Which laptop will be best for games?

welant

I'm looking at two similarly priced laptops at play.com (hoping to get the RAC discount if its still available)

one is the Acer Aspire 6530 (AMD Turion RM-70 2.0GHz / 4GB / 250GB / 16" / Blu-ray / Vista Home Premium, ATI Radeon HD 3650 512MB )

the other is the Acer Aspire 6930G (Core 2 Duo T5800 2GHz / 3GB / 250GB / 16" / Blu-ray / Vista Home Premium, nVidia 9300GS 256MB)

(it wont let me post the links)

The laptop is not just for games, but i'd like it to be able to handle them on lower settings if possible

From my (limited) research, the extra grunt of the ATI graphics card should more than compensate for a slightly slower processor. But i have read some bad reports about the Turion processor for games.

What do viewers of this board think? I'm aware that neither of these are "gaming" laptops, but i'm looking to stay below 500 quid.

thanks

Duk

Personally i would go for the top one.

GFX card is slightly better (the two models are close but the 512 Ram snatches it imo)

AMDs generally run faster for media and it comes with 4GB ram.

I would choose the top one the Ram will make everyday stuff faster.

Hope this helps

boso

The Acer Aspire 6530 would be the one I'd choose, it has higher RAM, and the graphics card is bigger.

With it may not be excellent with games, it will definately do better than the other one.

clickclash

It really depends on what kind of games you want to be playing, do you have any examples of the games you want to play on it now or in future?

exprog

Also, you need to be aware of whether your games require the diagonal keys for movement (i.e. the 7,9,1, and 3 on a pc keyboard) as lots of laptops don't have them.

[Deleted User]

Neither will be very good for gaming, graphics chips in laptops are usually aimed at HDMI output and DVD/Video performance rather than framerates and image quality in games.

welant

whatever runs really. Some examples of games i'd be interested in trying

TES: Oblivion (in at the deep end there in terms of graphics power required?)
Empire: Total War

Not to interested in fast paced FPS games. No crysis for example!

And happy to turn down the settings to get things to run.

Armengar

Aspire 6530 IMHO. You will struggle getting over 1024x in terms of screen resolution so it will not look brilliant. Both of those games are heavy CPU users too.

exprog

welant wrote: »

Empire: Total War

You probably know, but just in case, Empire: TotalWar requires Steam, which many people consider to be malware and refuse to install. Others have installed it and then had big trouble. For more info see the thread in the Empire: TotalWar forum at www.totalwar.org