Gt627-218 Vs. Gt725-074

I have narrowed my choices down to these laptops. I am having trouble deciding which one is better for my needs. I'm going to college but have to leave my desktop due to floor space, so I need a gaming laptop to continue my favorite pastime

Pros and Cons:

627

Blu-Ray drive- dunno how much I would actually use it though.
Smaller screen, more portable.

725

Slightly better video card- but it's ATI and driver support is worse than NVIDIA

I've heard it has a slightly better build quality.

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I think basically the only difference is weight/size, the video cards, and the Blu-Ray vs DVD drive. Is the 4850 better than the 9800 gs enough to justify $50, a blu-ray drive, and portability?

Such an agonizing decision.

 

i'd say it is not worth it.

http://www.notebookcheck.net/Mobile-Graphics-Cards-Benchmark-List.844.0.html

plus a 9800gs can be flashed to a 9800m gts, and the gs is at least 55nm, so should have slightly better performance and less heat. the 4850 will only deliver maybe 10-20% increased performance.
and with the blu-ray drive, there is no point if you don't have 1080p resolution, or can at least watch it on a 1080p screen.
and $50 is nothing with a decision like this, so it comes down to portability.

i would also recommend to check out this laptop:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834220483 $1300

 

10-20% performance increase?

thats quite big in my book...

 

I dont agree with the 1080p for blueray, that res on a small (17 inch screen is silly to be honest)

The HD 4850 is powerfuller then the 9800gtx and should perform very good in comparison to the 260 (Tester found a way to push past limit clocks on 4850, almost making it as effective as the desktop version )

And 10-20% is definately a great improvement HOWEVER*

Alot of companies that release games tend to favour Nvidia over ATI so alot of games are fine tuned for Nvidia, however ATI is very nice.

The bad thing about ATI is driver support, however the community is modding the newer desktop drivers for the Laptops, and its been working, Ive seen some dramatic improvements in the 9.2-9.3 drivers =)

I would definately go for the 725 for gaming + Ati offer an overdrive tool which you can OC your GPU without breaking its warrenty.

 

Thanks for the responses. I think I will go with the 725 for pure awesomeness. =)

Hopefully I won't run into driver/ATI issues and whatnot...

 

Im still using stock drivers and i have no problems, will let you know if i do run into anything "disturbing"

 

Thanks a lot catacylsm. Now all I have to do is convince myself that a 32 bit operating system is acceptable. =) I guess I can justify it because the gig of ram I would gain doesn't return as much performance as the turbo mode does.

 

Well i know Sena converted his last gig of ram into a Ram Disk (Hell of alot faster then HD but only limited to a 1GB) so hes utilising all 4 Gb's of ram, i think you can also get Vista 64bit from microsoft if you pay $10 for the shipping, im not to sure on that one though.