SureAI Forums covering SureAI game titles.

[TheHawk]

Hi.

I am considering selling off 2 of my pc's (lack of space nowadays) and hopefully get enough money to buy a laptop/notebook. It would have to be capable of playing games though.
Did look at an MX11 alien, but over here (UK) IT'S £600 for the basic model. Paying extra just for the name. So I was wandering if you use a laptop for games. Which one? How good are they for pc games?

[himmelslicht]

There are only few laptops capable of playing up-to-date games on high settings. And they are expensive.
Laptops generally arent designed for gaming, but for office use.
If you want to buy a laptop for gaming, you have to consider that you will have to pay more money for less performance. Your gain would be mobility and less power consumption on the other hand.
Personally, i would recommend a laptop for gaming only to the casual gamer. I find a desktop computer more convenient for long gaming sessions. Not only am i free to choose my pheripherals, such as keyboard and screen. If you add them to the purchase of a laptop, its gets very much more expensive, and you still save no space.

Anyhow, if youre going to buy one laptop, you should look out far a grafics card with dedicated grafics memory. Most laptop grafics cards use shared memory only, while there are some which use both shared and dedicated memory, or even dedicated grafics memory only, which is much better in performance.

[arvisrend]

I am using a laptop (an MSI GX620, one and a half years old) for gaming. NVidia Geforce 9600M GT for graphics and 2.53Ghz dualcore. It is enough
- for Morrowind to run smoothly with most of the MGE features on (including distant land),
- for Nehrim on almost maximum settings (I don't use AA but otherwise it's maxed) with a rather good framerate outside of Erothin (Erothin is very annoying, however),
- for The Witcher (1) on maximum to run smoothly except for the market district in Chapter 3 (this seems to be related to the many NPCs and probably bad programming) and the burning ghetto in Chapter 5 (ok, I understand),
- for Dragon Age to run smoothly except of some loading lags which probably everyone has (but Dragon Age is NOT a technologically up-to-date game).

I don't know what to expect of the next-gen games though.

[TheHawk]

Hi.

Cheers for the response.
The games I play are all the ones Arvisrend mentioned, plus Drakensang/Gothic3 (at the moment only playing Nehrim).
Space is a problem now, which is why I'm looking at a laptop/notebook (because someone cannot stand the whirring of fans, me and my computers are in the bedroom. Not ideal with 2 pc's running and a 3rd one I was thinking of selling anyway).

Unfortunateley looks like i'm unemployed again in a week or two. I was hopeing to tart up 2 of my pc's to sell and hopefully get enough for a notebook.
Unless I see something else, I have become set on a alienware mx11, gt3500 graphics card, optional i5 or i7 processor if can afford. The duo core version apparently runs Crysis at 37fps.

But it all now depends on finding work again. So. Heres to dreaming.

Thanks for the response guys.

[himmelslicht]

Maybe some affordable silent fans would be the solution for you then? But thats just a suggestion..

[Shatar]

I use one of the ASUS G51J series:

*GeForce GTS 360M
*Intel Core i5
*500 GB HDD
*4 GB Memory

I bought it 3 months ago for €1099 and I'm able to run Oblivion on highest settings. The only downside is the 15.6" screen, but that doesn't bother me much.

[TheHawk]

Hi

Shatar I think I can only dream about it for now. But thanks for the response.

I use one of the ASUS G51J series

Looks really nice, trouble would be the cheapest seen over here is closer to £1300 (roughly double what you've paid and considering £600 is making me choke now). Screen size was no mater, the MX11 only has a 11.6 inch screen.

Maybe some affordable silent fans would be the solution for you then? But thats just a suggestion..

Love all suggestions. These are home built pcs (call them my Frankensteins), quiet cases (1 even insulated) and arctic cooler fans on the one, "cool and quiet" enabled.

[himmelslicht]

Cool & Quest only affects the CPU fan. And my Arctic Cooling Freezer rev. 2 keeps my CPU under 45 degrees at full load without a single sound.
Loudest fan in my system is the grafics card fan when its under load.

Theres a simple way to make your PC a lot more silent instantly, given your BIOS offers the Options for that. My BIOS allows me to adjust fan speed manually. Dropping it from 100% to 75% makes them go from moderatly noisy to whispersilent. For the grafics card, you might have to use an alternative cooling solution, like an fan upgrade from arctic cooling, as most factory issued fans dont offer good cooling and silence. Or a passive cooler and manually adding a big silent fan (120 mm) on top of the passive cooler. Prolly the most silent solution if you know a little tinkering, as most grafiks cards go with 30mm - max 80mm fans.

[TheHawk]

Hi.

Cheers for the suggestions.
One pc I manually control. Fans have controls which sit on top of pc.
Unfortunately (money is always the problem), my gameing pc has 3 gpu's (2 x 9800gt and 9500gt dedicated to physx). If I had the money I would change to passive gpu's. Plus make sure not just gt cards. When I built this just over 12 months ago (just won a couple of hundred on a sweepstake), able to pick both 9800's up for less than £120. Seemed a bargain.
Saying that though, if I check with rivatuner or any other software, my gpu's usually run quite cool , start off on a 30% duty cycle and 25% speed, and that is quite quiet.

edit: It should run cool. Just thought about it. 7 fans in total !!!!!!!

[himmelslicht]

Its not about the cooling. Unless you OC in a close case its hard to get your PC to overheat. Its about reducing the cooling as much as possible to avoid noise :p

[TheHawk]

Hi.

I do OC once in a while. Not too much. But the fans I have came with case or are on gpu's. Cannot remove any and apart from turning some off do not want to turn down much below 25%.

Believe it or not, just as typing this, someone just came in and said how quiet they sounded in here, but they could hear them downstairs!!!!?????
I give up.

[himmelslicht]

o.O Ok, maybe its not the fans, but the HDDs vibration spreading through the ceiling? I dont know either, something that sounds silent close up just CANT be loud far away o.O

[TheHawk]

Hi.

Thanks for help and suggestions.

Am getting some sound proofing foam or similar (when I can find some) to stand pc's on. If that does not work, buy some ear defenders for them (p.s thats a joke. I'd get killed if they saw this)

[Dark Phoenix]

I use a laptop for gaming. I have to.. wife's pc broke and she took my desktop over.. But.. I love my laptop. I have posted a list on other forums of over 100 modern FPS games this thing playes well on either medium or high settings. It is a Compaq cq61 with a single core AMD Sempron II 3.0 mhz processor ( dual processors are way overrated for gaming, as most games dont make use of them anyway) with 4 gigs of ram. It has a 366 megabyte ATI Radeon 4200 HD video chip that can use shared system ram for a total of 1.6 gigabytes of video mamory. ( people also say shared video ram sucks, thay are only half right - shared video ram works awesomely if your not trying to run lots of other applications in the background. This thing cost me $ 350.00 at Wal-Mart - about the cheapest new laptop you can get. came with 2 gigs of ram, I added 2 more gigs for 50 bucks. Total 400.00 U.S dollars.

On it I play Oblivion (Nehrim) on medium settings, Fallout 3, Fallout New Vegas, All Thief games, Splinter cell games, Two Worlds, Gothic 3, Half Life 2, Doom 3, Singularity, Call of Dudy Modern Warfare 1 and 2, GTA San Andreas & GTA 4, ( low settings for GTA 4) Crysis 1 and 2, Far Cry 1 and 2, all the Stalker games, the Precursers, White Gold 2, borderlands, ( and a bunch of older games like Morrowind and deus ex - you name it, this thing plays it well. Most games that came out this year I play on medium settings and thats just fine with me. Most other games that are at least a few years old I play on high settings. I say, grab a laptop with a good video chip and try it out - don't listen to the crowd. Only games I really have any problem with and have to go to lower than medium settings are console type games that were not optimized well for PC.

Beats any portable gaming system and any console system hands down, is portable, more flexable than those. In my book it's a win win.

[Vandriam]

I have used an Acer Aspire 7736 ZG to play Nehrim.

GPU: NVIDIA GeForce G210M (512 Mo of video memory)
RAM : 4Go (DDR2)
CPU : Intel Pentium T4300

I just had framerates lags sometimes but not any big problem on this computer.
I have bought it 700 Euros 2 years ago.

[bananasplit]

I use a Laptop both for working on and playing Enderal...well..it worked fine for Skyrim, but for anything beyond that you might consider a Desktop PC i guess. Still, Enderal works ok on my Laptop, but more powerfull Desktop PCs do make it much easier both using the creation kit and playing Enderal ..plus it is more fun. It is great to take your work everywhere though, on the train, visiting friends etc. and also having a go at mashing up some undead in a train compartment full of old ladies;)

Downside is poorer visuals, lower framerate..you want to spend at least 1300 - 1500 euros on a decent gaming laptop, if it is supposed to run Enderal in a proper way;)

Edit: I use an Asus Laptop, which has the largest screen available..which is nice for all visual applications. It is quite heavy though, 4 kilos something, and it does not fit into a backpack easily. There´s 8 Gb Ram, 2Gb vram and a core i7 something..can t rememeber the details. Works fine for Renderapplications and other visual stuff. This model is supposed to fit "mulitmedia" demands.. there are special models for gaming, but somehow i never heard anybody was really happy with those..quality issues