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Acer Aspire 1664WLMi. Any good?

post #1 of 10
10/17/04 at 1:53pm
Thread Starter 
Hi.

I'm thinking of getting a new laptop, and I was wondering what people thought of this one.

Acer Aspire 1664WLMi
3.4 Ghz Intel Pentium 4
1 GB RAM
ATI Mobility Radeon 9700 with 64 MB of external DDR Video Ram
80GB Ultra ATA/100 HDD hard drive
£1,250 with 3 year warranty

I'd be using it for writing, internet and playing games (I mainly play RTS games, so it doesn't have to run things like Doom3, but it does need to run things like Rome:Total War and UFO: Aftermath at high settings). I'm a little worried about the graphics cards RAM, will the high computer RAM and processor compensate?

I'm looking for a laptop thats going to last me a number of years, hopefully atleast 5, which is why I'm trying to go for high specs.

Any help and peoples experiences with this model would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

Matthew Thomas

P.S. What does external DDR Video Ram actually mean?
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post #2 of 10
10/17/04 at 3:15pm
That cpu is total overkill for the graphics card, not to mention it'll run hot and have bad battery life. The graphics card will run most games fine right now, but a 9700 is a bottleneck in all systems currently. However, there are pretty much no alternatives so we live with it . I'd look into Pentium-M instead of P4, but that's your choice.
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post #3 of 10
10/17/04 at 4:33pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by Sanna
That cpu is total overkill for the graphics card, not to mention it'll run hot and have bad battery life. The graphics card will run most games fine right now, but a 9700 is a bottleneck in all systems currently. However, there are pretty much no alternatives so we live with it . I'd look into Pentium-M instead of P4, but that's your choice.
agreed, save your money and downgrade to either a 2.8/3.0 or a p-m. Will be much cheaper and you can maybe upgrade your hdd or optical drive with the money you save, or not.
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post #4 of 10
10/17/04 at 4:54pm
Same opinion here, GPUs will always be bottlenecks, but going for such a strong processing power over a 64MB M11 just doesn't sound right.
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post #5 of 10
10/18/04 at 5:17am
Thread Starter 
Thank you everyone whose replied.

A Couple of Questions.

Whats a Pentium-M and whats the difference between that and a Pentium 4?

What does external DDR Video Ram actually mean?

Whats a GPU?

Sorry if these seem basic questions, I'm new at this.
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post #6 of 10
10/18/04 at 7:40am
Ok, here's a non-tech answer to your questions.

Quote:
Whats a Pentium-M and whats the difference between that and a Pentium 4?
A Pentium-M is designed for Mobile Computing. It runs cooler, consumes less battery life, and can change it's clock speed according to the applications (ex. a 1.7Ghz processor cay run at 500 Mhz, or less, if all you seem to be doing is Word Processing). this saves a good amount of battery.

Quote:
What does external DDR Video Ram actually mean?
Basically, the Video Cards come with 2 different types of Memory. Shared, and Dedicated. In the Shared memory architecture, the video card uses the system RAM for it's purposes. While in the dedicated approach, the video card has a seperate high speed memory attached to it. Guess which one is better?

Quote:
Whats a GPU?
A GPU is a Graphics Processing Unit, a fancy acronym for the Video Card!


Hope this helps.

And Personally, I'd look at the Acer 1681WLMi/4501WLMi, which has almost the same specs, with a Pentium M Processor. It will get you around 4-5 hours of battery life, with an average computing load.

Also, the M11 (Radeon 9700) 64Megs is quite enough for your needs. It wil also play Doom 3 at a tad (read: a lot) lower settings..
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post #7 of 10
10/22/04 at 1:22pm
Thread Starter 
Sorry its taken so long to reply.

Thank you everyone for your help. I've now decided not to go with the 1664WLMi, so its back to the drawing board.

I've had a look at Pentium-M's, but they all seem to have a lower power processor than I'm looking for. I want atleast 3 Ghz so that I have a good chance of still being able to get most of the games I want several years down the line.

Oh a follow up question to one of my previous ones. In relation to graphics cards.

External DDR Video Ram:

Would that be shared Ram (because its external to the graphics card.)

Or would that be dedicated Ram (because its not part of the standard Ram)

Please could someone tell me which one that is as I've seen it listed on a number of laptops.

Thanks
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post #8 of 10
10/22/04 at 1:39pm
That would be dedicated RAM to your GPU, it will not be shared by your system RAM. If your GPU is a 128 MB 9700 Pro, that means it has its own 128MB memory architecture and will not be using your 1 GB or system RAM. That means your system will be using all 1 GB of RAM while your GPU will be using it's own 128 MB of RAM.

Rao.
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post #9 of 10
10/22/04 at 3:38pm
Thread Starter 
Thanks
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post #10 of 10
10/22/04 at 3:40pm
processor speed is not relative to the performance of the processor. You can have a 2 ghz cpu that will perform much better than the 3.0 ghz p4 (amd 64 3000+). The same is true with the p-m processor. At 2.0 ghz, it is about as fast as a 3.0 ghz p4 give or take a few hundred mhz. It should be fine for your needs as the processor isnt a bottleneck in games.
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