Acer Laptops

PaulKK

Hi,

I'm looking for a laptop that will run battlefield 2. I have done some shopping around and found an acer aspire for eur 1599.
It has:
pentium core duo T2300 (1.66ghz)
2GB DDR2 ram
512MB dedicated ATI graphics
120GB HD.

Free wireless card and bluetooth, camera and all that stuff.

Can anyone tell me if this is a good deal, what the core duos are like, or if they've had any experiance of acer?

Any help appreciated.

Paul

TerrorFirmer

Acer are a good brand.

Whats the video card? I'd be suspect of anything advertised as 512mb Ram - other then the very top end cards, most of those cards advertised as such are usually low end hardware that are technically filled out on paper with lots of ddr2 memory which, in reality, can't actually all be used as the card can't utilise it. Cheap marketing ploy, basically.

If you plan playing Battlefield 2, the following cards are:

Poor, but managable: X1300, 7300
Decent, medium settings: X1400, 7400
High-ish settings: 7600, X1600
Highest settings: 7800, 7900, x1800 (dunno if this is even out yet in mobility form)

To be honest, that above list is all you need to know - the amount of actual memory present is in most cases totally irrelevant. I know there are other cards out but a laptop in that price range, with 512mb ram, couldn't really be anything but one of the above.

TerrorFirmer

Just if it interests you, I got a Laptop in PC World that costs 949 now - Advent 7093, 1.66Ghz Core Duo, 1Gb DDR2 ram, 80gb Hard Drive, 256mb Geforce 7400, 15.4 screen.

Runs BF2 fine at medium settings @ 1024x768, one of the games I play the most on it, looks reasonably good too and runs at a nice 50 frames a second.

PaulKK

Thanks Havok,

its an ATI Mobility Radeon X1400 with up to 512MB of HyperMemory.

I might take a look at the pc world site too,

cheers,

Paul

TerrorFirmer

The X1400 is actually quite a decent card and is better then its class equivilent (the 7400). I'd say you should be able to run BF2 at mid-pushing high settings quiet comfortably. Again, it can't actually make use of 512mb memory, that is really only a gimmick but still, its a good performer.

As I said though, you could get something very close to that Acer spec-wise for much less.

Good luck anyway!

JackKelly

Acer are a great brand. I've had one for about 6months or so and it's been brilliant. Fast,compact, and looks good. Not a single problem so far.

A have a Aspire 5500 which i got for ~1000E of acernotebooks.co.uk (i think).

It has 100gb HD,1gb RAM,2ghz CPU and an x700.

The x700 would be a relatively old card at this stage but it still plays BF2 with no problems on medium/low setting. In fact it handles everything you throw at it bar the new titles. I wouldn't go for a huge card if you are only going to play FM on it, it's overkill.

TerrorFirmer

TimAy wrote:

The x700 would be a relatively old card at this stage but it still plays BF2 with no problems on medium/low setting. In fact it handles everything you throw at it bar the new titles. I wouldn't go for a huge card if you are only going to play FM on it, it's overkill.

Now thats a problem, because the X700 is still a good card and I've seen it running BF2 on medium-high no problems, and I've seen Oblivion and GRAW running on it too. Sure you have latest drivers etc?

JackKelly

lol, it's been a while since i've played BF2 on it, so to be honest, are infact probably on medium to high.

I'm after trying Hitman Blood money on it, and got away with low settings.