Looking for a $500-600 gaming laptop, need GPU info

[eggyman100]

Looking for a used gaming laptop in the $500-600 range and have found primarily ones with GTX260m GPUs, I am wondering if this is any better than the GT720m my current laptop has. Would it be worth raising the budget up to another $100 to get a GTX460m GPU instead? Also, most of these seem to have various i7 2nd gen MQ-type CPUs, are those enough to run wii games on?

[teh_speleegn_polease]

I used to own a laptop very similar to this one, and it's not too bad. The GTX640M is definitely a lot better than the options you mentioned, the CPU is good enough, and it seems to be in your price range.

Speaking from experience, I'd say that with HLE and EFB to Texture, you'll be able to run the majority of games full-speed; achievable resolution will depend on the game, but as a general rule 2x IR should be mostly fine.
More demanding games will need various speed hacks, and might still not run full speed. My laptop had a Sandy Bridge, instead of the Iby Bridge in the one I linked to, but otherwise the CPU models are similar and I'm not sure how much it will improve your performance; in any case, don't expect to be able to play Twilight Princess full-speed. I think I barely managed a steady 20 FPS with HLE and fast texture cache. Similarly, graphically demanding games will require a lower res: going above 1.5x IR and adding any AA in Skyward Sword will probably immediately kill your framerate.

One thing to note is the screen resolution, which is HD not FHD, and also 1366*768, which rather unusual. Also, the particular one I linked you to has had its 1TB HDD replaced with a much smaller SSD; so unless you plan on playing your games from one of those rare optical drives that can do so, you might need to get more storage. But HDDs are dead cheap today, so it shouldn't be too much of a problem.

[eggyman100]

(06-05-2014, 12:27 AM)teh_speleegn_polease Wrote: I used to own a laptop very similar to this one, and it's not too bad. The GTX640M is definitely a lot better than the options you mentioned, the CPU is good enough, and it seems to be in your price range.

Speaking from experience, I'd say that with HLE and EFB to Texture, you'll be able to run the majority of games full-speed; achievable resolution will depend on the game, but as a general rule 2x IR should be mostly fine.
More demanding games will need various speed hacks, and might still not run full speed. My laptop had a Sandy Bridge, instead of the Iby Bridge in the one I linked to, but otherwise the CPU models are similar and I'm not sure how much it will improve your performance; in any case, don't expect to be able to play Twilight Princess full-speed. I think I barely managed a steady 20 FPS with HLE and fast texture cache. Similarly, graphically demanding games will require a lower res: going above 1.5x IR and adding any AA in Skyward Sword will probably immediately kill your framerate.

One thing to note is the screen resolution, which is HD not FHD, and also 1366*768, which rather unusual. Also, the particular one I linked you to has had its 1TB HDD replaced with a much smaller SSD; so unless you plan on playing your games from one of those rare optical drives that can do so, you might need to get more storage. But HDDs are dead cheap today, so it shouldn't be too much of a problem.

Listing and pics says it's a GT640m, is that actually better than a GTX 460m? Also not expecting to go over 1.5xIR and I think the most demanding I have is Super Mario Galaxy or MK Wii (seems to run particularly slow compared to other games on my desktop), would it run those at 1xIR?

[teh_speleegn_polease]

(06-05-2014, 01:49 AM)eggyman100 Wrote: Listing and pics says it's a GT640m, is that actually better than a GTX 460m? Also not expecting to go over 1.5xIR and I think the most demanding I have is Super Mario Galaxy or MK Wii (seems to run particularly slow compared to other games on my desktop), would it run those at 1xIR?

Not by much, but it is about on par. However, being of the Kepler architecture, it is more power-efficient. Although in the end, it doesn't matter that much.

It will definitely run MK Wii on 1.5xIR, might go beyond that. As for Mario Galaxy, the main bottleneck used to be the CPU due to LLE requirements up till a recent revision of Dolphin; this has now been fixed, but it may be the cause of slow performance for you right now if you're using an older revision. In any case, I don't quite remember how well it performed on my laptop, but I don't think it was too bad - you will very likely be completely fine with 1x IR.