Chimpy Chompy on 25/4/2008 at 10:36

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Hi all, I'm thinking of getting a laptop, but am well out of touch with hardware these days. I'm not after Real Ultimate Power, however it would be good if it could throw around say World of Warcraft at a decent rate. Or other such few-years-old games - I don't mind turning off fancy graphical bells and whistles.

So what kind of graphics hardware should I look for? And what price range are we talking? They seem to start around £350ish but I suspect I might want something with slightly more oomph.

jay pettitt on 27/4/2008 at 13:03

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A word to the wise. nVidia's universal drivers don't work out the box on their laptop cards. There's no technical reason for this - it's just that laptop manufacturers like you to go to them to get drivers - which of course they diligently make available in a timely fashion. Oh wait.

The standard drivers can be made to gogo by removing reference to blocked cards in an .ini file, but it's a bit of a rude surprise if you're not expecting to be told that your shiny new hardware isn't compatible when you've just downloaded a shiny new driver update.

jay pettitt on 28/4/2008 at 22:54

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My understanding of nVidias numbering is that x600 cards represent the midrange stuff, which given what you've said is probably a sound choice.

My lappy has a 7600 thingy - which I stumped up for in case I fancied a bit of gaming. It's competent at games from a couple of years ago, Half Life 2, Doom 3 et all - but Bioshock was definitely a struggle. Sound is an issue - it's inbuilt intel badged stuff and it's prone to spluttering and breaking up on some games. My laptop manufacturer has yet to post driver updates. Lazy bastards.

Anyhow - Vista is such a god-awful disaster that I finally cast windows into the murky pits of my draw of abandoned CDs and old mice (along with 3.1 - windows for workgroups on 3.5" floppy) for all eternity and have been happily married to Ubuntu ever since. Which also means that I no longer do any gaming to speak of and the extra fifty quids or so spent on semi-respectable video tomfoolery was wasted. Oh well...

Dario on 5/5/2008 at 15:47

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I wouldn't buy a brand-new laptop (unless you're very moolah-inclined). I got a used Dell D600 for my dad on Ebay (via Buy It Now), for $300, and it can run Half-Life 2 on medium settings.

Just make sure you check for several things before buying used. 1) If they say "we haven't checked the battery/screen/keyboard - condition unknown", forget it. 2) I forgot what number 2 was, but don't forget to check for it, or you might get a bad laptop. (course, then you can always give them the dreaded negative feedback for selling you a defective piece of crap)


I've had two X-Fi's. They're excellent for headphone users (I mean serious people who ONLY use headphones when gaming) but are otherwise a fantastic waste of money.

I have to use an X-Fi Xtreme Gamer edition for recording purposes (my Audigy 2 Gamer wouldn't fit in my new motherboard, and had a popping center channel issue)... I started with an X-Fi Xtreme Crap edition (aka Xtreme Music [Edit: Xtreme *Audio*]) but the rear sound in games is garbage, and recording is broken when you're trying to Frap ingame audio and microphone audio at the same time (raises hand).

I was emailing tech support for about 2 weeks, and they finally ran the issues up to some programmers, and said that they MIGHT have some driver fixes coming for the rear-sound and recording issues... but that's not a guarantee. As soon as an exec finds out about it, I know he's going to say, "What?! Spend money on fixing issues for cards we already released??? It's cheaper to just dish out the NEXT cards, and let people UPGRADE because they can't stand the old ones!"

(that's also Adobe's new work ethic for a lot of their CS3 products. Why patch dreadfully annoying bugs, when you can keep the programmers focused on CS4, and then sell that sooner?)

Dario on 5/5/2008 at 17:49

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Oops... I meant to say Xtreme Audio.