<<<is the lat. d800 good for games as well?>>>
It is. It plays all the games that I've thrown at it so far with ease - even at 1600x1200.
<<<i know it has great 3d marks and all, but i've read (can cnet reviews really be trusted?) that it's not the greatest for games>>>
NO, they can't really - they give a good outline. Let me tell you, unless you get a notebook with a GeForceFX go 5600 or an ATI Mobility Radeon 9600, you are not going to find a notebook that is better for games. The only minor problem is the wide aspect display - but that is not really an issue and most new games support the resolution anyway.
<<<i'm trying to decide between sony vaio grv680p and dell lat. d800. They both sound great to me. sony has a reputation as having horrible support though :/, that's all that worries me about the vaio.>>>
Well, I was put off of the VAIO for several reasons:
-CPU: It is a standard P4, no P4-m so no powersaving which means decreased battery life.
The Latitude uses a Pentium-M (Banias) CPU which (although only running at a max of 1.7GHz) will beat a Pentium 4 2.5/2.6GHz; it has 1MB of L2 cache and extensive power saving technologies.
-RAM: It has a maximum RAM size of 1024MB, whereas the Latitude's is 2048MB, allowing for future upgrades. and increased efficiency in Database and CAD Applications
-LCD: The Latitudes Widescreen is more usefull for watching DVD movies, and the resolution is far higher resulting in sharper images (1920x1200 vs 1280x1024 (Sony))
-GPU: I've had a notebook with the M9, and now 1 with the GF4Go 4200. The GeForce 4 go 4200 is way, way, way better for games than the 9000 and suffers (in my experience) fewer driver instabilities, in fact, none so far.
-HDD: I'm not sure if the Sony Hard Disks are 5400rpm or not, but i would make sure - a hard drive is the biggest area of bottleneck on a notebook, get the fastest one possible.
-DVD/CD-R/RW: At least Dell now offer a DVD Writer, but i personally would not get one, writing a DVD at 1x will take an hour, and would use significant battery life, it is more effective to get a faster, external DVD-Writer.
-Battery: The D800 offers significantly increased battery life - I do my school work on it, and, so far,I've never had to bring the charger along with me. Taking notes, using powerpoint, and playing music, the notebook lasted 4.5hrs on battery, and it still had 5% remaining when i packed it up. you can also insert a 2nd battery into the D|Bay which will extend battery life to 7hrs or so.
-Modem: The D800 uses a V92 modem vs a V90 of the Sony (big diff
)
-Ethernet: The D800 supports up to 1000BaseTX (i.e. Gigabit) Ethernet
-Multimedia: The Sony supports Sony Memory Stick input, The dell uses Smart Cards for multimedia or security
-Pointing Devices: D800 has DualPoint Touchpad plus Pointing Stick.
-Dimensions: Dell weighs 7.0lbs vs 8.1lbs Sony; Dell is 1.5" thick vs 1.6-1.8"; Dell is 14.2" X 10.9" vs Sony 14" X 11.8"
All in all I prefered the Dell in most aspects.
<<<In terms of overall performance
But the thing is.... Cnet dont do 3d benchmarks on lower end notebooks..... so i was wondering how does the 5100 with ati m7 32mb fare in 3dmark2001se?>>>
I dont have any benchmarks, but i believe it is safe to say that it would not score higher than 6500 3DMarks.
<<<Well what games do you want to play? I personally wouldn't get the Radeon 7500 for the latest games (though I don't know what kind of 3dmark score it gets)-- the D800 you can get with the GeForce4 4200 Go 64MB. And Cnet did NOT say that the D800 wasn't really great for games... on the contrary, it said that this laptop "scored so well that it would even rival many desktop systems in 3D performance. If you're a gamer who's looking for a notebook that won't let you down in the frame-rate department, look no further."
It sounds like, at least until the Radeon mobility 9600 and GeForceFX 5600 mobile version become available, this may be the fastest for 3d/games right now...>>>
actually, the FX5600 is available on Toshibas, (in canada i think), But it only scores 8000 3DMarks, and about 2000 in 3DMark2003 - which is very impressive. The 9600 scored similarly as you can see from Tom's Benchmarks.
RaPTuRe
Who's General Failure and why's he reading my disk?