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by partyboy

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I'm going off to college shortly and was looking at getting a laptop for school (well mostly for the portable games but don't tell my parents), and was looking at the new Dell XPS'. However I was wondering if I could make an existing laptop that they offer up to par with the XPS instead of forking over the money for the new design. Well the base of the question is how well does the 128MB DDR ATI MOBILITY RADEON X300 PCI Express x16 Graphics card stand up to the 256MB NVIDIA GeForce Go 6800 Ultra.

4 replies

by mjd420nova

In my experience, graphics in laptops seldom
work very well as the chip speeds are not
quite up to par with the desktops. Most of
the game software is written with NVIDIA as
the chip of choice. ATI RADEON are fine but
usually require patches and can gobble up
frame rates. The manufacturer that seems to
be above the rest and will stand behind the
systems they sell and that's ALEINWARE,
check them out. Expensive but speedy machines
made for gaming.

by thechas

As a general rule, what graphics system comes with a laptop is the only option you have.

The graphics processor and any dedicated graphics RAM are built onto the system board.

As for hardware comparisons of different graphics cards, take a look at sites like http://www.tomshardware.com/ that review and compare cards.

Still, it will be a VERY RARE laptop that you can install a PCI Express video card in.

Looking over the XPS systems at Dell, it may be a graphics card that they are using. However, it does state that the GPU and card are customized for laptop use. So, they are NOT standard interchangeable PCI Xpress cards.

Chas

by hal 9000

Save your money and build yourself a Clevo to what you want. Well at least the size of HDD, the type and amount of RAM and CPU as well the basic chassis you'll be getting better value for money and have a far better NB to boot.

http://www.clevo.com.tw/

You should be able to track down a reseller in your ares from this Makers Web Site.

Col

by jamesrl

My assumption about the mention of an PCI Express board is that is either a) a mistake or b) that they have implemented PCI e on the "on board" video chipset. PCIe is twice as fast bandwidth wise as 8X AGP.(hence x16)

As far as a chipset to chipset comparison, there is no comparison. The nVidia 6800 GPU is far more powerful than the Radeon x300. The x300 is the budget end of the ATI line, whereas the 6800 was once the fastest processor that nVidia made (now its the 7800).

Of course all depends on what you want to do with it. For surfing and business apps (MS Office) either will do the job. If you want to play games, or watch DVDs, the nVidia will be better.

James

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