Laptop

[Fish_n_Dive]

I have a basic question. i am getting a laptop for x-mas and want to be able to edit digital photos and play games. is this a good card to do that?

ATI® MOBILITY RADEON™ 16 MB video DDR SDRAM, Dual display support

[Moses]

Won't have much affect on dig photos but will on ability to play games. I'd recommend at least 128 ram if you are a serious gamer.

[leptar]

The mobility radeon 16 mb will play alot of the 'OLDER' games like UT and Quake well but when you get into games like MOH or BF1942 the game play will be extremely choppy or wont load (termination error) due to the fact that you’re going to be using older technology with newer code... But don't under estimate the power of notebooks. The chipsets in the notebooks are designed differently then their desktop counter parts. if your looking to get by with great performance go with the ati 9000 mobile or the NVIDIA 5200 mobile both offer great gamming performance and I believe 99% of notebooks that offer these chipsets give a basic 64 megs of ram to allow you to play 'today’s games' if you want top performance go with the ati 9600 mobile.. New batches of games are coming out in the first quarter of 2004, with that the minimum specs will surely increase thus making older machines obsolete... remember 32-64 Megs of video ram is minimum, 64-128 is recommended.
1 other thing with notebooks is to do your homework on the screen... nothing worse then having blurs/ghosts while playing games.

http://www.alienware.com/system_pages/area-51m.aspx

http://www.voodoopc.com/systems/notebook.aspx

just some food for thought... also check out review sites that don’t favor Intel or amd / ati/nvidia..


Whether your spending 1k or 4k on a notebook makes sure your happy with it... Also check the "RETURN POLICY" when ordering online... even if it's 15days that should be long enough... load a good game and max the settings. Be careful of restocking fee's...

My 2cents... hit a computer show... Usually the good ones start in January you can test/look/and especially HAGGLE PRICES to get a really good deal.

[Newboater]

A laptop has internal problems relating to high end editing and games. Mainly heat.

I would recommend nothing less than a Pentium 2 GHz or higher with 512 Megs of RAM and a Video card with nothing less than 64 Megs of Memory on board if you can get it.

In addition make sure the hard drive is 7200 rpm and not one of those older 4200 or 5600 rpm drives which will slow down your access time to programs and file considerably.

Especially for a laptop.

The Ole Sarge

[NJTackle]

And watch out for PC's that SHARE the memory from the motherboard for the Video card. 16mb really isn't much. Sure that isn't a mis-print?

I'd go with at least 64mb....128 prefered. If you want to do real gaming, I'd go for a desktop. You generally have a greater selection on compenents such as video card, sound cards, etc, and they are cheaper.