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  Trader Rating: 0 · #1  
Old June 27th, 2010, 07:44 AM
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bstandifer bstandifer is offline
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New here with a question...

Hi,
I'm not really sure what thread this would go in (im still very new to the site). So forgive me if I'm putting this in the wrong thread.

Anyway, my question is this...
I just purchased a new laptop. With my old laptop I just played a lot of sims 3 however, I'm hoping to start playing better games (since I have a better laptop). I would like to let you all know the spec's of the new laptop and get opinions as to what type of games I would be able to play (with pretty good graphics).

also I would like to get opinions as to if the laptop I purchased is worth my money or did I buy crap? (I paid 999.99)

First of all it is a Toshiba Satellite A665 s66067 (first toshiba I've owned so Im not sure if they are even good computers)

here are the spec's

i7 processor (running win7)
4g ram
500g hard drive
screen resolution 1366 x 768
nVidia GeForce GT330M with 1GB dedicated memory, and up to 1758MB shared memory
Dolby Avanced Audio with Harman/Kardon speakers


If you need to know anything more let me know, but thats really about it. I'm ready to start game playing but needed to know if i needed more ram/better graphics card anything like that.

I look forward to your opinions!

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  Trader Rating: 5 · #2  
Old June 27th, 2010, 04:26 PM
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Stang Stang is offline
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Well basically for gaming at this resolution you need both a decent cpu and gpu, there is no point having too much power on either end if you are restricted to 1366x768. The GT 330M is a pretty potent little card with 48 shader processors, 8 ROPs, and 16 TMUs. And ~25.6gb of memory bandwidth (DDR3 on a 128-bit bus) provides a good backbone. In essence you can look at this as a GT 220 in the desktop environment, so if you look for some reviews of those then you will get a good picture of what this card is capable of.

From my experience with both cards I can tell you it's quite capable of gaming at this resolution. Games like BC2, COD: MW2, Sims 3, L4D2, WIC, and so many more, will be very playable. In some games you will not be running with any AA/AF enabled or might have to sacrifice a few settings from high to medium, but all in all its a very good way to go. The trade off for anything higher in performance would mean a bigger laptop (17" screen), heavier, lower battery life, and more heat being dumped onto your lap. In a 16" laptop like the A665 you are in good shape.

If you would like to improve the responsiveness of the system the first place I would turn is that hard drive. Either replace it with a hybrid drive or a straight SSD. Either option will mean faster boot ups, quicker return from sleep mode, games and apps loading faster, and if you go with the SSD you'll see lower heat, shave off a bit more weight, and you will get more battery life.

You can get a 500GB Momentus XT hybrid hard drive for $130 on newegg, so you wont lose any space just gain in performance. While SSDs are much more expensive, $100 will get you a 30-40gb drive, and the $150-$200 range has 60-80gb, but you'll be looking at $250-$300+ for 120gb or more. But, the SSD advantage is clear, and if you want your laptop to be as fast as it can be you want an SSD. If you need a lot of storage but still want more performance, get that hybrid hard drive. Basically its a 7200 RPM mechanical drive with a 4gb SSD built in that acts as a read-only cache. Seagate determine what gets installed here, and it makes things very simple and very effective. You should read this review at Anandtech to see what this all means. Basically you can easily get 2x the performance of a standard 500gb drive, which puts you much in line with the best high performance drives the desktops get (WD Raptors), but you still fall quite short of what the SSDs can really do.

$999 is what these laptops cost in general, and you have a good one. I wouldn't bother upgrading the ram or any other components but that hard drive is certainly your weakest link right now. The only other real alternative that I have been suggesting to people is the M11x from Alienware. It is an 11" laptop, so much more portable, but essentially offers the same hardware as that toshy you picked out. Prices start at $799 with a Core 2 Duo processor, GT 335M, and 2gb of ram. With a Core i5 and 4gb of ram you are looking at $999, while the i7 upgrade brings that up to $1,150. But if you want portability as well as gaming power, its pretty much the best option on the market right now.
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  Trader Rating: 0 · #3  
Old July 21st, 2010, 11:58 PM
markylove markylove is offline
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Hi,

I'm just new in this site and well, I have the same problems as you have,.

I have heard that Toshiba's are all so great!

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