RollinThunter, on 10 June 2012 - 08:37 AM, said:
I'll prefase my next sttrments with this: I have no clue what any of this means
But, I'm a physics major, I have a liscence to learn anything(I mainly do metal work and things like that). The hardware side of this, all of the different gpu, cpu, graphics cards and GHz, I have no clue on the differences, but I'm fairly certain that most o the high end stuff is running outside my price range, and buying the notebook and THEN upgrading it with all the higher end tech is a little out of my budget at the moment, though possible in the future. So focusing in on stock notebooks, llenivo is the better quality books at the low end of the pricing spectrum, but this trinity company I havn't heard of before, is this some new startup company or just a new line I products from an existing manufacturer? And what is looking to set these apart from what is currently on the market?
Yeah. You generally can't upgrade a notebook so easily (Hard drive / RAM usually the exception). To be honest, its not worth your time learning the minute of the many different pieces of hardware out there. Googling for benchmarks is usually the quickest way to go. (Or, even better, check out my link below.)
Trinity is the name of an upcoming AMD CPU/integrated GPU (They call it an APU) chip. It looks fairly impressive, but waiting for availability & their price to come down after launch might not be worth the hassle.
For the benefit of anyone else in a similar situation, i'll add my 2c.
If you already know your budget, and you know your budget will be the same come launch, then you may as well buy, and enjoy an upgrade now - There will ALWAYS be something just over the horizon to hold off for, so you may as well not bother waiting at all.
I present to you, the holy grail of laptop hardware:
http://www.notebookc...List.844.0.html
Search for the hardware you're looking at on that site, and you'll quickly find out what it can do for you.
When it comes to RAM, 4g should be more than enough to run Win7 & MWO, with some ram to spare. However, if like me, you like to have all sorts of stuff running in the background, do video or photo editing, or use VMs, then extra RAM is usually well worth it, as its quite cheap at the moment. As for 64/32 bit - While it is true that especially in the past, 64bit has been more trouble prone than 32bit, the performance advantage on modern games is quite decent. These days the problems are mostly gone anyway.
Lastly, i just wanted to bust some misconceptions. First of all, hyperthreading does not double the usefulness of any CPU. In fact, in some situations, it reduces performance, and battery life. Hyperthreading involves one CPU core that has a few (often used) components duplicated per core. This allows it to 'present' itself as two cores, which runs two threads (think lines of work to be done). If these two threads include work that can be divided into those doubled up components of the CPU, performance increases (~40% in ideal cases). If not, then performance suffers. For example, sometimes two threads are assigned to the same physical core rather than two separate cores.
Also: While AMD's dual graphics system is indeed impressive value on most games, MWO so far does not support combined graphics setups, whether they be SLI or Xfire (Including the notebook Xfire). I would advise against buying such a notebook until you've seen benchmarks for this particular game that shows that it does indeed work well.
Edited by iron wolf, 10 June 2012 - 08:44 AM.
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