nVidia 7150M and SL

I am considering buying an HP laptop (dv2845se) with the following:

2.1Ghz AMD 64x2 TL-62 w/512K + 512K L2 cache
4G DDR2 RAM
nVidia GeForce Go 7150M Graphics w/up to 1071M ram (yes I know its shared)
250G HD
Win Vista Home Premium
14" WXGA HD Display (1280x800)

Does any one here use a laptop with THIS graphics card on a similar system?
If so, how well does SL run?
Any other issues i should be concerned about?

I know there are better and more pricey setups out there. At present, I am not looking for alternatives to this laptop.

Any help would be appreciated.

I've never used that particular card, but I can 99.9999% promise you you're not going to be pleased with it. With GeForce cards, the second digit is always the most important one. That number one in there indicates that that card is lowest of the low end in the GeForce 7 series. I wouldn't recommend going any lower than a 7600 if the 7 series is where you're looking.

Take a look at the specs on nVidia's website for a good idea of just how poorly 7100's perform. Compared with a 7600, the 7100 has half the memory interface, less than a quarter of the memory bandwidth, just a hair over one fifth of the texture fill rate, and about one third of the vertices per second. And that's for the desktop version. It's a safe bet the laptop one is even worse.




I know you said you're not considering alternatives, but that's kind of a shame, since there are much better machines out there for the exact same price. Here's one that looks promising, for example, the ASUS M51Sn-B1: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834220317

Slightly slower CPU in the ASUS than in the HP, but as usual, ASUS gives you a MUCH better graphics card, which more than makes up for it. The 9500M is basically an x600 level card, in that it's identically spec'ed to the 8600M. They seem to have dropped the numbers a step for the mobile cards in the GeForce 9 series for some reason. I notice the 9300M is likewise identically spec'ed to the 8400M.

Don't be fooled, by the way, at the apparent lesser amount of RAM in the ASUS, 3GB instead of the HP's 4. At first glance, it does seem like 1GB less, but when you consider the following two points, it really comes out the same. First, you'll be spending that extra gigabyte in the HP on the video card, since as you noted, the 7150M has no dedicated video memory of its own. Second, since both machines come with a 32-bit OS, 4GB of system RAM is not a usable possibility anyway. All 32-bit operating systems have a hard limit of 4GB for the combined total of video memory plus system RAM. Since ASUS is giving you a 512MB video card, it wouldn't make sense to put more than 3GB system RAM in the machine. Technically, they could give you 3.5GB, but there wouldn't be enough benefit in that to justify the extra cost. They'd have to put two more memory slots in it, which would mean a complete redesign (and potentially a larger sized machine), just for a relatively small increase in RAM.

Anyway, that's just the first one that popped up when I went to NewEgg, typed in ASUS (because I happen to like ASUS laptops a lot), and set the search parameter to under $1000. If you shop around, there may be even better alternatives around (if you've changed your mind actually to consider alternatives, that is).

Thanks for the info. Don't get me wrong, a beter deal is a better deal. My point about not wanting alternatives was to stop the thread from losing iits point. That being, how well does the 7150M deal with SL.

It looks like I'll be holding off until my existing laptop gets back from Toshiba service (2 weeks at least).

I have a HP with the 7150. It runs just fine. im new to SL, its glitchy at times but im not sure if thats from the server, me being on wireless or the processor but it does not freeze or lag.

I got a cheap o laptop that has this graphics and SL runs pretty good with it as does EVE-Online and other games i play

its not a bad card and you can find these in nice laptops for about 400USD

with 2 gigs ram / etc etc etc

if the price is under 500 and this is gonna be a 'extra pc' for mobile gaming it will be fine

if its your primary gaming machine you might wanna upGRAYedd