Budget Gamers Side-by-Side Comparison

OK folks, going into this I had the following specs in mind that I (initially) wasn't budging on :

Athlon X2 3800+ (2GHz x 2)
80GB 7200RPM SATA
1GB RAM
GeForce Go 7900 GTX (512MB)
8X DVD, 24X/10X/24X CDRW
17" WSXGA+
bluetooth
7-in-1 Media Reader
built-in camera
1 year warranty

According to NVIDIA, the following companies offer the GeForce Go 7900 GTX card:

ABS
Alienware
Cyberpower
Dell
Falcon Northwest
Gateway
Hypersonic
ibuypower
Prostar
Sager
Toshiba
Velocity Micro
Vicious
Voodoo

Out of these, only 3 of them got me in the $2500ish range. The rest either did not offer the Athlon X2 or were significantly more!

Sager 9750
ProStar 9068
Hypersonic Aviator FX7

Being the cheap that I am, I decided to reconfigure these 3 notebooks with the GeForce Go 7800 GTX 256MB card instead.

Sager went down $300, ProStar went down $300, Hypersonic went down...

$520

That coupled with the fact that Hypersonic was the only one that offered high performance, low latency RAM makes this a no-brainer for me.

I hope this saves somebody a little bit of research.

P.S. Before doing this, I bought a Dell Inspiron E1505:
Dell gave a $1500 line of credit, so I thought, "Why not?"

For $1485, I built a:

Intel Core Duo T2500 2Ghz (2Ghz x 2)
60GB 7200RPM SATA
1GB 533Mhz Memory (512MB x 2)
GeForce Go 7300 (256MB dedicated)
24X CD-RW, DVDR/RW Drive
15.4" UltraSharp WSXGA+ w/TrueLife
Broadcom 440X 10/100 Integrated
Intel(R) PRO/Wireless 3945ABG Net

The 3DMark05 score was a pathetic 1293, and I'm sending it back today!

Good point.

That's a very good point, but I'm gonna put my Thinking Cap on for this one.

Let's see...
Max supported memory on Windows XP Pro - 4GBs.
Max virtual address space Windows XP Pro will allocate for processes and background applications - 2GBs (unless you modify the boot.ini with the /3GB switch)

Cost of the 2nd Memory Module $150

The GeForce Go 7800 GTX does not support Turbocache (only the Go 6200 and the Go 7300 do), so I won't have to worry about my video card borrowing System Memory.

I do not multitask when I game (as a matter of fact I 'End Task' on everything possible before launching a game), so whatever I'm playing (BF2, Lineage2, CS) will always have full dibs on all of the CPU and Memory it wants.

I chose AMD over Intel, so I don't have to worry about an Intel chip reserving processor resources for multitasking.

Reliable sources also indicate that you may experience some performance loss while traversing information amongst multiple memory modules.

All in all, I think I'll be ok with a single 1GB (low-latency) module.

k

Coolness, danka!