Yes, another gaming laptop request

[nissangtr786]

Why do people want to buy a gtx670m or gtx 675m. the 7970m takes less power then the gtx 675m and is easily 80-100% more better, weighs less and fits in a slimmer profile so should have more room for cooling.

[gamerish]

Why do people want to buy a gtx670m or gtx 675m. the 7970m takes less power then the gtx 675m and is easily 80-100% more better, weighs less and fits in a slimmer profile so should have more room for cooling.

Because the laptop with the 7970m is over $500 more (now that Allan's discounts have been reduced).

3720 would work assuming it's within your budget. I suggested i5 because I didn't want you to overspend on i7 3720 for the sake of higher clock speeds and then be stuck with a mid range GPU.

I can't add an i5 to any of those laptops

[nissangtr786]

gamerish whats Allan's discounts?

Anyway even if it costs $500 it is worth it consdiering the cost of the laptop. The 675m is a more mid-high end card now after the graphics cards are released. top of the range cards are basically double in performance like the 7970m and the 7970m takes less power then the 675m by around 17w on some games..

[gamerish]

gamerish whats Allan's discounts?

He's an Alienware Sales Rep who was giving everyone really good discounts but he got shut down by the higher ups. It was a big consideration in my getting an M17x since the vast majority of people I've seen lately have had no luck in haggling (and I myself am a bad haggler).

Actually I can get an i5-2450M in the M14x for the Emulators. But wouldn't that have signficantly worse performance than the i7-3610QM?

[anotherusername]

There are i5s with faster clock speeds than the one in your post. PS2 and gamecube emulators don't benefit as much from adding extra cores as opposed to faster clock speeds.

Just keep in mind that the CPU you choose has to at least be able to reach 3.0Ghz. From that point on, the faster the better.

[nipsen]

Wow. I hadn't the slightest clue. That would just indicate their poor design though...

..actually, what the guy said is wrong, or based on wrong information at least. The only real ps2 emulator at the moment runs with components on different threads, and does scale with more cores. So on a quad-core and above a certain amount of Ghz, and there's no real benefit. You can scale resolution and passes to fit the processes that run on the graphics card in the same way. In other words, yes, you will be able to run that emulator on, say, an mx17. And it will run well. Or as well as the emulator can run.

Of course, there's no way to actually get the emulation running 100% accurately from a byte-code execution point of view, since the bus on a PC isn't fast enough yet. ..and probably never will be until intel goes out of business. But yeah, a mid-range "gaming laptop" will run it.

[azn4lif3s]

I second prasad, it's just not flashy

Sent from my DROID RAZR

[anotherusername]

..actually, what the guy said is wrong, or based on wrong information at least. The only real ps2 emulator at the moment runs with components on different threads, and does scale with more cores. So on a quad-core and above a certain amount of Ghz, and there's no real benefit.

What's the maximum amount of cores PCSX2 and dolphin are able to use though? Just 2. If someone is on a budget I would definitely recommend getting an old i5 with faster clock speeds than a newer i7 with slower clock speeds. See PCSX2 wiki for more details.

[Ferrari353]

Is there an Ivy Bridge equivalent to the 2640m I think? The dual core i7 with the really high clock speed.

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I727 using Tapatalk 2

[nipsen]

What's the maximum amount of cores PCSX2 and dolphin are able to use though? Just 2. If someone is on a budget I would definitely recommend getting an old i5 with faster clock speeds than a newer i7 with slower clock speeds. See PCSX2 wiki for more details.

True that.. But the "software" part of the renderer has been spawning multiple concurrent threads for a long while now. So you get a bit for free if you have a quad-core, specially on lower/sub-recommended speeds.

Agree with you that a good option for a light gaming laptop is to pick an i5 from... what.. 1.5 years ago, that actually has less power-consumption, and is easier to overclock, and so on. And then go for a good 3d card that makes the paint boil when you run full load.

Problem is that you won't actually save that much money on doing that, unless you find a used chassis and start experimenting with putting in your own components..

Warning - long sidebar:
(By the way -- if you're looking for a low-effect gaming laptop, and the requirement is emulation software to medium detail dx11 games. Then take a look at the amd apu setups. Most of these laptops are set up with the apu only, or else a dual 6320 junk-class dedicated gpu in dual graphics/crossfire. Avoid those.

But some of the setups go with a 7670m (one of the low effect graphics cards, lower than the new 650m nvidias), and I'm guessing that the newer fusion cpus from amd will turn up in these systems. With an a8 or a10 apu, and perhaps a light version of the 7970m series..? And then you'll have an interesting rig that you can run fairly intense emulation software, or 3d games, even while on battery. Performance won't be stellar on power or on battery - but in return it will run cool and with steady performance. So it might be worth a look.

I ended up trading in my n53tk because of the screen (2 degrees optimal view angle) and because I need nvidia drivers for a dual screen setup (ati's drivers don't work, simple as that). Also didn't like the keyboard and the grey on black on grey all that much. But I would have kept it because of the apu+dedicated card setup. Really liked this. The OpenCL performance is ridiculous for a laptop, and the same goes for anything that needs quick transfers on the bus. It's more like cheating on the benchmarks Of course, it's peaking out at 1700 3dmark11 marks. That's where the gpu performance ends for the 7670m. But on standard clocks, a lot of the transfer and calculation benchmarks in sisoft sandra for example places it up towards server boards.

..of course, almost no programs actually exploit that kind of performance right now. But if you're a gamer, and you're not that interested in cutting edge 3d performance - then you're going to thoroughly enjoy the fact that the "integrated gpu" has full dx11 support, dx9 and dx8 consistency, etc. And that you can basically scale for performance and battery. Instead of needing to switch to the other card if you wanted the game to run at all.

Example: Homm6 is the kind of game that has a lot of effects and calculation going on in the background. So if you run that on intel graphics, you often get artefacts or distortion of some sort when you run on battery. It's fine, because you don't really care about that when you're on battery, and so on. But with an apu setup you can just turn the detail down until you get 30fps, and it will play the same way as when using the dedicated card, other than the lowered detail. You have the same thing when running heavy hardware decoding for video, that maybe is running on some physx/directcompute extra. This is not going to run well on an intel integrated card, and you will have to rely on the external card running constantly (or the cpu peaking out instead), even if the actual gpu is basically almost idling. But that same thing will run without any complaints on the apu, and you could typically turn off the extra graphics card completely. And actually run with 25% load and a dx11 gpu, while the effect drain is about 50w. By comparison, that's where a Macbook pro idles. And this is considered "extremely low" for a laptop.

So if you were looking for a cheap-top, and don't want to spend too much money on getting a huge 3d sli setup, or something like that. But still want a quad-core setup for media encoding and some of the emulation that needs high computation power... while not needing that much of a monster of a gpu, really. And are willing to turn the resolution or detail down a bit to get a game running smoothly. Then consider an apu-setup. There aren't that many options out there right now. But the "ultraslim" stuff from AMD will probably be geared towards that. Some of the e-450 chipsets also come with an apu dual core with a reasonably good apu.. like a 6650m.. you know.. 800-1000 3dmark11 marks at best. It's ..just about good enough for BF3 on ultra low detail in 1024. But(!) it will still have all the instruction set acceleration, as well as have these.... gorgeous OpenCL benchmarks .

Anyway. So consider if that's going to fit the bill. If you can get away with an e-450 or one of the a70 chipsets for normal use, you will get performance per coin that's absolutely ridiculous with one of these setups. And they will still run cool. I'm not exaggerating here - full load on all cores while using the gpu, and the "core" on the n53tk ended up at 41 degrees -- while overclocked from 1.5Ghz to 2.6Ghz (even if I'm not completely sure it didn't run at "boost" state all the time, that was still impressive. It will run on standard timings for 31 degrees on heavy use - 30-50w drain)..

Obviously these systems won't ace the synthetic benchmarks on single-thread performance. But was that really the point for a laptop anyway..?).