What to expect of the SZ in terms of gaming

as I have been told before wait for Core 2 Duo

Don't expect much.

Had one. Not for the newest games, nor even games in the last half year. Oblivion played but at bare minimums and that kinda ruins the game since its content depends on graphics quality. WOW runs low to mid/low quality. Can forget about BF2. I'm not knocking on the Sony. The size and features are awsome but it is no gamer. Even with the Core 2 Duo it will not run games well. The 7400go is a crippled 7 series with only 4 pipes and a 64 bit bus.

Is your SZ gimped or something? Mine still has the horrible 1 gig of 533mhz ram in it with 2 gigs of 667 in the way and it plays WoW at full settings minus Antiscopic, I havent tried that yet. FRAPS says Im at about 30 FPS when I log on in Iron Forge and when its done loading everyone then it will be around 40-50 at the bank once everyone is loaded (maybe 6 sec). When I'm by myself grinding or farming its like 70-80 FPS. My M1710 gets like 140 FPS solo grindng/farming and like 70 FPS in iron forge...for the SZ being 4 whole pounds it does just fine playing WoW on full settings. I havent tried a MC raid or anything on it but if it can handle IF decently it should handle MC without much problems. *Edit* I tried it with antiscoping at full and it lagged a tad in IF while people were loading. I noticed it also would spike to low 90's FPS in IF when not at the bank. Maybe your problem with WoW was because it didnt support the DUO chip untill 8/21/06. Before that date WoW had a software glitch that capped WoW at 64 FPS (With vsync on or off it didnt matter) on comps with the DUO, even my m1710 thats getting 140 FPS now was capped at 64 FPS. Maybe you should play WoW agian now that it isnt capped and you'll notice a big difference. PS. The only thing Ive done to it as far as performance is goto www.tweaksrus.com and DL a new driver and it gives a decent performance boost with no bad effects.

here's a list of games, can someone tell me how each of these will run on high or above average settings on the SZ.

Counter Strike Source
Day of Defeat Source
Half Life 2
FEAR
Battlefield 1942, Vietnam
really any graphically intensive game, lol

By the way, does anyone know how the Dell XPS M1210 (12.1 inch) will play games compared to the SZ, I assume it will be better but I'm not sure by how much.

The only difference b/w the SZ and the XPS I was looking at is that the XPS has a 7200 RPM HD (vs SZ's 5400), and the XPS has 256MB Nvidia card, unlike SZ's 128MB (but they are still both Nvidia 7400 cards). The SZ has 2GB RAM vs. XPS's 1GB

I'm very debated about which one to get.

Thanks.

I used to have the xps 1210, I loved it but I wanted more gaming power so I sold it.

The only game I played on your list was Half Life 2, and it played excellent. Almost max settings if I remember correctly, depends on what resolution you require. Oblivion played ok, but nothing to write home about. I was only able to play near max settings at 640x480 and even then it was choppy. So on medium or low it should play fine at higher resolutions. Personally I would always give up resolution in order to enable extra settings. Another game was Titan Quest which many people seemed to complain about performance issues. I never had any problems with it on the 1210, it played great at medium or high, whatever was one setting down from max quality.

If you like to play games at 1920x1200 then you will likely not be happy with such a small notebook, even at low settings most games will not play great. If you can handle 1280x768 or even a little lower then you will probably enjoy it.

2 things to note (just my opinion of course):
1) I would NOT worry about the 7200 rpm deal, I even changed out my 100gb 7200 for a much larger 160gb 5400 in my current notebook and I never looked back. Benchmarks either went up a little or stayed the same.
2) If memory serves me correctly the SZ version of the 7400 had 128 mb dedicated ram, and the 1210 7400 only has 64 mb dedicated, so the SZ should be better than the 1210 for gaming.

Thanks

If you go on the Dell site you can get the XPS M120 w/ 256 MB Nvidia card

Actually if you read the fine print at the bottom it clearly states that there is only 64 mb of dedicated memory.

"#4 The total of local and shared system memory used by this graphics card is up to 256MB. Local on-board memory is 64MB. Up to 192MB of system memory is allocated to support graphics." (64 dedicated + 192 system/shared = 256)

From Sony's SZ line it says this:

"128MB (NVIDIA® GeForce® Go 7400) and 128MB dynamically allocated shared (RAM/Video) memory " (128 dedicated + 128 system/shared = 256 max)

So both have a maximum of 256 mb of memory, but the Dell may rob more from the system memory. In theory the Sony should outperform the Dell if all else was equal. I can not comment on real world performance differences though since I only owned the 1210. Actually I had a 13" sony but it was a pentium M with the nvidia 6200.