Best Current Laptop Deals

B

Bobbergibbs

Member
Trainzers:

I am getting along okay in T10 with my Acer 5520 stuffed with 4GB RAM and using a 1TB external hard drive but I wonder if there is a site where folks discuss the best current equipment and prices available for laptops that can best handle Trainz?

My Nvidia GeForce 7000M has issues with upgrading drivers. Nvidia says to go to Acer and Acer upgrade does not seem to work properly.

Should we expect to get reasonable performance from a laptop costing under $500 or what should one be prepared to pay? At the rate that systems change, is it better to buy a new laptop every couple of years than try to upgrade an older one?

For best performance, is it best to dedicate one laptop solely for Trainz?

What's the current favorite?

Bobber in Yuma
 
First, laptops under $500 don't have discrete video; it's all integrated from what I've seen. That's is a huge problem for Trainz or most other modern games.

Second, having a "dedicated" laptop for trainz is insanely expensive; it's not like you can have a $200 desktop for internet/other alongside your $500 gaming PC. You're probably going to spend $1,000 on a laptop with discrete graphics alone and if you want to be reasonably futureproof, plan on spending even more. And, if you can really afford to lay down some cash, look at another recent thread here entitled, "I splurged..." at jcitron's post and some of the other laptops discussed there.
 
With an old XP desktop you can easily add ram, add upgraded video cards, a higher wattage power supply, and even install Wndows7 ... with an old, or inexpensive new laptop, it might be a bit more challenging a project.

I have seen some nice $850 to $1300 laptops that would run Trainz pretty well ... laptops are in general not intended for gaming, and are really inferior for gaming, and even $3200 Alienware laptops are not great for gaming (although they are the best of the group) ... as desktops are superior in all ways.
 
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I am looking to upgrade, but I need a laptop, I am looking at a maxed oiut Dell XPS17. Anybody have any otherf suggestions?
 
I recently changed my laptop and got a much better deal going to an independent company that does custom builds, than paying through the nose for a Dell, Toshiba or similar machine.

The company I used is at http://www.pcspecialist.co.uk/ obviously not much use for our friends in the USA but for UK people might be of interest.

In addition to being able to customise the spec, it comes with none of the performance sapping crud installed (and hard to get rid of) on brand name machines. It's also supplied with a proper Win 7 OEM and driver DVD's, not relying on a restore partition.
 
That's pretty sweet. I haven't seen a comparable service in the U.S. (not that I've really looked that hard...) but I can see a market for them over here.
 
Windows gaming experience rating???

Hopefully this question is relevant to this thread.

I would like opinions on whether the Windows Gaming Experience rating is relevant to Trainz when considering either a new laptop or desktop purchase.

I believe the top rating is 7.9 and I wonder if you could get to 7 plus you would be good to go. I run TS2010 on a Sony laptop (integrated graphics)with a 6.0 rating and it does fairly well with TS2010 but since I have a lot of urban areas on the route I wish it did better.
 
cascaderailroad said:
With an old XP desktop you can easily add ram, add upgraded video cards, a higher wattage power supply, and even install Wndows7 ... with an old, or inexpensive new laptop, it might be a bit more challenging a project.

I have seen some nice $850 to $1300 laptops that would run Trainz pretty well ... laptops are in general not intended for gaming, and are really inferior for gaming, and even $3200 Alienware laptops are not great for gaming (although they are the best of the group) ... as desktops are superior in all ways.
Click to expand...

My $3200 Alienware M17x runs Trainz quite well with full on sliders. There are very few stutters. In fact no more than my desktop used to have in the same places, and that machine is quite fast.

The biggest thing with laptops is the processor and graphics. The processors are usually the mobile versions of the big boys, and are setup for power savings. The video too is usually built-in and usually the Intel graphics chip-set which is reall poor.

The top-of-the-line Alienware machines have the real processor, not the mobile version, and use discrete video. In my particular system, it comes with crossfired ATI 5870s. This makes a big difference in the performance. Although I'm not sure if Trainz even uses the Crossfire mode.

Before I settled on this machine, I looked at the CAD-capable laptops. The Lenovo W-series and the mobile workstations from Dell and HP. All of these machines had very under powered video. They all had decent processors, but the video chipset was built on to the motherboards, and the amount of available RAM was really poor. These machines were also really,really expensive too for what they were capble of. Way more than what I spent on my Alienware, which has larger hard drive storage, and faster video.

Here's a good site that will help with information on laptops.

http://www.notebookcheck.net/

They say what the video is capable and compares the machine's capabilities between desktop and other comparable laptops.

John
 
Man your lucky, I have a dell inspiron 1545 that is worth $1,050. My windows game rating is 3.7. If I attempted to overclock it, I guess the game rating would be anywhere from 4.5 to 5.
 
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