Yet another Laptop Thread (ATI Radeon HD 3200)

So to start with, I'm not expecting miracles of any kind here. I know that laptops and SL aren't the best of friends, and while some laptops can handle SL, many can't handle it well. Unfortunately, I've been forced to look into the prospects of buying a laptop, because of the home-networking options where I live. I'll still have access to my desktop machine for major building and stuff, but the laptop would probably be used for more social stuff, so SL on the lappy doesn't have to be as perfect.

My budget isn't awesome, but I've come up with a couple of nice looking HP Pavillion DV7 series notebooks that I've been looking at, and I find myself worried about the video cards.

The laptops I'm seeing in my price-range (about $600) all seem to have shared video memory. Processors and ram and pretty good, (dual core, 2.0ghz, 4 gb of ram) and like I say, I've found a pretty good looking machine.

But rather than the "in this price range" standard Intel Graphics Accelerator 4500 MHD (presumably "on-board", the machines I've been looking at come equipped with an ATI Radeon HD 3200 video card.

The downside if of course, the shared video memory. But that's where my knowledge taps out.

The Jira has a few entries from people complaining of problems, but the complaints are pretty limited. I'd like to know what experiences people are having with this card.. if it's even remotely servicable for SL, or what.

I know that Argent recommended to someone, a machine a few months back that came with this very card.But I'd like to know what others think.

I don't have that exact card... I have a Radeon HD 4600, it worked fine until the last upgrade to the SL server, now I cannot edit linked parts anymore... it causes my bandwidth to drop to 0 and I'm paralyzed. Good luck!

Things have been rough on laptops since the last few updates -- even on macBookPros that worked great until recently.

The frame rate recently took a dive on the release client. Nothing except my powerful mac Pro desktop with custom graphics card gives me the frame rate I require to build anymore.


Proceed with caution. Try before you buy.

Don't forget to buy a cooling fan for your laptop.

Can't you get a really nice machine from Tigerdirect.com for $600??

Have you gone there and tried building one?

I have a HP DV6 series - TWICE resurrected with a new motherboard by HP (including after warranty) no thanks to SL which burned it up.

Buying that laptop as my SL machine back in 06 was the worst mistake i ever made - it is pretty beefy too for back then 1.8ghz 64x2, 2gig ram, and a GeFroce card.

If you can build your own, i would do that instead.

Also, ATI anything in SL is just rolling the dice on what your experience is going to be like.

I just looked at Tigerdirect.com.

You can get a machine that is like 2.5ghz to 3.0ghz (dual and quad) for the 450-600 dollar ranger.

You would have to buy a video card separately.

You can get a GeForce 9500GT 1GB, for like $50-60 bucks and that thing can run SL with graphics max including Antialiasing at x8 and the anisotropic stuff on.

Laptops are comfortable.

I am just terrified of ever owning another laptop for SL that is not one of those special super beefy gamer laptops like from Alienware.

Lappies are just too easy to break and too expensive to repair.

If you buy a laptop, you better be able to afford a 2 year warrant - you will most likely need it.

When it comes to laptops, I actually tend to recommend Thinkpads.