Hello Eric,
It's always a bit difficult to compare desktops with laptops. Some trainzers will say I have ... and it runs ok, others will say - oh no not in my case.
Therefore, here is some info about my systems.
With your 'Sony Vaio Core i3 350M / 4GB / 500GB / 15.5" TFT / ATI HD5650 / Win 7' laptop, I'm not sure that Trainz 12,10 and even 09 will run smoothly.
Why ?
The info hereunder is from the second link (
http://www.notebookcheck.net/ATI-Mob...0.23697.0.html ) in post 3.
The AMD
ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5650 is a middle class
DirectX 11 graphics card for laptops. Its based on the Madison (LE, LP or Pro) chip and is produced in
40nm. Like its predecessor, the
Mobility Radeon 4650, the HD 5650 features a 128 Bit memory bus for dedicated DDR3 and GDDR3 memory chips. GDDR5 is not supported on the HD 5650 (only in the higher clocked versions like the
5750 or
5770 cards based on the same chip).
I haven't got a Sony with I3 processor but I do have an Acer aspire 7540G laptop with the ATI radeon HD 4650 GPU, and I can say - the graphical card ( GPU ) is not good enough.
If you buy trainz ( 09,10,12 ), you want to know and explore all routes within the game. Perhaps later on, you will decide to build your own route.
Anyhow, when exploring the routes in the above versions, I my case, especially when exploring the routes with larger size, at some point the images stopped for a fraction of a second, before contuining. In my case, this was not enjoyable.
Now, about the desktop pc - the Dell inspiron 620 with processor I5 ( probably I5 2500 ) and GTX 550 Ti, should at least have a power supply of 550 Watt and 4GB ram.
I have no Dell PC but I do have a desktop with the I5 2500 processor and the graphical card Nvidia geforce GTX 570 (the recommended minimum power supply was 550 Watt). I have placed a 600 Watt power supply in my PC.
And my trainz version ( 09,10, 12 ) are running fine in "normal" conditions.
Best regards,
Kurt :wave: