Widescreen Gaming Forum

I recently visited a friend's house, who has a laptop PC. The specs are as follows:

Core 2 Duo 2.0Ghz (the laptop has a Centrino sticker - I'm guessing it's an Allendale)
Geforce Go 7950
2GB of RAM

We tried playing the BioShock demo, but it was barely playable at his native res of 1440x900, even at low settings. The thing is, it would be completely smooth for about 4/5ths of a second, and then chug. Then be smooth for the next 4/5th of a second, and then chug. At medium settings, the behavior was the same, except the chugs happened more frequently, but the game was still smooth between chugs. The only way we could get the game to be playable was by lowering the resolution to 800x600, which was stretched and ugly.

We also tried disabling all non-Microsoft services and startup programs, but there was no performance improvement.

Is there any reason the laptop should perform like this? If it's capable of being smooth 80% of the time, I would think that means the laptop is capable of playing the game smoothly, but something is causing it to chug.

What was the speed of the HDD. My last two machines (before this build) have been laptops. I've found that the most dramatic difference to the "feel" of using Windows and playing games was the speed of the HDD. I slower 4200rpm drive will kill you, and a 5400rpm drive is quite a bit better.

When the Centrino laptops first came out, I took one and was able to swap out a 1.6GHz proc, a 1.8GHz proc; 1GB RAM, 2GB RAM; and a 4200rpm and 5400rpm drive. I saw no discernable difference in performance or benchmarks with any combination of the procs and RAM (the video card was fairly limiting at a Radeon 9200). But, upping the HDD speed produced noticeable benefits.

If he's having to hit the swap file on a slow HDD, that could do it. Also, if he had any power mgt settings on that would throttle down the proc (which is a feature of the mobile chipsets) when it didn't "sense" a load, then he may need to adjust power mgt.

Did it do that with any other games?

laptop hardware kinda does that...sadly...I'd run a defrag and them move on to ram checking...could be a hardware issue or something.

I don't know for sure what the HDD speed is, but I just looked through all the Toshiba Satellites (his laptop is a Toshiba), and it looks like the closest match compared to his specs is the P105, which has a 4200rpm.

Did it do that with any other games?

Yes. The FEAR demo chugged on medium, but ran fine on low. Oblivion is currently his game of choice, which has the same chugging effect outdoors on medium details, native res, but he says he's used to it, and the game is playable as it's not as action-based as shooters.

The other game we tried was the Half-Life 2 demo, which seemed to work fine at medium details, native res.

My guess is that it is struggling with the textures at higher resolution and is having to page them from virtual memory. It is probably running out of video memory and goes to the much slower harddrive to page them into memory.

My laptop is comparable with graphics cards out 10 years ago.

I can play COD2 on dead low settings on 800x600 and get decent framerates, but that's just about it.

I found that using an external hard drive for some games helped a ton, but the graphics card still caused problems.

Online games are out of the question as the CPU can't process the network data fast enough.

Hmm everybody on the notebook forums says it runs pretty well for those who have played it.

I downloaded the demo on my PC earlier but have not had the chance to play it yet. If I like it I will put it on my notebook and report back how it runs.

Mine has a 250gb 5400rpm drive in it, wich has a read speed nearly equal to a 7200rpm drive.

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I can't even play it on my laptop (don't have the shader model support)

I second Ibrin - HDD spindle speed makes 90% of the difference when trying to game on a laptop. I was never terribly demanding of gaming on my nx7000 (although I went through quite a period when I was gaming on that exclusively).

Anyway. 4200RPM drives murder performance in games. Windows doesn't notice so much. 5400RPM is more comfortable - 16MB cache also helps a lot. 7200RPM is obviously 'ideal' but I don't favour due to the increased noise/heat in an extremely tight environment. My Acer's 5400RPM drive already cooks when defragging for any lengthy period - a 7200RPM would melt. :lol:

I don't suppose there's any way to test this theory without buying more things first? We'd have to buy a new hard drive *and* an extra copy of Windows since the Toshiba only comes with a recovery partition, and I don't think my friend would be crazy about spending $150-$200 with nothing more than a guess that it might help things.