Laptop question about SH3 and SH4

[The Bandit]

well I've decided to get a laptop, just so I can have somthing portable, and I know that SH3 and SH4 were not built with them in mind but, I was wondering which intergrated graphics chipsets that they work with. Right now I'm looking at a Dell with ATI Radeon® Xpress 1150 that goes up to 256, I've also been looking at a more expensive toshiba u300 (weights 4.5 pounds and has a 13.3) and it will have Intel GMA 950 graphics. I would think that the basic CPU in both cases (the cheapest Dell would come with a Sempron 3500+ and the cheapest Toshiba would probably be a Pentium Dual Core 1.73ghz, but might end up being a Celeron 520) would be able to run SH3 great and SH4 pretty good, I'm not looking to buy a gaming laptop but, playing these games on it would be a plus. Anyhow I am just wondering what you guys have and what works, I know that a lot of integrated graphics chipsets laptops have will just NOT work with some games, so I just want to go with whatever works with them.

[Canovaro]

I would not recommend a celeron in a laptop since they tend to get very warm. After some time dust will get into you laptop and things might heat up, causing the laptop to shut down. Better have a Pentium in your laptop.

I'm not sure about the Sempron, could be the same story for AMD. Maybe you better get an Athlon, but again I'm not sure about that.

[Kaleu_Mihoo]

I have a 1.5 intel centrino laptop with mobile radeon 9700 graphic card (64 MB vid memory) and 512 MB ram. SH3 (GWX) is running just ok, except of many explosions in the same time. No info on SH4, because not really interested in that sim. The advantage of centrino is, you can tone down the core voltage with some free tools (default 1,340 V, my laptop running on 0,940V), which means a major reduction of heat and power conspumption from the battery. Under normal work, the temperature never exceeds 52 deg C, and it is not necessary to use a cooling fan at all :rock:
So I would also recommend Intel and not AMD, as they are getting much warmer, like Canovaro allready said.
cheers

[SilentOtto]

And as far as I know, those intel 94* or 95* graphics chipsets are sluggish for gaming.
I know, my centrino laptop has the 945 chipset and with 3D apps it is one of the slowest things I had seen in years. Do not touch that for gaming!

And btw yes at least this centrino gets hot!

[The Bandit]

thats a good idea to have a look at the operating temp of the system. The main reason I was looking at the intel graphics is compatibuility. I've heard that a lot fo the ATI or Nvidia integrated chipsets are not regcognized by some games. I don't mean for this to be a pure gaming laptop, I just want to be able to run SH3 and SH4 pretty well. Both are pretty vanilla compared to what's out there now. I might look at laptops that have separate video cards but they are usualluy a bit more expensive.

[johnno74]

2nd that advice about celerons. They don't step down their clock frequency when the CPU is idle.

Thats all rather old tech now, intel core cpus are what pretty much all new laptops have, and they rock. I have a Dell Latitude D820 with a core2 duo @ 2ghz, and cpu is pretty much never the bottleneck.

For video I've got an nVidia Quadro NVS 110M which was the top video option for this laptop. I play GWX @ 1680x1050 with no problems at all.
Generally laptops with screens 15" or smaller have crap to acceptable video performance. Some laptops with 17" screens have chipsets that will blow most desktops out of the water - mainly because a 15" laptop is made lighter, and can't dissipate enough heat for a high-end GFX chipset

[Kpt, Otto]

Avoid a Celeron chip if you can, they are not fast enough. Duel core cpu is ok, either Pentium or Centrino. The Pentium chips run very hot normally which means a heavy fan to cool them in most cases.

I have both as auxilary computers a Pentium 4 2.4Ghz laptop and a dual core Centrino laptop. The Centrino is by far the better unit because its light weight and smaller so can be carried around easier. The Pentium is a heavy weight and its fan is louder when it goes off which is every five minutes and stays on for ten. Horible when listening to music or watching a Dvd. When playing a game it can be very distracting.

In most cases the graphics card in laptops are slimed down versions of their desktop familly and therefore makes gaming a touchy experiance. On the box of my copy of Silent Hunter 4 is says:

Supported graphics cards:

ATI Radeon 9600/9700/9800/x300 to x850/x1300 to x1800
Nvidia Geforce 6200/6600/6800/7800

Laptop models of these cards may work but and are not supported.

When I bought my copy of SH3 I had a laptop as my main computer (the Pentium 4) and was gutted when it wouldnt play because its graphics card was not up to it. At that time SH3 spec was that it would run on any ATI Radeon card. It didnt run on mine because it was a laptop version of a Radeon! I had to when I could afford it build this desptop computer which is a monster before I could play it! I havnt tried to play it on my Duel core centrino laptop because I know its graphics card is not up to spec.

Also I would consider the sound quality issue. Most laptops have inferior sound as well.

Ah well just my 2p worth! A laptop is good as a back up mobile unit only!!

:()1:

[Penelope_Grey]

The first thing I would suggest is to not buy a Dell. However its up to you sir.

If you really want a Laptop with muscle I would advise one with an Intel T7600 2.33GHz dual core chip. Its the fastest mobile processor money can buy at present.

Get yourself 2 gigs of ram

and a Nvidia GeForce 7950 GTX 512mb graphics card.

Splash out, you want a laptop to play games, get a laptop that will play ANY game.:up: One thing you could do which I didn't do when buying mine, is get a 7200rpm RAID 0 Hard Drive... I had a standard 5400rpm drive...

[Mueller72]

If you consider a gaming laptop i can recommend the Toshiba Satego X200. It has a Nvidia Geforce 8700M GT gfx card (DX 10). Its more a desktop replacement not really something to put on your knees (its not light and getting hot :cool:)

With the laptop screen the resolution is 1440 x 900. With my 21er Monitor i run SH3 in 2048 x 1536 very smooth. With all the new effects and scene mods im in heaven right now (Thanx again to the modders :up:).

Going to try SH4 for the gfx soon.

[johnno74]

The first thing I would suggest is to not buy a Dell. However its up to you sir.

If you really want a Laptop with muscle I would advise one with an Intel T7600 2.33GHz dual core chip. Its the fastest mobile processor money can buy at present.

Get yourself 2 gigs of ram


I think dell latitude laptops are quite good. The inspiron are a bit cheap, but the latitude laptops are designed for business use and are much more solid and are better supported by dell, for only a modest extra price. I've had two, both with 3 year warranties. First one is still going strong, its now 6 years old... no chance of playing SH3 on that :D

And regards to CPU - not such a big deal what you get. graphics card will be the limiting factor. I have a T7200 (core2 duo, 2ghz) and I've just finished playing SH3 and when I look at the task manager history graph, it never went above 30%.

Whatever you get, I reccommend you get a 3 year warranty.

2GB of ram is worthwhile too.

[Penelope_Grey]

Oh Im not saying Dell are no good, I don't doubt they make decent systems, but... Dell are more Business and Educated orientated than for individual usage. If you are a businessperson or a teacher, you're laughing...

[Hakahura]

I run SH3 with GWX on a laptop with no problems at all. I also ran SH4 for a while whilst the game worked fine, the Pacific just didn't do it for me.

My laptops specs are...

AMD Turion 64 x 2 TL50 processor
256MB NVIDIA Geforce Go 7600 dedicated graphics card
2 x 512MB SO DDR-2 667MHz memory
120GB S-ATA hard drive
15.4" WXGA X-Bright wide screen display (1280x800)

Made by a UK company called Evesham.
Don't know if you can get one easily in Canada but I would definitly recomend one.

[Penelope_Grey]

Evesham are a good make from what my friend says, her father has a Evesham desktop.

[The Bandit]

ok well I did some more reading and it looks like right now the the laptops I am looking at, the Celeron chip they are using is actually just Core 2 Duo cut down to single core (Merom-L chip) it dosn't have speed step so like you guys mentioned earlier it won't cut down the voltage. Thing is right now price is really important, I already have emptied my pockets on a brand new desk top that will be able to run any game in the forseable future (video card could use a little work, I went a little cheap on it but I will cross that bridge when I come to it), really all I am looking for right now is somthing portable that I might even end up using for school that will let me run SH3 and SH4 (and by run I mean not chug and do a decent job of the graphics, not spectacular but just get the job done). I am trying to stay away from the intel integrated graphics though. Right now I'm looking at a Dell Vostro, cheaper busniess model Dell, came out not too long ago, slotted under the lattitude. preferably I would like to keep the total cost to under or just a little over $1500.

[irish1958]

I have an athelon 4000+ with a radeon 200express and 2gb of ram.
I run SH3 very well, but SH4 gets about one frame an hour at the lowest settings.
Get the duel core and the best video card with the most ram and 2gb of system ram.
If you can't afford this now, find a rich and generous girl friend and be very, very nice to her.
:p:p:p

[Von Manteuffel]

I'm very happy with my Dell XPS M1710 notebook. The Intel® Core™ 2 Duo T7600 Processor (2.33GHz,667MHz,4MB L2 cache); 512 Mb DDR3 nVidia GeForce Go 7950 GTX graphics card; and with 2 Mb RAM play SH3 like a dream and handle SH4 tolerably well. An added bonus is the 17.0" UltraSharp™ Wide Screen WUXGA (1920x1200) TFT Display. Both games look superb.

[CapnMike U-69]

An Apple Macbook Pro 15" laptop runs SH3 (and SH4 !!) brilliantly, in Windows XP.

2.4Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo processors with a Nvidia Geforce 8600M GT graphics card and 256 of video/SDram. Need 2 Gigs of Ram, 1 Gig is not enough - but you can fit up to 4 Gb if you wanna go ballistic !!! :-)

160Gb HDD @5400rpm, but optional 200GB 7200RPM hard drive available - for about $130 extra cost.

1440 x 900 native wide-screen resolution, get about 3.5 hours life on full battery at full processor speed, but runs even better connected to power supply.
Frame rate is excellent. No problems even in port without lite harbor traffic enabled.

Works nicely connected to a 2nd (20") monitor also. Use a pair of bluetooth headphones for serious immersion in the game, as all laptop speakers I've heard are a bit cr*p.

'Bout $1900 bucks now I think.

Seriously fast laptop ...and really good for gaming, altho' I bought it for work (of course!)

Capn Mike