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Laptop picking friend needs help
Alright so my friend just sold his laptop today for $350 off craigslist....now when it comes to laptops idk really anything about them graphic card wise and stuff and thats what hes looking for and it comes down to 2 laptops that people are selling off craigslist. So can u tell me which one would be the best for him to buy for the price and better performance.]
1st.
M15x alienware ($475)
15 inch screen(of course)
windows vista home premium (capable of running windows 7 which ill update it to)
intel core 2 duo 2.10 ghz processor
3 gigs of ram
160 gig 7200rpm harddrive
NNVIDIA 8700m gt 512 mb
2nd ($500 going to try to lower to $450-475)
Acer Aspire Laptop AS5552G-7641
Genuine Windows® 7 Home Premium - 64-bit version
AMD Phenom™ II X4 Quad-Core Processor N970 (2.2GHz - 2MB L2 cache)
4GB DDR3 1066 SDRAM
500GB hard drive
Acer® CineCrystal™ 15.6" display (1366 x 768)
ATI Mobility Radeon™ HD 6550M with 1024MB of dedicated DDR3 VRAM
AMD M880G chipset - 8X DVD±RW DL
6-cell battery
1-year limited warranty
Looking for one that plays best in games.
so over all which laptop sounds like a better deal for the price? all this info came off either my texts or the add its self and he wants to buy either one of them by friday after he gets paid.
Comments
The second will be better at games. The first is very old. The second will have much better graphical performance. The per core processor performance will be about the same for both laptops, but the second has four cores and the first only has two. I hope your friend doesn't need much battery life, as he won't get it from either of those laptops. He should also assume that he'll have to turn graphical settings way down to get games to run smoothly.
alright ya cuz he's upgrading from the gateway nv78 which has some crappy chipset videocard and the battery life doesnt really matter he'll prolly have it plugged in all the time. Just really looking for the one thats better and the right price and the second one $500 is that sound about good for it? Sucks the alienware is old he was wanting that one cuz it looks awesome lmfao but i told him its all about performance
The Alienware laptop is probably about four years old now. For a gaming laptop, that's living on borrowed time. The hardware is thoroughly obsolete by now. It should still run games on fairly low settings, but if that's all it can do today, it might not be goo long before it won't run newer games smoothly at all.
The Acer laptop is basically a budget gaming laptop from a few months ago. It's probably got a 5400 RPM hard drive, so it will be sluggish. The build quality probably isn't very good. The idle power consumption will be very high, so you might be looking at two hours of battery life even while completely idle. But games will run just fine at moderate settings. Redwood didn't get rebranded into the 6500M series until earlier this year, so the laptop can't be all that old yet.
Tell your friend to get a gaming desktop instead of a laptop if he can.
oh alright well the guy said he replaced it not long ago or something idk lol but ya i guess he said that he could play black ops on high and then GTA 4 on medium settings, this is all that he said lol.
but idk id have to check it out and thats how long the last laptop he had didnt last long only about an hour but he never took it off the charger so it didnt really matter. The laptop had a 4 family chipset series and it sucked he just plays WoW and css and tf2 really so im sure it will be a lot better then his gateway nv78
A Gameboy.
Better than Intel GMA 4 series graphics isn't a high standard. Even something like this might beat Intel GMA 4 series graphics performance by an order of magnitude:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834101253
That's not at all competitive in graphics performance with the used Acer Aspire that your friend is looking at, though. If he really doesn't care about the drawbacks I listed, but only gaming performance, then the Acer laptop should fit what he needs, and the price on it is right if it isn't defective.
oh alright lol ya he only has $450 which we got the guy with the acer laptop to lower it to that, which he said he only had the laptop for around 2-3 months and barely used it. He said he used it once or twice to play starcraft 3 or w.e and he built a new computer so he had no use for it. The acer Laptop had the 6650 video card not the 6550
But if he had $500 i told him he should get this
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834152245R
that one seems really good
Radeon HD 6650M is Turks, not Redwood, which is better yet. 6 SIMD engines rather than 5, and with various architectural tweaks to improve performance, too.
You don't want a GeForce GT 520M. That's Nvidia's lowest end GPU chip (GF119) from the last two generations, and won't even be competitive with Llano, let alone Redwood, let alone Turks. It might get you 1/3 of the graphical performance of a Radeon HD 6650M. I think he'll like the Acer laptop, as that's a good price on it if it works properly.
ya i think he typed it wrong on the add cuz when i google the model number for the laptop it shows that video card in every laptop of that model, so as u said that saying it will be good he got excited lol.
I don't think that Acer will necessarily do abysmally on battery life, either, unless that Phenom II X4 is really just miserable on power consumption (admittedly, I don't know much about those CPUs).
My Asus has a Core i7 720QM, which I would think would suck just as much power, and a Mobility Radeon HD 5730, which appears to consume more power at idle than the 6550, and I still get 3 hours out of it. It's not great, but it's almost always enough, and I don't see that machine doing worse, barring have a tiny battery or, again, the Phenom IIs being far worse than I'm giving them credit for.
All in all, I think that'll be a nice laptop.
Your Clarksfield processor has power gating, so it can turn cores off entirely and use only a few watts at idle. AMD's processors that launched before this year don't have power gating, so all processor cores have to be on, running, and sucking power at all times. It might pull about 10 W when completely idle, and it goes up from there when you actually use it. And that's for just the processor; the video card and monitor will draw power, too. I'd be surprised if the laptop has idle power consumption under 20 W, and that will drain a battery pretty quickly.
Yes, I'm saying that the Acer will have poor battery life. It might get you two hours while completely idle, and considerably less if you try to actually do anything with it. If that doesn't bother your friend, then it might not be a big deal. Playing games on the battery burns quite a bit of power, and the only way to get a couple hours of battery life while gaming on a laptop that can run games decently is with a Llano-based laptop.
If you do buy an acer, be prepared for it to start overheating. I have mine a year now and it even overheats with videochat. I know other people with the same problem ( can't even watch movies). I have, when I am "gaming" ( everything on low and nothing that is kind of new vs dragon age origins that did run a year ago) constantly a external fan on.
Imo save up a couple hundred more and get a Laptop that will do your job for you
I'm not sure about the Clarksfield numbers, but I bet it's similar. The Bloomfield CPU's, when they go to power gate (I'm surprised Intel doesn't have a catchy trademarked buzzword for this yet, it kind of just gets lumped in with TurboBoost), can run at under 2W with all except 1 core sleeping (and that core clocked down) - which is enough to do light text editing (email) and web browsing, or for a server idle with low traffic. When a Bloomfield fires up all cores and goes to 100% load, it can draw near 130W at stock clocks. Sandy Bridges are similar
Granted that's a desktop CPU, but the power gating isn't dissimilar for an Intel Laptop CPU, they mostly just cap the TurboBoost and max TDPs.
Just to illustrate how effective power gating can be, and how it can provide benefit even outside of a laptop.
AMD has has "Cool'n'Quiet" for a while now,and now has "CoolCore" but it isn't nearly as comprehensive as Intel's much more flexible combination of variable core clocks, TDP management, and Turbo Boost.
Here's a few good graphs that compare some popular desktop CPUs. They are posting "at the wall" power levels, so it includes the entire system, not just the CPU, but looking at the difference between idle loads, and the idle->full load deltas, and it's eye popping.
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/sandy-bridge-efficienct-32-nm,2831-7.html
I suppose that does create a problem for AMD's chips, power-wise, if they're that far behind Intel on power gating. I remember Cool'n'Quiet used to be a real groundbreaking thing on the Athlon 64s, at least compared to what Intel had on their netburst chips (which, iirc, was little more than an emergency underclock for when the chips overheated, as they did often).
Of course, even with abysmal battery life, that laptop should be quite powerful for $500. I'd call that a great buy.
It's not that AMD was behind Intel on power gating. It's that Intel had power gating and AMD didn't. At all.
The basic problem is that if you keep transistors on, they slowly leak power, even if they aren't doing anything. Intel's answer to that starting with Bloomfield was to say, fine then, we'll completely disconnect a considerable portion of the chip if it is idle so that no power can get there and have a chance to leak. That's what power gating is. It's kind of like how your computer uses a bit of power even while off, but won't do so if you physically unplug it from the wall.
With Zacate/Ontario and now Llano, AMD has power gating, too. Bulldozer/Orochi/Zambezi/Valencia/Interlagos will also have power gating, as will presumably all future processors from both AMD and Intel. So AMD has caught up there. But that doesn't help you if you get an older AMD processor. The lack of power gating is a big reason why AMD processors in laptops were undesirable last year.
well hows it going to be for him if thats not his main source of playing games? he has a really nice desktop, which he'll only play games with the laptop when he goes to friend houses and thats really it, he said he doesnt like taking all his gear places just would bring the laptop and it there.
Well nearly all games should run fluently at medium settings, easily in the 40-50fps range or better at that machine's native resolution. A few games, like Metro 2033, will have to be set to lower settings, but Metro 2033 is also an absurd outlier there.
Notebookcheck has a fairly good list compiled, and most games ran at 30fps or better at high settings, and 45fps or better on medium (they test at around 1366x768 usually, and where they use lower resolutions at "medium", there's usually enough headroom to bump the resolution up that little bit).
If that's acceptable to your friend, then it should be fine.
well the guy bailed on selling it to me "my gf took the laptop to work today she freaked out" lmfao cuz he was selling it....pretty lame so theres nothing else good in my area on craigslist and im looking online theres nothing close to something that good for only $450-500
So your one of those guys that tells the doctor "My friend has this problem and he's looking for Viagra..."
im the type of person to help someone out lmfao he's giving me the cash to buy him one and giving me some extra cash for myself