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Some PC, HDMI Monitor and hard drive questions :D.
Darkfalz89
Member UncommonPosts: 581
I have summoned you all here today to discuss some questions I have regarding the topic title. Several months back i was in desperate need of a gaming powerhouse in order to play the eagerly aticipated MMO warhammer online. Upon browsing the several companies, makes and models i found one desktop that intersted me, the gateway FX series. What i planned to buy was the desktop version but since it was a month in backorder, my fellow best buy associate recommended that latop version, the gateway p-7811 fx. Now keep in mind several years back i laughed at the idea of a laptop, but as irony would have it i bought it out of desperation. To this day I am glad i purchased this man made beast, but when your not totally pc savvy, having a laptop can make major headaches. Months of finding a good cooling pad (this laptop is friggin huge so even with the bigges one i could find i still have to move it between my processors and video card to keep cool) and understanding how laptops differ (being limited to much less gfx driver updates and waiting several months for desktop hardware to be modified for laptops) and the whole laptop being warm always bothered me, even tho ppl say its common, specially for gaming laptop.
Sorry about all the rambling, now lets cut to the chase. The best and full specs i could find online for my laptop is here http://reviews.cnet.com/laptops/gateway-p-7811fx/4507-3121_7-33201021.html?tag=mncol;psum
Now this laptop did play the game wonderfully I sadly did quit after realizing the game was far from complete. After coming back for the 1.3 update i notice with all the AE from choppas and massive scale RVR my computer stutters to 15fps somtimes running the same settings i had before, but even desktop power users said this is a game issue not exactly a hardware one. I did find a guide with some better tweaks, and after lowering my AA from 16x to 4x i noticed a wonderful improvement. Now the question is, what could i improve to make this game run better at these settings and to also prepare me for the releas of Aion? Now my problem is im not a techy, but as far as my laptop goes, i believe its better to wait till the GTX cards come out of mobile and maybe those I7 processors. What im looking to upgrade is maybe if i could find a nvidia 9800 1g card, i see the desktop ones but have yet to see a laptop one, anyone care to suggest any findings?
Another question is about hard drvies, my computer has a ESATA port, and what ive recently come to learn is in fact that hard drives ALSO enhance gaming on a computer. The HD in my laptop is provided via the link but i do notice 2 hard drives, sometimes 3 in computers: is all that really necessary? I was wondering if i could get a explanation on how that would improve and if i could get a quick rehash of how esata refers to SATA drives and possibly some recommendations on a external and maybe a better HD replacement for my current if its not suitable?
On last thing i needed some info about is HDMI. I recently bought a 24 inch monitor with 1080P res and had this question: If 1080P = 1900-1200 PC resolution, why have a HD port when my pc already has technically 1080p? Thing is someone mentioned to me that he could run a game in low res on his laptop and put it as 1080p on his monitor. Is this possible, and if so how do you manage this? While on the subject of HDMI and resolutions, ive been running games on 1900-1200 so much and i love it so much that anything lower seems like it looks like ass, is there any reasoning behind this? My understanding was that res only meant sizing and more pixels, while textures, AA and AF is what enchanced the actual graphics. For example: is it preffered to set my desktop res at 1600-whatever when lowering my game to the same res? Does this yield a better result?
I would all like to thank you for your time and patience with reading all this, any suggestions would be much appreciated and thank you once again. Maybe im just too worried about everything and my laptop is fine the way it is, i just want to make sure there isnt ways to make it a little better, because i do know it is a beast regardless.
Oh and btw, im just back from work so im clocking out for a few hours, suggestions for now would be fine, i hope i explained everything well enough where its more suggestive feedback and not many questions. if not ill be happy to answer any when i get up 
.
Comments
Not a single reply ; ;.
wow wall of text..
4x AA vs 16x AA: 16x AA is almost impossible to run at without some serious hardware, especially on a laptop. It is possible AA wasn't even working when Warhammer first came out and that the setting was doing nothing. The next round of laptop GPU's is coming out soon so you'll be able to get an i7 geforce 2xx in a few months.
The HD in your laptop is a 7200rpm hard drive which is pretty good. Internal RAID in a laptop seems terrible to me, gaming laptops already have tremendous heat issues and a RAID puts out even more heat for no to minimal improvement in load times. An ESATA drive would be ok but most external drives are still just laptop form factor drives so you won't get any benefit from it, plus a faster HD only improves load times and texture loading which don't happen very often though a 5400rpm drive is painfully slow.
I'm not clear what your question about the 1080p is. The laptop has an HDMI out on it so you can hook up to an HDTV for watching movies or playing games instead of being stuck on your smaller laptop screen even if it is 1080p. You can hook up an external keyboard and mouse as well and just put the laptop out of the way, or plug in a 360 controller and pretend you're playing a console.
In my opinion lappys suck and blow at the sametime! The resoloution in basic terms is higher res = higher detail, lower res = lower detail. The lower the resoloution drops the less detail and you start to see blurring and blocky graphics, it's like aging your eyesight 50 years, that's why Stygia in AoC would emd up looking like Ibiza after 1 week on a club 18-30 holiday!
Lappys will always overheat and turn into giant hotplates slowing everything down no matter what hardware is inside. For playing anything other than WoW or similar level MMORPGs forget it, I'd rather eat glass whilst watching "High School Musical" 1,2 and 3 back to back. I'd say you made an awfull error in judgment by not waiting for the desktop, unless you can sell that lappy and buy a spider platform AMD setup you're in trouble.
Laptops + online gaming = Pariah gamer, FACT!
"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience"
CS Lewis
Oh, missed this part of your post.. It's more important to run the game at max resolution supported by your display, largely because this is called the native resolution - at that resolution your display doesn't have to do anything special to the video signal. If you run it at below native resolution then everything gets very muddy because the display scales the image up to fill the whole screen.
Scaling *up* is bad because your screen is 1920 pixels wide and 1200 pixels tall - if you play a game at 1680x1024 then for it to fill your screen some pixels are going to be doubled/interpolated/smoothed or whatever scaling process your display uses since you are stretching an image meant for 1680 pixels across a display with 1920 pixels. This never looks good because the display is making information up to fill in the empty pixels.
The other reason higher resolution is good is because it reduces the need for anti-aliasing. AA only exists to counteract the jaggy effect that happens the lower you go in screen resolution (and conversely goes away as you go up in resolution). Pixels are laid out horizontally and vertically so any line that isn't straight across becomes noticeably jaggy as it steps up to the next row of pixels. AA blends these lines with the background color to make them less noticeable, but higher resolution alleviates this as well because the step from one row of pixels to the next is much smaller.
4X FSAA means the video card actually renders the screen at 4X the resolution (7680x4800) then scales it down to 1920x1200, blending together colors as it goes - it's a less optimal solution than actually *having* a 7680x4800 monitor but obviously that type of resolution doesn't exist so the downscaling approximates what 7680x4800 would look like if you'd just been punched in the eye and couldn't see very well. So a higher resolution is better than higher AA as AA is only there to make up for not having an infinitely high resolution to begin with.
AF (anisotropic filtering) corrects the blurring that occurs across the ground as the 3d viewing angle becomes more shallow and parallel with the ground as you look further out, and high quality textures provide more detail, which you need a decent resolution to see. Also your desktop resolution and gaming resolution do not need to be the same, but they both should be at 1920x1200 anyway to make them look right.
While im still learning about laptops and computers in general, i would still have to say there is some bias in your reply. The ironic thing about everrything you just said about laptops is exactly what i thought about laptops a year ago, and that was with the least amount of knowledge about computers, until i tried one. I would take a good look at my laptop specs before you say anything, because my game was able to run games liky crysis(which is amazing to say the least since that game ran like ass on any setup) and fallout 3 and farcry two with almost max setting like a pro. As far as the heating issue, i got a nice industrial size fan (although i wish i could find a bigger one, my only problerm) and it keeps my "lappy" nice and cool. My pc may not be able to shell out like a desktop, but the new core I7s and the GTX cards (whenever they decide to realease for laptop) will make it more possible for my lappy to keep up. I also want to say im not regretting getting a laptop, i move around alot with my job and i have a network wherever i go, i feel like i cary my own portable beast with me.
I would like to thank you both for you great explanations on how these settings work in detail. It totally makes sense to my know why when i put AA to 4x i really noticed no difference (which is because im running the game in max res) Also wanted to say i was considering to get a esata external drive and install the game on it and maybe the os and boot it from the esata drive (would this make things faster or is a internal drive faster than the write speeds of a esata external? I know 7200 is the best you can get but my laptop config doesnt reall tell me other details as far as write speeds e.t.c. + my hard drive is only 200g, which is garbage. I wanted to get it for the storage also, thinking of a esata 1TB 7200 external 3.5 with 16x write speed.
What im really asking about the HDMI is whats the difference with a HDMI cord between a video output or w/e its called (connecting it from my laptop to a TV/Bigger monitor?) Is the quality of the picture better? (which is kinda obvious but its not bad to still speculate) And also, it says when i go to my nvidia control panel that my screen is "connected, non HD" and when i set it to "1080p" i scroll up to the res and its "1900-1024" and when i try to go to 1900-1200, it deselects HD mode and goes back to saying "Connected, non HD" Some tvs/monitors automatically configure but i was wondering if i needed to do anything addictionally? My guess is HDMI is for laptops that cant run 1900-1200 and the HDMI upscales it for the monitor/tv, which makes it the same thing if i used my latops native res right? cept that i dont understand why it goes 1900-1028 or w/e you cant get the 1900-1200, or im just doing something wrong.
One final question tho, i did install my warhammer game on my backup, which is my main drive partitioned into 2 pieces (the backup not having a OS installed on it). For whatever weird reason would that slow down the game and give it a lesser performance?
While im still learning about laptops and computers in general, i would still have to say there is some bias in your reply. The ironic thing about everrything you just said about laptops is exactly what i thought about laptops a year ago, and that was with the least amount of knowledge about computers, until i tried one. I would take a good look at my laptop specs before you say anything, because my game was able to run games liky crysis(which is amazing to say the least since that game ran like ass on any setup) and fallout 3 and farcry two with almost max setting like a pro. As far as the heating issue, i got a nice industrial size fan (although i wish i could find a bigger one, my only problerm) and it keeps my "lappy" nice and cool. My pc may not be able to shell out like a desktop, but the new core I7s and the GTX cards (whenever they decide to realease for laptop) will make it more possible for my lappy to keep up. I also want to say im not regretting getting a laptop, i move around alot with my job and i have a network wherever i go, i feel like i cary my own portable beast with me.
I do have a bias against lappys when it comes to anything more intensive than browsing the internet. Lappys just don't match up to a desktop in performance no matter the specs, as soon as that beast gets hot you need your industrial size fan to get it back to a decent performance that my desktop does with no effort.
I mean what's the point of having a "portable beast" if you need to lug about an "industrial size fan", I'd like to know how big is that industrial size fan? Seriously for the price of a real cutting edge gaming lappy you can get a bleeding edge desktop that will just annihilate it. However if you need the portability then you're stuck with the lappy and industrial fan!
"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience"
CS Lewis