Which laptop video card to get? Ati or Nvidia

[romeriolopez]

Hi,

I'm getting a laptop in the near future, however i'm having trouble deciding which laptop video card to get. The laptop I want is an Asus A6. Its primary function will be internet stuff, and Civ4

There are 3 options on the video card:

Geforce Go 6200 256mb DDR
Ati Mobility Radeon x700 64mb
Ati Mobility Radeon x700 128mb

Does anyone on these forums run Civ4 on one of those? How do you think it will run on a 1.8Ghz Centrino, with 512mb ddr?

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Cheers

 

[Citizen Philip]

My advice is: Those videocards aren't good enough, and you have a good chance of it not working, or below average. The 6200 is the best of the lot.

 

[Thumper333]

Well, since the bare minimum to run the game is 64MB of video RAM, I obviously recomend against getting that one.

128MB is the recomended amount, but many people have been having trouble with the ATI cards and Civ4.......you're best choice really is the NVIDIA with 256.


Here is what I currently have,

1.73Ghz Centrino
768MB DDR2 RAM
GeForce 6800 256MB


The game runs fine on 1600x1200 and high settings. So you should be fine perfect with the 1.8 Centrino. Remember, the chip architecture is just as important as the speed, the Centrino's are nice chips with 2 on chip caches, so they outperform other chips with the same speed but only 1 on chip cache.

 

[mist]

runs beautifully on a 64mb GeForce 5700 Go.

i've had trouble getting updated drivers for the geforce go series tho, both with this laptop (acer) and my previous one (unbranded) as they're not included in the detonator drivers and the laptop makers seem a little... lax (acer only has 62 out for win xp, but 77 or something out for XP 64 bit - no idea why). if ati mobile chips are included in their unified drivers then i'd go with them, otherwise it's much of a muchness.

 

[romeriolopez]

cheers for the advice guys. Thats good news too - the Geforce Go 6200 256mb card drops the cost of the laptop by £100

To make sure it works i'm buying the game, taking it to the store and installing it on the computer and playing it. If it works good then i'll buy the laptop. If it doesn't then i'll keep on looking.

 

[Citizen Philip]

cheers for the advice guys. Thats good news too - the Geforce Go 6200 256mb card drops the cost of the laptop by £100

To make sure it works i'm buying the game, taking it to the store and installing it on the computer and playing it. If it works good then i'll buy the laptop. If it doesn't then i'll keep on looking.

Just so you know, the 6200 does NOT USE stock drivers from Nividia: they've done something to those boards that requires special drivers (not a good thing), take a wander over to http://www.nvidia.com and look up driver support: Geforce and another section for Go.

 

[romeriolopez]

Just so you know, the 6200 does NOT USE stock drivers from Nividia: they've done something to those boards that requires special drivers (not a good thing), take a wander over to http://www.nvidia.com and look up driver support: Geforce and another section for Go.

Cheers buddy. I'll test it by trying the game out. Its the only reason i'm getting a laptop anyway ;-)