1530's DDR3 8600M GT, but the difference would only be the clock speed. Just don't play Crysis on it, you need to do alot of overclocking to your GPU. And yes, overclocking is a tricky thing, so be careful what you wish for.