Hi,

Im about to purchase a new gaming laptop and am unsure what to go with.. Should I go for one with a 7900 GS or will this be a poor investment given that its not DX10-compatible?

Ive been told that there are laptops on the market with DX10 cards, but I havent been able to find any. Does anybody know one? Ive contacted both HP and Dell and they couldnt tell me when theyll be releasing laptops with 8800 or equivalent. Does anyone know about when we'll be seeing it in laptops? Because Im not in an immediate hurry, but I dont really want to wait for too long either..

My budget is about 2700$, give or take.

Any help or advice regarding what to go with is appreciated.

Thanks.

As of this time, there are no DirectX 10 capable mobile graphics chipsets.
Wait a couple months (April/May?) until Dell gets them in their XPS M1710 mobiles. Toshiba is supposed to have a decent system also priced at around 2grand. I assume thats what you were looking at when you mentioned the 7900GS. Just remember to get 2gigs of ram minimum, Vista issues, and dont get a 4200rpm hard drive like the 200gb one included in that Toshiba.

have fun

Thanks a lot!

Actually the M1710 has been at the top of my list, but at the moment it only comes with the 7900 GS and the 7950 GTX. To be honest I dont know enough to know if thats a good one to go with or if Ill be making a mistake in buying one of those, seeing as it doesnt have a DX10 card.

Was thinking 2 GB of RAM and a 7200 rpm HDD.

Was also looking a bit on the HP dv9000 series, but they only come with 7600 GS which Im guessing isnt all that.

try checking into enpower, go to you rlocal pc club or pcclub.com
they can customize almost anything for you, and they use non propriatary hardware.

Ive heard that HP doesnt make the most reliable laptops.

I would go for Dell or Toshiba.

Dell Sucks for reliability.

Toshiba is typically better than HP, but their low end Sattelite models are the same, it's their Protoge etc that are the solid models.

As for VPUs, no DX10 will be announced until middle to end of this month, and expect to be able to buy them about 2-3 weeks after announcement, if not later for many models. IMO, there will be no GF8800 equivalent at launch expect that later when both companie move to greater use of 65nm, the current GF8800 or R600 would be very power hungry and hot, it needs alot of shrinkage.

Something like a GF8600 with 256bit memory would be a good compromise IMO.

There isn't enough info out there, but there are alot of pics of the mobile GF8600 series from CeBit;

yip I persionally think it would be a waste to purchase a laptop now that doesnt have a DX10 card, I was going to also get a gaming laptop but decided against it, it really all comes down to how much of a gamer you are? and also Im pretty sure you can get a better GPU for that price, so do extensive recearch on gaming laptops and there GPUs price, good luck

My suggestion would be wait for AMD to launch the whole lineup of the R600 .

It not to faraway now