New Laptop for FFXIVFollow

My other choice is to go Alienware. Do you guys think an M15x will cut it with this spec?

PROCESSOR Intel® Core™ i7 Processor 840QM (1.86 Ghz, 8MB, 4C)

OPERATING SYSTEM Genuine Windows® 7 Home Premium 64bit- English

GRAPHICS CARD 1GB NVIDIA® GeForce™ GTX260M graphics card
OR
1BT ATI Radeon HD 5850

MEMORY 8192MB 1333MHz Dual Channel DDR3 SDRAM [2x4096]

HARD DRIVE 250GB (7,200rpm) Serial ATA Hard Drive

LCD 40cm (15.6") Wide Full HD Display (1920x1080)

OPTICAL DRIVE DVD+/-RW (DVD, CD read and write) Slot Load Drive


Also, which graphics card would be better. Ive heard the 260M struggles somewhat.

5850 for the graphics should be your surest bet of the three to run FF14.

The GTX260m seems like it would have a hair more horsepower than the 5650 (5650 can bench close to the 250m's sometimes). It is interesting to note this card is more or less built off the modified G92 Core (around the 8800/9600 PC cards) that was in a solid performing line of cards for years in the PC market. So this SHOULD be a solid performer for a laptop. But against the mobility 5650--many scores were within 50 points of each, flip flopping who was better. As close as they are, I would lean more to this, simply because FFXIV is supposed to look better on the nVidia chips. But it concerns me that it is the borderline requirement (9600/9800 cards used the G92/G94 cores).

The mobility HD 5650 is more or less on par with a scaled down 5570 PC card. It also only supports DDR3 on a 128bit bus, so it's fill rate may be lacking. But it does support up to DX11 natively according to the ATI site. On paper, it would appear to be better than the 260 (almost twice the stream processing potential)--but for some reason it wasn't jumping as far out in front as one would expect. It's core is further past the minimum requirement though, so it might be the better option of the two for assurance it will run FF14.

Unfortunately, both of them seemed to be coming in just barely on par with the ATI Radeon 2900 and nvidia 96009800 PC cards (most likely due to the slower memory architecture and reduced pipelines/shaders). So, while they may run FFXIV...they may not run it very well.

It looks like that ATI 5850 may be the one to shoot for. It's built off the RV840 core (Juniper that the 5700 PC cards were originally built around). Although they are scaled down versions, they do offer full DX11 support and CAN com with DDR5 memory to help with the 128bit bottleneck on the memory bus. Fill rate is one of the killers on laptop cards, so aside from more GPU power, this is another nice advantage (if you find DDR5) over the other two choices as they only come with DDR3.

But even with only the DDR3 versions, the 5850 mobilities typically come in around 40-50% faster than the other 2 cores in the benchmarks--likely due to the clustered stream processor setup the others lack. Some laptops with this GPU have come in close to some PC's with the 5750 cards in them. The big drawback with this core though is the power draw (and consequently heat). So if you go this route--get a cooling pad to put it on.

Raist

Edited, Oct 10th 2010 9:08pm by BDHERTZER

It wont be unplugged often, it just needs to be more portable than a desktop. I ordered mine last night, following specs:

COLOUR CHOICE Alienware M15x Gaming Laptop - Cosmic Black
PROCESSOR Intel® Core™ i7 Processor 840QM (1.86 Ghz, 8MB, 4C)
OPERATING SYSTEM Genuine Windows® 7 Home Premium 64bit- English
GRAPHICS CARD 1GB ATI® Radeon™ HD 5850
MEMORY 4096MB 1333MHz Dual Channel DDR3 SDRAM [2x2048]
HARD DRIVE 500GB (7,200rpm) Serial ATA Hard Drive
LCD 40cm (15.6") Wide Full HD Display 1080p (1920x1080)
OPTICAL DRIVE DVD+/-RW (DVD, CD read and write) Slot Load Drive
PRIMARY BATTERY 9-cell 85Whr Lithium Ion battery

Due to arive on Nov 1st so time now moves slooooooooow.