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Friend asked me for laptop advice; oh dear...
Tropez
Posts: 3,696 Forumite
in Techie Stuff
So when it comes to desktop PCs I know my stuff but when it comes to laptops, not so much...
With that in mind, a friend of mine is looking for a laptop for their teenage daughter. It will be used for the basics, such as schoolwork and the like, but my friend also wants her daughter to be able to do some light-gaming (seems one of the reasons for this is to free up the family PC a bit more as she currently games on that). The girl is apparently a WoW player and into RPGs such as Mass Effect, Skyrim, The Witcher and a few others.
I know enough to know they need a dedicated graphics card to be able to do any real gaming on a laptop and I also know enough to know that WoW's graphics engine is outdated and can be sluggish at high settings, even on some of the mid-range desktop graphics cards like the Radeon 5870, so I know out of the options given to me it is likely that WoW will only run on mid-range settings at best.
The other games, I'm not so sure - I've seen Mass Effect 2 (which I believe uses the Unreal 3 engine) and CoD: MW1&2 running on an old i3 with a 1Gb 330m so I believe that these options should be suitable for someone that won't be hardcore gaming.
Nonetheless...
The first option is an Intel Core i7 3610QM running at 2.3Ghz with 8Gb RAM and running a 2Gb dedicated GT640M.
The second option is a Intel Core i7 3630QM running at 2.4Ghz with 6Gb RAM and running a 2Gb dedicated HD7670M.
From what I've read, the 640M beats the 7670M in overall performance and coupled with the extra RAM makes it the more obvious choice over a machine that boasts nothing extra but a 100Mhz clock speed improvement. Also, the first laptop is £50 cheaper.
But, what I'm interested in is providing my friend (and by extension her daughter) with realistic expectations as to how it will perform with her favourite games, particularly WoW. Even though we're not talking about someone likely to try and run Crysis on Ultra settings at a static 60fps, I still wouldn't like to tell them that it will handle everything they currently enjoy with ease when it is possible they'll have to downgrade graphics to make the experience smooth and enjoyable.
There's a lot of fake Youtube videos suggesting that demanding games can be run on Ultra with any old card and some of the benchmarking sites throw up erroneous info - I still recall one benchmarking site a few years ago making an absurd claim that a GMA3100 could handle FEAR on maximum settings! :rotfl:
So, after that long, and no doubt rambling post, is anyone with experience of either or both of these chipsets in a similar (or identical) configuration able to comment on what can be expected gaming wise?
Cheers in advance!
With that in mind, a friend of mine is looking for a laptop for their teenage daughter. It will be used for the basics, such as schoolwork and the like, but my friend also wants her daughter to be able to do some light-gaming (seems one of the reasons for this is to free up the family PC a bit more as she currently games on that). The girl is apparently a WoW player and into RPGs such as Mass Effect, Skyrim, The Witcher and a few others.
I know enough to know they need a dedicated graphics card to be able to do any real gaming on a laptop and I also know enough to know that WoW's graphics engine is outdated and can be sluggish at high settings, even on some of the mid-range desktop graphics cards like the Radeon 5870, so I know out of the options given to me it is likely that WoW will only run on mid-range settings at best.
The other games, I'm not so sure - I've seen Mass Effect 2 (which I believe uses the Unreal 3 engine) and CoD: MW1&2 running on an old i3 with a 1Gb 330m so I believe that these options should be suitable for someone that won't be hardcore gaming.
Nonetheless...
The first option is an Intel Core i7 3610QM running at 2.3Ghz with 8Gb RAM and running a 2Gb dedicated GT640M.
The second option is a Intel Core i7 3630QM running at 2.4Ghz with 6Gb RAM and running a 2Gb dedicated HD7670M.
From what I've read, the 640M beats the 7670M in overall performance and coupled with the extra RAM makes it the more obvious choice over a machine that boasts nothing extra but a 100Mhz clock speed improvement. Also, the first laptop is £50 cheaper.
But, what I'm interested in is providing my friend (and by extension her daughter) with realistic expectations as to how it will perform with her favourite games, particularly WoW. Even though we're not talking about someone likely to try and run Crysis on Ultra settings at a static 60fps, I still wouldn't like to tell them that it will handle everything they currently enjoy with ease when it is possible they'll have to downgrade graphics to make the experience smooth and enjoyable.
There's a lot of fake Youtube videos suggesting that demanding games can be run on Ultra with any old card and some of the benchmarking sites throw up erroneous info - I still recall one benchmarking site a few years ago making an absurd claim that a GMA3100 could handle FEAR on maximum settings! :rotfl:
So, after that long, and no doubt rambling post, is anyone with experience of either or both of these chipsets in a similar (or identical) configuration able to comment on what can be expected gaming wise?
Cheers in advance!
0
Comments
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CPU isn't really as important as the GPU when it comes to gaming.
So, perhaps if there is a fixed budget, compromise on the CPU and look for a better GPU.0 -
those specs are probably better than what 99 percent of the users of this forum have, are they willing to spend a grand on it?!!
> . !!!! ----> .0 -
personally i would go for the first one, regards graphics i would go for the 640m as it really is all going to be down to the gpu with regards the gpu clock speed as well to how well it streams it out and keeps up basically the faster gpu clock speed the better which on the first one is 625mhz also the better the ram on the machine feeding the main cpu will speed things up as well making multi tasking easy so to me is a no brainer.
specs
http://www.geforce.co.uk/hardware/notebook-gpus/geforce-gt-640m/specifications
where as amd is a very different creature with pinning its specs and colors to the mast they use all sorts of fancy words but will not underpin specs down that people can check again also regards that series of card listed hd7670m also certain features only work with an amd platform which that second machine is not.
specs
http://www.amd.com/us/products/notebook/graphics/7000m/7500m-7600m/Pages/radeon-7500m-7600m.aspx#2
hope has helped
basil :beer:0
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