Campquake Senate

So I'm shopping around for a comp for school finally, and ive got a few questions.

First: 1GB RAM or 2GB RAM? Would 1 be sufficient for gaming on a non-intense level? Would i

Second: What processor? AMD or Intel? I had that snafu with Oblivion not working on a certain type of Intel, but is it good overall?

I'll probably have the computer bought by the time any of you respond, so feel free to make your points so that I feel bad about it afterwards and learn what I can do next time.

thanks!

One more thing:

ATI RADEON X1200 vs. NVIDIA GeForce Go 6150 (UMA)

Which is better at handling animation and photo-editing programs as well as games. I know that there is better, but I can always switch it out latter. This is just for starters.

As for that comment I made in the first post about me getting the computer soon.... yeah... that's not going to happen. I may be off at college, but I am still so whipped as far as buying things for school goes. Damn it! *sigh*

If I can get this computer I'll be back in the fray as far as gaming goes. Living without a computer is so hard. It's been two weeks... this is my first usage in two weeks. This is a more expensive habit than smoking! Except for that whole cancer part.

I appreciate any help you can give me.

I would go for 2GB of RAM. Its cheap enough now and the performance is very nice.

I'm partial to AMD and cannot make unbiased comments regarding CPUs lol

I'm assuming we're talking laptops here as the two video cards you mentioned are both integrated. correct?

If so, you can't swap out the video on a laptop.
Both of those cards appear to be stripped down versions of better cards, which in itself is kinda scary if you want them for gaming performance.
I would try to spend a little more in this area if at all possible since you will be stuck with it.

I'm with RB on the RAM thing, these days the prices aren't too bad, so half of the time it's not alot more to just get the additional RAM.

Myself, I haven't dealt with AMD's recent stuff, so I can't give a real "this does that and their's doesn't" comparison to you. I can't say that I'm biased one way or another either though when it comes to personal preference. I used to run AMD, now I like Intel, but that doesn't mean that I wouldn't go back if I found AMD had better offerings.
For my company, I basically just tend to stick with whats been dependable, and that AMD has not been. I've had about 10 AMD chips die on me and not a single Intel. So these days, I just buy Intel because they've been more dependable for me. I just avoid their servers like the plague!! What a PITA!!
I must admit also, that the new Quad core Xeon chips are very impressive when it comes to performance. But that info is useless to you since I seriously doubt you're looking into anything Xeon.

KrAzYdAvE wrote:I'm assuming we're talking laptops here as the two video cards you mentioned are both integrated. correct?

If so, you can't swap out the video on a laptop.
Both of those cards appear to be stripped down versions of better cards, which in itself is kinda scary if you want them for gaming performance.
I would try to spend a little more in this area if at all possible since you will be stuck with it.

Oh. I didn't know that. As for the RAM, there is an option for one of the laptops to exchange the 1GB for 4GB of RAM. But that laptop is a Toshiba. That gets into something completely different. Toshiba or HP? Those are the main two I'm looking at. The main focus for me is going to be the ability to run the programs that are used in the picture-editing and animation programs. I just don't know a whole lot about the two in terms of better-ish-ness. Gaming is going to be able to happen no matter what, I'm guessing, as I probably won't be playing any demanding computer games. I mean, how demanding is c:ss?

This isn't going to be the computer that I'm going to have for the rest of my life. It just has to last me four years. That's four years of gaming and school stuff. I'm not worried about text docs obviously, it's just the animation and editing programs I'm thinking about.

well, first off, 4 years can be a long time when it comes to computers!
so 4 years down the road, you will probably HATE whatever you buy now, even if you bought a top of the line computer.

Toshiba vs. HP? I prefer HP for hardware support reasons.
But who knows what Toshiba is offering these days!
Support on a laptop is pretty important since things to tend to break on them and they can't be easilly serviced by just anyone.
The longer the support you have to cover something such as a broken video cable, or failing PC-Card slot, the better off you are.
I have dealt with HP ALOT on the phone and even though they are now bouncing you to India 90% of the time, I really have no complaints about them. Well they do like sticking the OS on the hard disk lately and not giving you restore disks which I'm not fond of, but that shouldn't really affect you much.
Honestly most of your picture editing performance comes from the CPU and hard drive speeds. I've been very impressed with the speed of the core 2 duo laptops, but don't confuse them with the "core duo", there's definitely a difference!
For hard drive speed, try to make sure you get a 7200rpm drive, SATA preferrably.
Laptops have always been plagued by slow 4500rpm and 5400rpm drives. The increase to a 7200rpm is definitely something that you will notice.

4GB of RAM is way overkill and the price jumps up considerably, 2GB is the sweet spot.

Ender[CotC] wrote: Oh. I didn't know that. As for the RAM, there is an option for one of the laptops to exchange the 1GB for 4GB of RAM. . .

4Gigs of RAM is a bit confusing under Windows XP/Vista unless you have Windows XP/Vista 64-Bit or any flavor of 64-Bit Linux.

Windows XP/Vista (the regular 32-bit versions) have a 4 Gigabyte physical memory limit. But Windows 32-bit OS'es will split your RAM into two chunks, one chunk for System and one for User (applications). This will half the amount of RAM available for *you* to run games / apps and stuff. There is a /3GB option in the boot.ini to allow you to pull more of that RAM over to the user side. However, doing so will impact Window's ability to run multiple applications.

This doesn't mean that you shouldn't buy as much RAM as you can afford, it just goes to say that you shouldn't expect to see 4 Gigs available to you for your games. Under Vista, 1 Gig is the minimum recommended by many. The 2 Gig recommendation is the sweet-spot where cost and performance are optimal.

First off, every single toshiba I have seen (about 30, no kidding) all suck balls and break more often than launch xbox 360's. I've to deal with so many of them and they are the kind of computer that will last you maybe a couple months than you pretty much have no choice but to throw it out, so no to them.

Support for laptops... you are much better off on your own, and learning how to take care of your laptop than just being a simple user who doesn't notice when something is wrong nor how to fix it. Support wise, not something for you to make your decision based off of b/c they are not very helpful at all, and they usually have no idea what any problem on a computer is, nor have any suggestions on how to fix it.

Intel: Core 2 Duo, Core 2 Quad only
AMD: any of their dual cores are fine

Video cards: GeForce anything 7000's or 8000's, anything lower than that sux a lot nowadays and are completely obsolete and incompatable with a large majority of major editing software and games, and won't handle most anything anymore. ATI little of, the one video card I had from them was great at the time and lasted a long time, and still isn't broken, but NVIDIA is dominating the market mostly.

2GB's of ram are a must for all you want to do, you can't handle lower if you do intense picture/movie editing with gaming too.

Hard drive wise, nowadays almost every hard drive for laptops come 7200 RPM standard, they won't give you the option to downgrade simply b/c the price difference is so tiny it's not worth the processing speed difference, and now their minimum size is well over 100 GB's too.

In general, and you call me biased for whatever reason you like, Dell has always been the one company that I've trusted the most for everything I've ever needed. Never has a dell failed to run anything I put on it, never has one burned out, died, or broken on me, and they pretty much own the market in price for most parts. You can get some really nice laptops there, and they also have really great payment plans too (Like for ex., a high end multimedia graphics laptop, costs I'd say for this example's purpose, $2000, you simply get an account through them, and you end up paying only about $40 a month minimum, and no interest first 18 months). So affordability there's always a way around that.

GVSU... Hmm, I remember there being numerous computer labs with free computers there you could use, so I have no idea where/why you're paying for internet at some obscure place.

Some other things you want to look for on a laptop:

Ethernet capability, make sure it's good quality and a high speed wireless card, b+g compatible, that way you won't have compatibility or communication issues between the laptop and whatever router you're connecting through. And having an actual jack for LAN cable is a must too (though good luck trying to find a computer without one nowadays lol).

Oh, and you're gonna want to go out and by a LAN adapter for your 360 so you have internet for that too.

Sound wise, as long as the laptop doesn't come with some really crappy 16-bit audio that sounds like crap, then you should be fine.

I think anything else on a laptop is basically cosmetic purpose that you'd have to select for yourself based on your own personal preference.

And are you sure about that ram split thing? I'm almost sure that's a Vista only thing that they're trying to correct for the next service pack 1 in january.

D.A.R.K.[CotC] wrote:GVSU... Hmm, I remember there being numerous computer labs with free computers there you could use, so I have no idea where/why you're paying for internet at some obscure place.

First off, the computers there (specifically the ones in the labs i'm allowed to use as a freshmen) are very old. At least 5-7 years old. That's what I've been living with for the past two weeks, which is why I cry on the inside.

Also, I have no idea what your talking about. "...paying for internet at some obscure place..."? My tuition helps pay for the wireless internet that is all over campus including my dorm. As long as the laptop i get has a wireless card... I'm pretty sure I'm good.


Thank you all for your advice. I was pretty shaky about the Toshiba, though I was considering it because of the 4GB of RAM. But since that is not a serious up-side anymore, I'll look into the stuff you guys mentioned. Hey! a plus side is, if I do get the stuff you mentioned, you guys will know what I'm talking about when I come to you with problems in the future.

We're always here, bro!

Ender[CotC] wrote:Hey! a plus side is, if I do get the stuff you mentioned, you guys will know what I'm talking about when I come to you with problems in the future.

D.A.R.K.[CotC] wrote:And are you sure about that ram split thing? I'm almost sure that's a Vista only thing that they're trying to correct for the next service pack 1 in january.

They might be trying to correct it. I'm not sure though since I'm not planning on Vista in my upgrade path, and I only learned about the limit when I was piecing together a new system and caught on to some user reviews of 4Gig RAM modules (4 x 1GB).

Source #1: Memory specifications
All editions of Windows Vista 64-bit provide increased memory support beyond the standard 4 gigabytes (GB) available with 32-bit editions. Refer to the specific edition of Windows Vista 64-bit to determine maximum memory capacity.

See: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/produc ... 64bit.mspx
(This defines Vista 32-bit as a 4Gig OS.)

Source #2: increaseuserva Megabytes
Specifies the amount of memory, in megabytes, for user-mode virtual address space. This variable can have any value between 2048 (2 GB) and 3072 (3 GB) megabytes in decimal notation. Windows uses the remaining address space (4 GB minus the specified amount) as its kernel-mode address space.

See: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa906211.aspx

Summary: Microsoft doesn't come straight out and tell you any of this. (Edit: I guess they do!) But reading many forums around you'll see testimonial that XP and Vista are not showing the full 4 Gigs on various computers. The above quote from MSDN explains that Win32 uses up to a full 4 Gigs of RAM, but then splits a portion of that RAM for the OS'es needs. The user can select up to 3 Gigs for themselves while Win32 will take the remaining amount.

Ender[CotC] wrote:

D.A.R.K.[CotC] wrote: GVSU... Hmm, I remember there being numerous computer labs with free computers there you could use, so I have no idea where/why you're paying for internet at some obscure place.

First off, the computers there (specifically the ones in the labs i'm allowed to use as a freshmen) are very old. At least 5-7 years old. That's what I've been living with for the past two weeks, which is why I cry on the inside.

Also, I have no idea what your talking about. "...paying for internet at some obscure place..."? My tuition helps pay for the wireless internet that is all over campus including my dorm. As long as the laptop i get has a wireless card... I'm pretty sure I'm good.


Thank you all for your advice. I was pretty shaky about the Toshiba, though I was considering it because of the 4GB of RAM. But since that is not a serious up-side anymore, I'll look into the stuff you guys mentioned. Hey! a plus side is, if I do get the stuff you mentioned, you guys will know what I'm talking about when I come to you with problems in the future.

Those computers are not old/bad enough to be as bad as you claim, I used them, and they worked just fine. They're the same ones we had in high school, just faster and with less security/restrictions

So a quick update on this topic:

I haven't gotten it together enough to go out and buy a computer that would serve all my needs (school first and gaming second), but I recently e-mailed my film/video advisor and asked what type of computer he recommended for students in my field. He recommends the Macbook or Macbook Pro. Now, I researched it a little on the web and it seems that I would be able to use any windows os in addition to apples. I don't know how the mac usually gets along with valve and it's games, but it seems that if I were to get a Macbook, it would work fine for both of my needs (yes, gaming as you all are probably aware of is a need).

I was just wondering what your thoughts were on the Macbook and the Macbook pro and whether or not this would could be a good/bad option for my gaming career (as it will obviously be fine and dandy for school).

I would hate to get a Macbook only to find that I wouldn't be able to game with you guys.