If you had to pick one what one and why

Hi guys me again just wanted to do a poll and the 3 laptops im looking at as i need help big time. I want the best gamer laptop out of these 3 laptops i can get windoes 7 on any of them i know some have vista listed. Games i want to play are Crysis,Left4Dead2,Bad Company2 stuff like that i dont care about anything like movies just gaming lol. Here are the 3 laptops. So if you had to pick one what would it be and why.

System #1

ASUS G50V
CPU: 2.54 Intel Core 2 Duo T9400
Ram: 4 gig
Video Card: NVIDIA GeForce 9800M GS discrete graphics 512 DDR
Hard Drive: 320GB 5,400 rpm X2 theres 640 gigs
Screen: 15"
DVD ROM: DVD burner & Blu-ray.

System #2

Gateway P-7805u P8400
CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo [email protected]
GPU: NVIDIA 9800GTS with 1GB of dedicated video RAM
RAM: 4GB DDR3 PC-8500
HDD: 320GB 7200RPM Drive with second empty drive bay
Display: 17" WUXGA 1920x1200 Full HD
Optical: 8xDVD±RW with LabelFlash
Wi-Fi: Intel 5100AGN

System #3

MSI Model GT725-074US
CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo P8600 2.4G
Ram: 4GB DDR2
Video Card: ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4850 Video Memory 512MB DDR3 VRAM
Hard Drive: 320GB
Screen: 17" WSXGA+
DVD ROM: DVD Super Multi

 

Shouldn't this be in the what to buy forum?

 

See he just wants to but MSI, thats why he is posting here, are ya spamming the Asus and Gateway forums too?

Anyways, from what I have seen, is that upgrading a GPU is pain is the @ss, and its best you buy the laptop, with the most powerful GPU, thats MSI, upgrading the CPU is a breeze.
Btw can ya spend like $200 more? Then maybe GX640 or GX740, but dont quote me on that.

 

already spamed them silicon lol i just dont want to make the wrong decision dont mean to make people mad kosti so silicon you would go for the MSI ? right.

 

I'd say the MSI as well. I dont even own one yet but i feel i love with my buddies gx640 lol.

 

me? Dont u see? I already own one.

 

so i see you have over clocked yours how dose crysis run on your laptop?

 

see, i dont have crysis, i had crysis warhead, and i love HQ, so like an idiot i crancked up the settings. At stock drivers i was getting 20 fps, later i managed 30-something.
I get 38 on gta iv, 45+ on cod6

 

What's your budget ?

 

$800 is all i can aford right now i dont start my job in the army till Nov.6th

 

Bodycount,
If I had to choose now I would go with number 3 again. I chose mine a year ago (with the idea to upgrade it to GT725, which I did recently) and my only regret now is that I can't buy GX740 . For what you deskribe that you're going to use it this is the perfect choise. The Gateway is not bad also, but it is less for gaming and more for movies. It has full HD screen and a card that can't keep up with it. What to say about Asus ... well ... I like the brand, but in this competion here, they just loose.
Now bellow you can see my framerate with Crysis Warhead (Just note that my model is with 1Gb VRAM and better CPU).
=== All on Enthusiast ===
Playable resolution here is below 1024x768. On that resolution my average framerate is 25. But when you go in some good fight the frame rate goes below 24 and sometimes falls to 17. I don't recommend this settings.
=== All on Gamer ===
This is the setting that I play on. Here I was manage to set the game to run at 1280x1024. Absolutely playable. Never had a framerate below 24. Average 28.
So when you play a little bit with settings may be you can find setting with even better framerate. I just wanted to shoot everybody and everything. Good luck on your choise.

 

You play with reduced res? I just cant stand anything other than native res.

And its good you didnt buy GX740, our card is still good enough and if you pop in a quad, it fills in as good as GX740, more or less, it works out cheaper too

 

Yea, I agree with you for resolution, Silicon. This is just this game. I payed now with some settings, shown on the attached pic, and I was able to get a playable frame rate on native resolution.

 

Noob here whats native resolution?

 

Thats when we setup road blocks, until we get the out come that is deemed fair.

 

I really can't understand what Ghola said, but native resolution is the max resolution of the LCD screen. Or within the laptops that you've mentioned:
Gateway - it's native resolution is WUXGA or 1920x1200
MSI - WSXGA+ or 1680x1050
ASUS - you didn't specify it's resolution.

 

Thanks Genna ya Ghola needs to join Mad Tv's fourm thanks for the info Genna.


Dam just seen your system info WoW you got your CPU OC to 3.3Hz Dam hows it run ?

 

Your apserlutely right, native is easily the best res, which is why i bought a machine with fairly low res for 17" .

Asus is 1080 or another 16 to 9 isn't it, MSI's easily the best!

 

Hmmm.... I doubt you have a good selection in here...Get that +300$ from anywhere (food money, save on gas, anything) and roll GX640 - you cannot find better performance for buck value currently. Believe me your won't regret it if you are prepared to handle some initial fixes (disable powerplay or upgrading vbios to avoid black screens, learning to underclock to save battery life etc.)
Yet the gaming performance is brilliant

 

Really ?

10 char

 

actually do save 300 bucks, bt buy 725 and pop in a quad and suddenly you'll realise that your 725 is faster than gx640.
Hopes bodycount didnt cut his broadband, to save $$$

EDIT : I just noticed that you're buying it for $800, I had bought mine for $1600+

 

Have to disagree on that one , the 640 is faster .. It has a better and faster GPU which will destroy the 4850

But he is limited to 800 and from those 3 notebooks , the 725 is better.

 

The HD 5850 doesn't quite destroy the HD 4850, but it has a decent advantage because of higher clock speeds. What kind of Vantage GPU scores does the 4850 get?
DirectX 11 is a big reason to buy the 5-series card, though.

 

IMO DX11 is not a good reason to buy a 5 series .. You will shell out all that money just for some eye candy ? They couldn't make good use of Dx10 , not expecting much from 11

I can match the stock vantage of the Gx640 by overclocking both CPU & GPU but that doesn't mean it will perform same as the 640 in real life gaming scenario. When will you guys understand that Benchmark are just meaningless numbers .....

 

Powerful graphics cards exist precisely for eye candy. Otherwise, everyone would buy lower-end cards and play games just fine on low settings.

The HD 4850 and HD 5850 are very similar cards, so I wouldn't expect a big variance in the performance difference between them in benchmarks and games, and so Vantage ought to be reasonably accurate in this case.

 

Dx9 is still solid to this day , I don't see why one should upgrade if they already have a decent card.

How similar ?

 

They have the same number of shaders and similar architecture, and GDDR3 on a 256-bit interface equals GDDR5 on a 128-bit interface. The biggest difference is clock speeds.

 

Same architecture ? Gddr3 equals Gddr5 ? Anyway i ain't got time for this.

The bottom line is 5850 performs better than a 4850.

 

I didn't say the architecture was the same, but it's definitely very similar. However, 256-bit + GDDR3 does indeed equal 128-bit + GDDR5 for memory bandwidth.
Sure it performs better, but I'd like to see accurate figures as to just how much better.

 

You know what? Its real wierd, but the 4850 and 5850 both have Raw Processing power of 800 GFLOPS.

Mobility Comparison

 

And Yes I totally agree with Death, due to nVidia's reluctance and of course the consoles the Dx11 really didnt end up getting used as much as the amount of provisions MS had provided.

 

That's for the 5850 when clocked at 500MHz. 1000 GFLOPS is the correct figure for the 5850 in the MSI GX640.

If they do indeed perform the same clock-for-clock (which might not be the case, despite the many similarities), then the 5850's 625MHz core clock gives it a 25% advantage over the 4850's 500MHz. There is also an advantage in memory bandwidth, though it's slightly less (~18%).

However, because the two cards aren't quite the same, I cannot say what the difference between them would be in real-world performance.

 

That is wierd.

 

Well ... the difference with the architecture is just to cover DX11 new requirements and according to me, the biggest advantage of this card will be smaller power consumption. Now don't be hurry to say "...better power consummation ... really? The heat of the card is the same if not more! So what is better here?" - The core has a lot of power saving options, which at this time it's obvious that they do not work. Surely it's again the old from a century issue - the drivers. Every time when i read about the architecture of the card I'm amazed of the engineering achievement. So we have to wait and actually see that feature working. And when it is working it will be a beauty! Very powerful card, if not the most powerful (will see what the team of "NoVidia", or how I like to call them - The team without vision will introduce now, but with this 100W of power consumption they are doomed!) with the best performance to watt! This is the only reason to buy 58x0 series card.

 

But I dont know why cant they have both 256 bit bus and GDDR5 memory. It would be so awesome, and also 2GB frame buffer. With these improvements 4850 would suffice.
And btw ATi has been having the dx11 tessellation feature since 2600xt.

 

Whats this madness i see, the 5850 will eat a 4850 in a dog fight, theres no questions, The cards are so different too, bus width, memory size, memory bandwidth and controller's (And cores).

Vantage shows the 5850 being way past the 4850, not just that though, the DX11 support is nice (But not to big atm) but head to head, theres no comparison, the GDDR5 not only makes up for the 4850 having gddr3 and a bigger bus, but still outpaces it a large margin because the effective resulting clock is much larger.

You can't statistically compare clocks and efficiency either, its like CPU's for example, i series make toast from core 2 q.

Architectures - Sinces its sead that 5850's based off 5750 then its running the terrascalar 2 architecture, where as the 4850 (Since our mobile ones are true 4850) is using unified superscalar shader architecture, there are pretty big differences in both in the way the cards handle things. (Since there running very close in configuration its easily safe to assume that its architecture efficiency that makes the 5850 better then 4850, not just hardware.)

GDDR5 is much hotter too from what i can see, and nvidia are just daft for doing this (And desperate) whats to stop ati doing the first notebook hemlock card .

 

AMD's "Terascale 2" is just a label; the architecture itself is still a unified superscalar architecture. Just like its predecessor, Juniper has 10 SIMD cores with 16 superscalar execution units in each, and 5 ALUs in each of those. As such, they both have 800 SPs, and they also share the spec of 40 texture units and 16 ROPs. It's clear that the biggest difference between them will be clock speeds. Nonetheless, I myself pointed out that the performance wouldn't necessarily be the same clock-for-clock (although it should be close), and you seem to have ignored that...

I also pointed out that the 5850 has higher memory bandwidth (~18%), but I'm not sure what you're getting at with "effective resulting clock", nor what usefulness that term has.

Nvidia isn't *that* daft. They're just going to push DirectX 11 performance aspects like tesselation, and Nvidia has a solid advantage in those areas. Overall, I still currently favour ATI because of price/performance, but Nvidia's starting to get somewhat competitive again.

 

5850 with GDDR5 and 500 Mhz core clock has 800 GFLOPS processing power (same as 4850)
BUT 5850 in GX640 is clocked at 625 MHz yields 1000 GFLOPS so that's a 25% increase in raw processing power.

As speaking of DX11 over DX10 and even DX9, The only options currently available are tesselation (increasing poly count for more realism) and depth of field calculations at GPU level (which at least currently kills performance(metro2033 and bc2)).
So, only 2 options for now but I expect game developers will utilize these technologies in nearest future and we'll see some nice visuals.

 

That "rename" covers massive enhancements in how the stream and paralell processing works between them, not only that there were plenty of problems to overcome in the die shrink, I agree with you in the sense that the architectures are exact (except the 38 series, that was completely different) and bare in mind there are different revisions of the architecture themselves (again superscaller versions.)

As for juniper itself, obviously a much higher instruction execution rate as well as all 5 series featuring new aa algorithm sets, modifications directly to the rops and tmus, so the hardware may be exactly the same in the list, but each individual component has either had a modification to it one way or another (again undeniably killing the mobile 4850).

Effective clock is your clock speed modified by gddr ram type (( i think like 4 x whatever the 5850 is running.)

Nvidia are pushing dx11 out over the cuda cores, amd are now working on doing this over the stream processors, odds are nvidia wont even come close to this when the dedicated hardware kicks in along side of atis stream, and the power requirements on the mobile fermi are a joke

 

There's definitely modifications - I never denied that - because at the very least Juniper brought in all the DirectX 11 functionality. However, your claims of "obviously a much higher instruction execution rate" and "massive enhancements" seem entirely unfounded - what are they based on? There's definitely new features in the 5850, in particular DirectX 11, but also some new AA algorithms. However, I don't think there was necessarily much of an improvement in performance in each of these individual components, if any at all. I don't see any reason to assume that's the case without seeing actual proof.

What's the point of "effective clock speed"? Memory bandwidth is what matters, and the difference is 18%, like I said before - 256-bit vs 128-bit and GDDR5 vs GDDR3 both correspond to a doubling of bandwidth.

In any case, your claims are relatively meaningless without proof, preferably in the form of real-world benchmarks. I continue to assert that there should be a significant difference in performance, but it would be almost entirely due to clock speeds. Even so, at the same clock speeds the 5850 would be a better buy due to the new features.

 

Infact not only the AA algorithms have handled improvement, even the AF have too, and the texturing filtering type has been expanded much further, and like molius said a 25 percent in processing power is undoubtably that "massive enhancement" to processing power.

Curious, how are you coming up with 18 percent? is it just the difference between speeds?

if your comparing then, how would a clocked 4850 running at 535 core and 1150 memory do?

As for real world benchmarks, theres alot out there now and its undeniably much more powerful then the 4850 mobility and as youve said before the 5850 and 5870 are just about exact so you can get real performance tests from that if were shot on benches, if you like we can begin collecting some comparison data? Ive the 4850 ready to go so just get me the name of some game/test and i shall run it And dedicated tesselation facilities are supposedly working really well?

another thing we can factor in is drivers, im not sure how well 5 series are optimised now but they took a while to get on their feet.

5850 would be better f sure at same clock, more features, cheaper manufacture cost (supposedly)

Edit: Forgive errors, on my morning wake up device lol (N900)

 

That 25 percent increase in processing power is caused solely by the clock speed difference of 625MHz vs 500MHz, and I've been saying all along that the biggest difference is clock speeds.

As for the 18 percent difference in memory bandwidth, Wikipedia's figures are 54.4GB/s for the 4850 and 64GB/s for the 5850, which is around 18% more. Of course, that's also the same as the difference between 1000MHz and 850MHz, because of what I said before about 256-bit + GDDR3 equaling 128-bit + GDDR5 for memory bandwidth when at the same clock speeds.

Also, the 5850 and 5870 aren't quite exact, because there's still the 12% difference in core clock speeds.

An HD 4850 at 535/1150 has ~14% less raw processing power and 15% more memory bandwidth than an HD 5850 at 625/1000. I would expect the HD 5850 at stock clocks to win most benchmarks by a slight margin - 5-10% - but it might lose some due to memory bandwidth.

How about the Resident Evil 5 benchmark? Can you run that?
Settings:
DirectX 10,
1680x1050,
Vsync off and framerate unlocked,
Motion Blur off,
8x AA,
everything else set to "High"

My preliminary guess is a ~8% win for the 5850 @ 625/1000 vs the 4850 @ 535/1150.

I got 55.2 FPS for the Fixed Benchmark and 53 FPS for the Variable Benchmark with those settings.

 

The thing is that ATi went crazy(ok, not really) but they jumped to MXM 3.0 so I cant upgrade to 5XXX series, so I'll do my best to assure myself that my old card is as good as the newer ones, thats the best we can do, besides burning a hole in our pockets and jumping towards newer lappies

 

Hehe unfortunately im not going to try and brave them sort of clocks again on the 4850 until next winter when im sat in sub zero .

Ill run te 4850 at stock if thats ok with you but i shall begin downloading the benchmark now.

The 4850 seems to experience some strange issues when overclocking out of the blue haha. takes about a night to get up to clocks also.

I once did know a guy running 625/1200 on eh 4850 (Supised it isnt dead yet. i think he scored 12000+ in 06 with a p9500 processor, it was like over 6k on sm2 and 3)

Forgive netbook typing : Keep missing keys

 

No worries. Stock is 500/850, isn't it? If so, the HD 5850 ought to have a solid lead (I'm guessing you'll get 45-50 FPS), but I guess we'll see.

 

Ehh shoot, i can't 1680 x 1050, you good for a 1080p run?

Sorry i've not been active, busy day.

Variable 1080p with above settings :
38 FPS, also im not sure how well i5 is in comparison to q9000 so i set a 2 core afinity.

Fixed 1080p with above settings :
32.3 FPS
Afinity 2

 

If you can do 1920x1080 you can do 1680x1050, surely. You can test it with 2 core affinity if you like, but I'm pretty sure this benchmark will barely be affected by CPU performance anyway.

 

Wow ... a true battle is here
As I remember this was a thread just to help the guy to choose laptop ...
By the way, 1920x1080 is 16:9 and 1680:1050 is 16:10, so there is no way to support them both.

 

That's not true. You have the option of stretching, or just having a black border around it. Neither is desirable, but for the purpose of a benchmark it will work.

@cataclysm
If the game doesn't give you the option of 1680x1050, you can just set your resolution in Windows to 1680x1050 and it will work.

 

Tried in window mode, my tv doesn't natively support that res and my vga port is damaged,

Itl have to be 1080p or lower then 1680x1050 (Possibly into the 1440's)