Re: Best laptop for budget to play UOSA on?
Posted: Tue Jan 11, 2011 2:40 pm
Mens Rea,
you mentioned you might like to also play Starcraft2: be mindful that all of the "older" Blizzard publishes have serious issues running under Windows7, and Vista; I have no issues with UO under Windows7, so certainly you should be safe there.
I imagine you'd be able to effortlessly run UO on almost any machine, so you'd need to choose your system specs in accord with the graphics-rendering demands of any other games, modern or legacy, that you intend to play: assess the most-intensive game's graphics requirements, and proceed to satisfy it.
I've seen a lot of economically-priced laptops relying on the ATI Radeon 4XXX series of graphics support: most of these are "Video Adapters", rather than bona fide "Video Cards", as they possess no built-in VRAM; some laptop manufacturers, however, have upgraded these "Adapters" with RAM chips, to turn them into "real" video cards with integrated VRAM. This is a laptop-manufacturer upgrade to the basic adapter, so you'll need to see the specific specs that pertain to the specific model of laptop to determine if VRAM has been added.
Don't confuse this with "Shared Video Memory": all video support shares RAM when it exceeds its own onboard resources; generally speaking, you must have some dedicated VRAM if you want to play games that render 3D graphics.
Mind you, don't bankrupt yourself in pursuit of dedicated VRAM: my old laptop, a 2GHz single-core under XP and with only 1 GB RAM, had no troubles rendering games with mid-poly resolution 3D graphics (that machine did work hard, however, and my OS performance was extremely streamlined); the VRAM its card possessed was 128MB; my newer 3-Core with 4GB RAM has 256MB and, so, doesn't work nearly as hard.
Getting back to UO: my older machine had no troubles whatsoever simultaneously running 3 UO clients, plus a couple of web browsers running/downloading live-streaming video, plus whatever else I felt like doing at the time; however, whenever I played an online game with intensive 3D graphics, that was all I was doing.
I hope I've pointed out some pertinent considerations.
SS
you mentioned you might like to also play Starcraft2: be mindful that all of the "older" Blizzard publishes have serious issues running under Windows7, and Vista; I have no issues with UO under Windows7, so certainly you should be safe there.
I imagine you'd be able to effortlessly run UO on almost any machine, so you'd need to choose your system specs in accord with the graphics-rendering demands of any other games, modern or legacy, that you intend to play: assess the most-intensive game's graphics requirements, and proceed to satisfy it.
I've seen a lot of economically-priced laptops relying on the ATI Radeon 4XXX series of graphics support: most of these are "Video Adapters", rather than bona fide "Video Cards", as they possess no built-in VRAM; some laptop manufacturers, however, have upgraded these "Adapters" with RAM chips, to turn them into "real" video cards with integrated VRAM. This is a laptop-manufacturer upgrade to the basic adapter, so you'll need to see the specific specs that pertain to the specific model of laptop to determine if VRAM has been added.
Don't confuse this with "Shared Video Memory": all video support shares RAM when it exceeds its own onboard resources; generally speaking, you must have some dedicated VRAM if you want to play games that render 3D graphics.
Mind you, don't bankrupt yourself in pursuit of dedicated VRAM: my old laptop, a 2GHz single-core under XP and with only 1 GB RAM, had no troubles rendering games with mid-poly resolution 3D graphics (that machine did work hard, however, and my OS performance was extremely streamlined); the VRAM its card possessed was 128MB; my newer 3-Core with 4GB RAM has 256MB and, so, doesn't work nearly as hard.
Getting back to UO: my older machine had no troubles whatsoever simultaneously running 3 UO clients, plus a couple of web browsers running/downloading live-streaming video, plus whatever else I felt like doing at the time; however, whenever I played an online game with intensive 3D graphics, that was all I was doing.
I hope I've pointed out some pertinent considerations.
SS