Best laptop for Civ4 ?

[Captain Pugwash]

I would be interested to have a post here from anyone who is running Civ4 on a laptop and thinks it's great for the job.

What laptop are you using ?
What screen does it have ? widescreen 17" ?
What resolution do you like to run at ?
Does the text look big enough at that resolution ?

I have been looking around at laptops cos I'm a laptop fan. The Alienware Area-51 m7700 spec looks great. However, spec is one thing, experience of running the game is something else.

My current laptop runs Civ4 OK but it is under-spec and the graphics get a little strange. Doesn't crash though.

 

[Zydor]

There is a good independent overview of the current laptop market in the link below. It does it mainly in terms of ATI Mobility Radeon - not always the best solution - horses for courses - but it does give you a good overview. (In fact the Site are by in large NVidia fans, but they are Objective in what they write)

Interpret across to other equivalent makes etc and you get a good focused start into your search.

In particular dont get sucked into 'more ram is best' syndrome, many times its true of course - but many times with mid range grahics cards 128 upped to 256 will make little difference due to other factors in the card design. With onboard graphics its usually the reverse at present, more dedicated ram is better, so go for 128 if you can and the chipset allows it.

The article makes a good distinction between desktop replacement at the high end, and basic notebooks at the low end, and the esential differences. It will pointout the differences that the Notebook Sales team will not. Its worth researching any terminology you dont understand, Sales teams rely on the lack of the latter for successful "spin"

As a generalisation the X700 and equivalent for other makes is what you should aim at - anything lower and you will see marked performance reduction. The main thing to take aboard is the 'processing power' of the beast, the Sales spin may say it supports X standrd or Y standard etc, but that means squat, what you need to know is how powerful it is- pointless supporting X Standard then making a pot of coffee between turns in the game .....

Use Google with the terms you see in the article, an hour or two with a pot of coffee on a quiet evening's searching background will achieve much if you use the article as a start point, and use the terminology to search on

http://www.hardocp.com/article.html?art=NzQ2

Regards
Zy

 

[Clacton0]

Ive got the game going ok on this laptop now

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=151773

 

[Captain Pugwash]

Hey Clacton, what screen resolution do you use ?

Zydor, I search all the time. I want to hear from people who are running on a laptop already. Which one do you use ?

 

[Zydor]

I mainly use a desktop, but I do run it on the work laptop (shhh dont tel em ) stops me going nuts at night when away on a job,

The laptop is an IBM Thinkpad T42 1.7GHz Pentium(M) 512MB, ATI MOBILITY RADEON 9600. Runs ok, will not make any speed records of course, but its a good machine that runs Civ IV fine

Regards
Zy

 

[Clacton0]

I run it at 1280 by 800 x 32 bit.

 

[Captain Pugwash]

So at least we have discovered it's not too bad at 1280x800. Don't worry Zy, we wont tell anyone that you run Civ4 on your work laptop all day long

Seems laptop users are a bit reluctant to tell their tale. Maybe they all run on the office rig.

I'm still using a 15" display, 4:3 aspect ratio (= NOT widescreen), 1024x768.
I have to say I love the screen size and the way the game looks at this resolution and there's no way I want to change. Unfortunately, very few new laptops offer a 15" screen any more. The vast majority are widescreen, either 15.4" or 17".