Graphics Card

Apoligies if this has been asked already, but im work and havent got time to search the forums properly.
Im looking to buy a expensive Sony Laptop but im concerned about the Graphic card as ive heard some do not work well with SL. Its fitted with a ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4650 card. Does anybody have one of these or know if it works well?

Thanks for any help

Sure it works, and will probably work really well.

Try to find something with an equivalent Nvidia. It will be less problematic for SL.

Search the forums for "ATI" and see.

I searched for "HD 4650" and got this: /invalid_link.html

If you get that card with your laptop you have a good chance of having problems it looks like.

It's a mid range card. A little better than an Nvidia GT 230m, which is the minimum that I recommend for SL from the current Nvidia range. As said before, Nvidia cards have better OpenGL support, but ATIs will work with some attention to graphics settings.

Thanks for the replys and advice
Im gonna keep searching and see if i can find a Sony one with NVIDIA card since there seems to trouble with ATI ones. I wouldnt want to spend alot then be dissapointed when i try and login to Sl.

The F series can be ordered with a GT 330m. That's about as low as I would go for a laptop to run SL.

After hours of searching and drooling over Sony ones that are out of my price range! Ive found one which is AW series with a Nvidia 9600M GT 512mb graphics card. Can anyone please confirm this works well with SL so i dont go and waste a £1000?

The 9600M GT should work well for SL. My laptop has two 512MB 8700M GT's in it. The 8700 and 9600 are almost identical, performance-wise, so assuming you've got a good CPU and plenty of RAM, you should get about the same experience I'm getting.

On that machine, I run SL with nearly all settings enabled and maxed. The only exception is AA, which I keep at 4x. Maxing AA all the way to 16x only makes things look slightly better, but carries a big performance hit, so it's not worth the trade, in my opinion.

Having two video cards SLI mode increases my FPS about 10% in SL, which you obviously won't be able to do. But SL still runs really well in single card mode for me. Your experience would likely be the same.

There is a catch, though. The 9600M GT comes in a couple of different varieties. There's a GDDR2 version and GDDR3 version. The one with DDR2 will likely operate significantly more slowly than the one with DDR3. So make sure you know which one you're getting before you buy.


Can I ask why you're so partial to Sony? Not that Sony makes bad machines or anything, but there are other companies out there that offer far more bang for the buck. Perhaps it's different in your country, but here in the US, Sony laptops tend to be pretty overpriced. For the equivalent of your £1000 (about $1400), I can get an ASUS machine with a Core 2 Quad, 6GB of RAM, and a 1GB GeForce GTX 260M, not to mention a full HD screen, and nice size 640GB hard drive.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834220669

The closest equivalent, price-wise, that I could find in the Sony AW series costs $150 more, and has significantly lower specs. It gives you a Core 2 Duo instead of the Quad, just 4GB of RAM instead of 6, a 400GB hard drive instead of the 640, and although the screen is an inch larger, it's the same resolution, so it might not look quite as sharp.

If ASUS laptops are available in your country, I'd suggest you give them a serious look. In the US, they've easily got the best feature per dollar ratio of any off-the-shelf brand.

Chosen... no one at newegg has even rated the computer.. I usually like to see a few ratings (5 or more) before I pick something up.. Although Asus is good quality... I hate their motherboards for desktops... you ever tried to take a heat sink off the processor on an ASUS mobo? ... pain the behind is not words to do the justice to the job..




Ive really been looking at this computer for about a week now to pick up as my laptop/spare computer... but Im unsure about it until I see some people give feedback on it..


BTW there is another asus laptop that is 300 dollars more but all i can see in the difference is hard drive space is there another difference im not seeing in the specs?

To be clear, all I did was plug in the equivalent of the OP's price range, to see what would come up. I wasn't trying to say that that particular model was the only one to look at. I was just trying to get the point across that there may be better deals out there than the one brand the OP was looking at. If you're not comfortable buying something that fellow customers of NewEgg have not yet rated, that's fine. Wait, or buy something else.

I don't see lack of ratings as necessarily a bad thing, though, on a brand new model. It'll likely be a few weeks yet before enough people have bought it and played with it to start leaving feedback.

I think this particular one is at sort of an odd price point. People who buy gaming machines tend to be enthusiasts, who would likely spend a little more to make sure all possible bells and whistles are included. The G72Gx-X1 is missing a couple of little things that its sister model, the G72Gx-A1 has. My guess is that's why the A1 has been rated a couple of times so far, while the X1 has not been yet. (More on this in a bit.)




I don't blame you for being cautious, but realistically, if you're waiting for five or more ratings to pop up on NewEgg, you may be waiting a long time. The market for gaming laptops is relatively small, and the market for 17" ones is even smaller. If you do a quick scan of all the ASUS laptops NewEgg is currently selling, the only ones that have been rated five or more times are the really cheap ones, and ones that have been around for a while. The only gaming machine that has a substantial amount of ratings right now is the G51, an 15 incher. 15's will always outsell 17's, and the G51 has been out for a relatively long time now.

This particular G72Gx-X1 model has the added problem that, as I said a minute ago, given the choice, most gamers would probably buy the slightly more expensive version. So the market for this machine is even smaller than it otherwise would be. I suspect it will be quite a while before enough people have bought the G72Gx-X1 for any five of them to leave feedback.




No, I haven't ever tried to take apart an existing build with an ASUS mobo in it. I doubt I ever would try to do that on a laptop, though, so I'm not quite sure what you're trying to say. All I know is I've owned two ASUS laptops, and several of my friends and family members have them. We've all been very pleased with them. I've come to trust the brand enough to believe that if the listed specs are good, I don't really need to see the reviews to know what to expect.




Have you tried Googling for "G72Gx-X1 reviews"? I just did. This first one that comes up says pretty much what I'd expect to hear, given the specs:

http://compreviews.about.com/od/deskreplace/gr/ASUS-G72Gx-X1.htm

The high end graphics card makes it great for gaming, but it's not quite as fast at other things as a machine with an i7 would be. I find that comparison to be a little silly, since there's no way you'd get an i7 AND a GTX 260 in the same machine for that price. If I had to pick one or the other, the graphics card would win every single time. I'm not sure what the author of the review expects people might do that would demand the speed of an i7 CPU but somehow wouldn't require much graphics horsepower. Ultra-intensive sound editing, perhaps?

In any case, I have to believe this machine is likely quite well suited for SL, which obviously is what is relevant here. A faster CPU would be nice, as would faster RAM, but again, given the choice between that and the nice graphics card, the graphics card will be more beneficial.




From what I can see, the differences are as follows:

- 1TB hard drive vs. 640GB
- BD Combo vs. DVD Super Multi

Other than that, they appear to be identical. That might actually help you out in your quest for ratings. As I mentioned earlier, the X1 hasn't been rated yet, but the A1 has been, twice so far. Since the two machines are the same, except for a couple of very minor peripherals, I'd be comfortable assuming the same ratings for both.

The A1 has gotten five out of five and four out of five, so far, not bad at all. It's worth noting that the guy who gave it four marked it down only because he had some driver problems, which is not really a critique of the machine itself. He said he would have given it a five, had it not been for that problem. I'd call that a five in the unfortunate guise of a four.


So now there's the obvious question, is it worth $300 for an extra 360GB of storage space and a Blu-Ray drive? Only you can answer that for you. If it were me, I'd probably want the Blu-Ray, but I don't see it as a huge deal either way.

I'd heard before that the ways SL and ATI are built meant they weren't great with each other, but after a card failed, I decided to try ATI for the first time - now, despite this new more expensive card supposedly ranking better in online charts for gaming, it definitely was not. I race cars a lot, so it noticed for me. After having now moved back to the much lovelier nVidia, I think I can advise that if you're only wanting to do SL, you don't get as much per pound/dollar/Euro with ATI as you do with nVidia. I think it's partly that nVidias take kinder to the 'Enable VBO' setting in hardware options (in the graphics tab).

I'm using a 9500 and race, as I said (with lowered settings and an unofficial viewer).. so 9600 should be plenty good enough now, but who knows how long for? SL's getting bigger and hungrier.

chosen you are a wealth of information... i like this laptop and when i have the cash which will be mid march i expect there to be some ratings.. hopefully they still have it in stock cause as we've discussed this thing outperforms my desktop in every category but processor speed.. 2.0 quad versus the 2.5 quad i have...


I really like it a lot and if i do pick it up ill let you know what i think of it.

I'm running an Asus G51 with the same GPU and CPU as the G72 model you are looking at. The main difference is that the G72 uses triple-channel memory (three banks instead of the typical 2). Look at the reviews of the other G series notebooks for more info (G51, G71, and G72).

Asus is a solid brand. The GPU is downclocked from stock to reduce heat. The vents on the G series put out a fair amount of heat, but that's typical of a gaming notebook: run on a cooler and it will saty well within specs for hardware temperature. The Clevo/Sager and Alienware models have better cooling, but they cost more. Asus has a good rating for build quality, and their units carry a two-year warranty (with accidental damage coverage the first year).

As for performance in SL, I can run two avatars logged in and have iTunes and multiple tabs of Firefox open and still get smooth framerates in SL. Draw distance set at 256 meters, everything maxed on the quality, and 4x AA.