Another Laptop recommendation thread

Hello all,

Need opinions, and need them fast pls. I purchased a Laptop last night online. During the options ordering process i upgraded the Graphics to a Geforce 105M from an Intel onboard graphics card. Of course this morning I am reading now that the graphics i "upgraded" to is prettly lowly. I have the chance to cancel the order today and go with another laptop that has a discreet ATI 4530 graphics solution (which is the lil brother to the ATI 4650).

What should i do?

I know neither of these cards are that great, and thats okay, I just need them to work. I will only use this laptop for SL while on vacation, work trips, and sitting on the porch during a few warm summer nights.

Is it worth it to change my order from a Geforce 105M Laptop (which is equivalent to a Geforce 9300M), to an ATI 4530? Both have 512MB memory.

Thanks much in advance.

nVidia GPUs tend to work better with SL than ATI GPUs. Also, a less powerful GPU might keep your laptop from overheating and dying... SL tends to be a bit of a laptop killer.

Either will be better than Intel graphics.

The Nvidia 105 has 8 cores and runs GDDR memory. It is a little better than the minimum specs for SL, but not by far.

The ATI 4530 has more cores but you can't compare ATI and Nvidia on core count...it's 80 cores are about equivalent to 16-20 cores on an Nvidia chipset. The problem is that while the spec calls for GDDR3 as the preferred memory, it can be built with slower DDR2 or DDR3.

So to recap:
ATI has more processing power.
Nvidia probably has faster graphic memory.
Nvidia supports Open GL 2.1 while ATI supports OpenGL 2.0 (minor feature differences) and has better overall OpenGL support.

I would say the Nvidia is worth an upgrade over the Intel graphics. If prices are close, the ATI will perform a bit better but may require more work to initially get set up in SL. If you can find an Nvidia 130m in your price range, that would be worth upgrading to.

You would be best to search the forums for "ATI" and the read the plethora of posts from people who have had issues, and then decide.

I'd go for the Nvidia is SL is your main concern.

Wow incredibly helpful posts. I thank each of you for your inputs.

Briana - I've lived through some of those "Plethora of ATI issues", which is why my gut always told me to go with Nvidia for my SL.

Argent - Thanks for the breakdown. I wish i could go with a 130m, but that just isn't an option for me. let me ask, are you familiar with the integrated Geforce 730i / 9300 GPU motherboards? If so would the performance of the 105M be similar? Because if so i can live with that. I have a little integrated ITX geforce 9300 motherboard, and i would say it certainly works "good enough" for me. If the 105M would be the same i could absolutely be happy with that.

NotebookCheck does these incredible GPU rankings for notebooks. Check out the right-hand panel, and list of reviews.

http://www.notebookcheck.net/NVIDIA-GeForce-G-105M.13790.0.html

I think Veritable Quandry would be able to give you better details than I.

The 105 has 8 cores to 16 on the 9300 series motherboards, but the 105M has higher clock speed and its own memory. You probably won't see much real world difference between the two, but the 9300 might have a slight edge.

Hi everyone. I just thought i'd drop an update into this thread for future reference of others asking the same or similar question in the future... i bought the laptop with the 105m Geforce i can happily say that second life really works pretty well on it. I didn't fiddle with settings too much, i just upped the hardware graphics settings from basic to medium, and everything works plenty fine. When i bumped up medium to high, movement became a little jerky, so back down to medium and all is well.

I am running windows 7, and have 4 gigs of ram with an intel T6600 dual core 2.2 gig processor.

I did get the warning upon first run of SL about my hardware settings not meeting the minimum requirements, but i set the warning to ignore in the future, and it now does just that.

On a side note, the cool thing about having a newer laptop along with a newer 54" inch plasma TV is that they both come with an HDMI port, so all it took was a single HDMI cable between the laptop and the TV and i was in SL bliss on the big screen, with both visual and sound, and with minimal effort ))

sl on the telly huh?..wow that is very cool