Will This Run SL ?

Hi guys & gals,

i'm thinking of buying a new laptop, but want to check it will run SL first.

Specs
AMD Turion X2 Dual Core Processor (2.00Ghz)
2GB Ram
NVidia GeForce 8200M Graphics (it says 'up to 895Mb . . . . . any ideas on that?)


thanks in advance
jimbo

Heck yea it will!

Let us know how it runs for you! Your experience should be pretty smooth.

i'll take that as a yes then. lol


have you any ideas on what it means on the product description of the graphics card, where it says "up to 895Mb" (bit concerned about that)

I am not sure. Maybe it means that i can used up that much extra regular memory in conjunction with your video ram?

I am really unsure about that.

ok,

apparently, the graphics card will take what it needs from the system (hence, "up to" 895Mb)

as for will it run SL ? . . . . . . . . . yes, it does . . . . very smoothly indeed




oh yeah, in case you hadn't figured . . . . . it's been bought & is sitting right here on my lap

"upto" means its using system ram

if you have a ton of it, you would be ok, not the fastest in the land, but fine

the problem with the phrase "upto" is when you get low ram

a 1gb pc with vista with 512 of that dedicated to the video will put you under the system requirements for both vista and sl


now know system ram is not nearly as fast as dedicated gddr2 or gddr3 video ram, but as long as you have enough to deal with everything in 1 pool you should be quite happy, altho you wont be breaking any records, or bragging about your super uber performance

now all of that said, some have dedicated video ram and THEN let you expand a portion of your system ram to help out, if your system has 256mb (or whatever) of dedicated video ram, and you do not dedicate more than that you will not suffer a performance issue for said hardware

all in all for a mobile its ok, you will do fine, i wish i caught this thread earilier, maybe i could have saved you a little bank , but as long as your happy, and SL is happy, everything is A-OK

Thanks Osgeld,

it's running great, so no need for the 'wish i'd caught it earlier'.

so far so good, i'm able to run SL & SAM broadcaster (as well as a certain file sharing program that i wont mention here) without any problems . . . . so . . . . yes, i'm happy & would happily recommend this laptop (especially seeing as it cost under £400) to anybody looking to go portable.

Jimbo

You should strongly consider getting a laptop cooler. SL run's laptops hot enough to fry eggs on and has been known to burn out a motherboard and/or video card. It fried my Sony Vaio, and fried my HP dv6000 twice.

its not just secondlife, anything that is as cpu and graphics intense will do it, but the advice is good

How many things are as CPU / Graphics / Hard disk intensive as Second Life?

I am not a gamer so I cannot list games of the top of my head.

Some photo editing and most video editing software are CPU and GPU intensive......some might be even more intensive than SL. CAD (computer aided design) programs come to mind.

The only other app that I have that comes close to Sl in being so GPU-intensive is when I am doing extremely high-rez ray-traced 3D graphic renders in DAZ|Studio or Poser. But those apps still " pace themselves" so as not to burn up your graphics card. The designers of high-end rendering apps for still images realize that the artist will probably do other things while a complex image renders. But in SL, you're rendering real-time, and none of the content can be pre-rendered. This puts a far higher load on the graphics card than even any of the really spiffy-looking 3D games, all of which can have most of the intensive calculation work pre-rendered, because the content of the basic scene never changes.

I used to do minor video editing first with an A/V Mac, and then on a windows machine and do not recall anything being intensive as SL. The HD in SL rarely stops moving, my CPU is always tagged at 54% (dual core 3.0ghz), and i cannot say much for the video card but I would think SL does not let that rest either.

I recall back in 03/04 LL saying something to the effect of SL being a very intense "Burn in" machine...maybe the term was bench test? I just know they said that SL was at the time probably the most intense application that ran all 3 things continuously non-stop (Video/CPU/Hard disk).

Nevertheless, I will never run SL on a laptop again for any prolonged period of time as if it were my primary machine unless it had one of those coolers that lock to the bottom of it, and even then. I've been burned thrice by on laptops using SL so its DeskTops forever for me since all i do are: SL, photoshop, Web surf, word processing.

I'll second that.

Laptops are great for portability, business, and schooling but for high performance they are, by far, very limited. Physical space is proably the main limitation (and the corresponding weight issues).....just no way to reliably dissapate the high heat generated by CPU's, HD's, GPU's, PS's, batteries, etc.

ZoMg i know what all those things are...

I AM A GEEK!!!!!