Requesting the expertise of those familiar with laptops :)

[echo]

Hello! I'm in the market for a new laptop, and am having problems knowing what's a good deal and what components are junk/good. I saw the following on sale

http://www.microcenter.com/single_pr...uct_id=0303741

http://www.microcenter.com/single_pr...uct_id=0304136

So my questions:

- How do the parts on the 2 laptops stack up against each other? There's a $100 difference, but to my inexperienced eye, it seems like the cheaper one has better parts? am i missing something?

- what's the real world performance difference between the mobility 3450 and 3650? for my purposes, i'm mostly going to use it to multibox (3? that's probably the limit right based on those parts?) wow and play some other games. (sims 3, fallout 3, possibly some fps shooters and rts games) will these cards be up to the task with reasonable framerates and eye candy options enabled?

- are these good deals? i would like to keep the price range below $900 USD, but if spending an extra $100-$200 will net me a significant increase in performance and longevity, i'm open to that also. if these arent good deals, are there better ones out there that anyone knows about and can link to?

Thanks in advance for your time in reading. have a great day!

[Enndo]

2nd machine is better, but neither will handle 3 wows. Laptops have small heatsinks, 3 wows on either of those duel cores will overheat the machine.

Edit- for 800 you can build a really nice desktop and 5 box

[Farleito]

There's a $100 difference, but to my inexperienced eye, it seems like the cheaper one has better parts? am i missing something?

Toshiba Brand + Intel+ Labelflash DVD + 16" Display + Radeon 3650
HP Brand + AMD + Lightscribe DVD (cheaper dvds)+ 15.4" Display + Radeon 3450

3450
Transistors: 181 Million
Stream Processors: 40
Texture Units: 4
Core Clock Speed: 600MHz
Memory Clock Speed: 1.00GHz
Math Processing Rate: 48 GFLOPs

3650
Transistors: 378 Million (hotter)
Stream Processors: 120 (faster)
Texture Units: 8
Core Clock Speed: 750MHz (faster)
Memory Clock Speed: 1.60GHz (faster)
Math Processing Rate: 174 GFLOPs (faster)

By those "numbers" the Toshiba is a better bang for the buck.. Regardless, I would advise against gaming on laptops. Laptops were never designed to withstand the high-end gaming usage. By engineering design, they were made to be more portable than durable. The heat kills them. They need a better cooling method. The same can be said for PCs, but when your videocard goes out, you're not buying a new proprietary motherboard. It's debatable, so I'll just say that it's my 2 cents... just consider it.

To answer your question, the Toshiba is a better deal unless someone can prove that the AMD is superior.

[CaptainEO]

My laptop is pretty close to that spec (Lenovo U330: P8600/Radeon 3450) and I have no problem 4-boxing on it. (however it does feel sluggish sometimes outside of instances, especially in Northrend).

[Moorea]

2nd machine is better, but neither will handle 3 wows. Laptops have small heatsinks, 3 wows on either of those duel cores will overheat the machine.

this totally wrong; I 5 box on a similar laptop and it works fine

what you do want though is 1920x1200 instead of 1366 x 768 - the more pixels the more you can actually see of alt windows

[LokNarash]

When using notebook for multiboxing or gaming in general, an additional cooler pad could be necessary. I cannot play single wow on my notebook without that, but using Zalman ZM-NC 2000 I can box 5 with 40 fps on main. I just had to remove bottom cover of the machine and place it on this cooler pad and never seen fps or cpu rate reduction again. This one is very silent pad and winner of many tests.

Also consider the screen resolution, playing on weak machine, the higher resolution can eat too much of Video resources.

[Moorea]

OT: hey LokNarash your signature picture is really nice - how did you generate it ?

[Enndo]

I don't remember where i read it, i htink it was toms hardware or maybe hardware canucks but the mobile(laptop) chips were tested and amd's mobile processors were actually out performing intels.

[LokNarash]

[quote='Moorea',index.php?page=Thread&postID=206503 #post206503]OT: hey LokNarash your signature picture is really nice - how did you generate it ?[/quote][url='www.toonsig.com']ToonSig[/url] and then I make one picture from the five, since just one file is alllowed in signature.

[Noids99]

I don't remember where i read it, i htink it was toms hardware or maybe hardware canucks but the mobile(laptop) chips were tested and amd's mobile processors were actually out performing intels.

A long time ago maybe. Since Centrino and more recently the Core CPUs have been release, Intel have offered the better mobile gaming platforms.

I have MBed 5 instances on a 17" Dell XPS M1710 for the last 18 months or so. Handled TBC fine, have since upgrade to a desktop for better WotLK performance, but there are now lappies available that could do that fine also.

The major necessity is the 4GB ram. This is an absolute minimum and until recently was once of the biggest caps on lappy MBing. Out of the 2 laptops, definitely pick the one with the 3650 and intel CPU. If possible, I would look for a laptop with better graphics however, especially if you want a 1920 x 1200 screen. There are a few Asus laptops with 9650/9700 chips which I would consider a minimum, with the 8800/9800s being better and the newer mobile GTX200 series being even better. You will find it harder to find machines with these specs and you will pay a lot more for them. If you decide to go down this track, my only other recommendation would be to get a mobile quad core for MBing also.

Cheers