19th October 2007, 12:39 PM
Sometimes NVidia's numbering of their cards is just plain confusing. I have two Geforce 7600 GTs and they work just plain great.
Anyway, they don't just put the WHOLE card in the laptop ABF, they just directly place the GPU on the main board. This makes it a lot easier to get it in there, make it fast (PCI-E fast), and get the power you would expect. However, the average laptop is made with the business person in mind, not the gamer, so they skimp on the graphics because most people, save CAD designers, don't need to have great 3D graphics.
That's why you have to make sure the laptop you get is specifically spec'd for gaming. Mine, for example, while very cheap and on the "low end" was still meant for gaming so I got a decent video card solution in there. Nowhere near enough for modern gaming, it was still a cheap laptop, but I can play Counterstrike Source and Warcraft 3 and most of my multiplayer stuff just fine, which is really all I wanted my laptop to be able to do. Oh, by the way, Steam now lets you play without it logged in. No more getting around it by starting it up before I lose my net connection, it now will just start in "offline mode" whenever it can't find a net connection. The only thing is the very first time I play any Steam game it has to authenticate itself one time online before I can play it. That's it and I can live with that.
So anyway, Alienware for instance makes gaming specific computers with multiple GPUs of the latest calibur and some nice video card RAM in there, so you can get a sweet gaming laptop that easily competes with desktop standards.
But it isn't cheap... not even close...
Anyway, they don't just put the WHOLE card in the laptop ABF, they just directly place the GPU on the main board. This makes it a lot easier to get it in there, make it fast (PCI-E fast), and get the power you would expect. However, the average laptop is made with the business person in mind, not the gamer, so they skimp on the graphics because most people, save CAD designers, don't need to have great 3D graphics.
That's why you have to make sure the laptop you get is specifically spec'd for gaming. Mine, for example, while very cheap and on the "low end" was still meant for gaming so I got a decent video card solution in there. Nowhere near enough for modern gaming, it was still a cheap laptop, but I can play Counterstrike Source and Warcraft 3 and most of my multiplayer stuff just fine, which is really all I wanted my laptop to be able to do. Oh, by the way, Steam now lets you play without it logged in. No more getting around it by starting it up before I lose my net connection, it now will just start in "offline mode" whenever it can't find a net connection. The only thing is the very first time I play any Steam game it has to authenticate itself one time online before I can play it. That's it and I can live with that.
So anyway, Alienware for instance makes gaming specific computers with multiple GPUs of the latest calibur and some nice video card RAM in there, so you can get a sweet gaming laptop that easily competes with desktop standards.
But it isn't cheap... not even close...
"On two occasions, I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." ~ Charles Babbage (1791-1871)