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will this laptop be any good for gaming
okay its a Sony VAIO NR21Z/S
it has 3g ram
250gb hardrive
a 15.4" Widescreen TFT 1280 x 800
Intel Core 2 Duo T8100 / 2.1 GHz with a 3mb l2 cache
NVIDIA GeForce 8400M GT graphic card which has 128mb dedicated ram
oh and this is what is says after where it says how much ram its got on the spec DDR II SDRAM - 667 MHz - PC2-5300 ( 1 x 1 GB + 1 x 2 GB )
im kinda clueless 
about how well it will preform running games like WOW, runescape and the call of dutys so if anyone has any ideas could use post em
Comments
Nope it won't. The 8400 is a crappy video card, and thats what matters most for gaming. The ideal notebook video card is the 8800m or the HD3870m.
http://blogs.zdnet.com/hardware/?p=2203
Yeah the 8400's also have a host of overheating problems in laptops. While I don't believe it is ALL, it is an abnormally high ammount of them. Oh and the fix for it is that the noisy little fan gets perminantly cranked up.
The T8100 chip is a poor performer in terms of gaming as well.
Rock a FailCom avatar now and express your disgust with pride!
The truth hurts...
Funcom RX
Aye. Let me save you some grief that I currently go through.
A) although a sata hard drive its 5400. Slowest on the block.
C) That processor just is not quite beefy enough imho. The T8300 will give you better performance without to much drop in your wallet. No need to jump to the 9300 i think series only 4% gains (approx.) for the buck
I have something similar, not exact and I really really reallllllly regret it but its awesome for some things, like err email lol.
If I had to redo I would go more this route ..
Intel® Montevina Core 2 Duo Mobile P8600 Dual-Core Processor (2x 2.4GHz/3MB Cache/1066FSB)
Comparable to the T8300 but possibly faster due to FSB, uses about 10w less so a tad cooler
4 GB(2 GB X2) DDR2-800 PC6400
Im guessing your gonna use vista 32 bit so why not max it to 4 gig
Nividia geforce go 9600m gt w/ 512
( can possibly crank up to 5.9 on windows score)
250 GB 7200rpm Serial-ATA-150 Super Slim Notebook Hard Drive
You will need the extra rpms for gaming on that HD
that and a few extra bells and whistles here and there would probably make gaming easier.
as far as the games you can run them just not very well. Unfortunatly I can not give you any real world performance on them just have a general idea what would work decent for you without cranking you past 1300 bucks for the laptop.
Either way gl to you.
dang it ill have to keep looking then cos my parents are goin to get me a new laptop soon and i just thought hey those vaios look awsome
This is in fact not true for notebooks while gaming because the 128mb memory for the gpu is really all a notebook needs to game. Having more dedicated memory above 128 for the gpu will not increase performance much. It is only used when you scale to larger display resolutions and much of the notebook screen sizes are under 17 inches anyway which is why 128 is fine and usually does not even use that all for IO process and screen res.
You only need to go to 512 if your running a resolution above 1280x1024 resolutions on larger then 20 inch screens. And a notebook with a 20inch screen??
Huge misconception with people and gpu memory interfaces these days are bigger is not always better, just depends on your application.
Who let you in the VIP section?
its not the resolution im concerned with but the texture detail thats gonna eat up the majority of the mem. or the game calling for world object rendering or any other of the crispy creams he/she could be wanting to see (* IE light and bump maps, etc...) In a 2d world heck 128 would suffice. But yes you are correct in that the screen resolution does contribute to the primary usage.
Three big rendering technologies have become standard in the past few years and they place huge demands on the RAM: normal mapping, anti-aliasing and post-processing.
To give some real life data..
Half Life 2 -- 4xAA Texture setting high
Card Memory Usage 244.37
System Memory Usage 80.23
Half Life 2 -- Texture setting high
Card Memory Usage 175.62
System Memory Usage 90.73
Half Life 2 -- Texture setting Medium
Card Memory Usage 129.62
System Memory Usage 60.76
Video Memory Watcher version 3.0 was used for these results.
anywho, just basically want you to get the best bang for your buck and not run into the same issues as myself.
I never intended to progress your ideas any further here simply because notebooks are not gaming machines and never really are intended to be, furthermore; the 128mb memory is sufficient enough for a notebook on almost all games with a decent gpu. Nobody is going to run max or high levels of AA or any of that on a notebook.
A good gaming notebook will run almost $3000 and for the real gamer will buy a game PC with high end video card with 512mb gpu memory to increase the performance for AA and all that eye candy at those higher resolutions.
Who let you in the VIP section?
I agree with the 'no its not a good gaming laptop' census...