Is 4200 RPM too slow for gaming?

Yes,

Theer are two solutions for this, upgrade to at least 1GB ram and disable the pagefile so the game can load almost entirely into ram. Or you gues it, a 7200 rpm hard drive.

If you wait till jan-feb, segate is releasing a new line of 7200 rpm notebook drives.

My 8600 1.7 with the 128Nvidia 5650FxGo and 768Mb 333DDR Ram has a 4200 60Gig Hd in it and all my games run smoothly including Half Life 2, so go for more RAM first, but other than Loading times I see no performance Lag in any of my games with my slower Hard Drive, but I would at some point in the future go for a faster Hd since 30Gigs Can quickly fill up in todays world....

Specs 8600 1.7
128Nvidia 5650FxGo
768Mb 333DDR
60 Gig Hd 4200
15.4 WSXGA+
4xDVDR+RW
1300 Wireless

A 4200 RPM drive is fine for games. The only time you would notice a difference is when launching the game or when levels are loading.

I have a 4200 RPM drive in my 8600 now. Should I upgrade the RAM to 1gb (512 currently) or should I upgrade the hard drive?

I like to play Call of Duty but the game has a tendency to lag every few seconds which I think is because of the slow hard drive. Thoughts?

It really depends on the game. In world of Warcraft, the game runs great on my AMD XP 2000+, 512mb ram, GeForce 4400 until I get on Grypohons. Then fps dips from 30-40 to 10 a lot of times. Why is this? I suspect its because of loading issues, you transverse a giant distance of ground on the grypohons and as such entire levels have to load quickly. A lot of ram doesn't help as much because the harddrive has to quickly fill up the ram again with huge areas.

4200 rpm's load slower, but they may not necessarily access slower since larger drives are more concentrated and 60 gb 4200 drives can access stuff about as quick as smaller, faster drives. The RPM mostly translates into faster loading times.

Hope that helps.

I understand what you're saying and it makes sense. I wonder what could be causing my lag then when I play Call of Duty (whether it be the original or the new U.O. expansion).

I've got 512mb RAM, 80gb 4200rpm, 1.6ghz, and the MR9600 running on a clean install of XP Pro with Omega drivers. I would expect this machine to play the game just fine, but every 10-15 seconds or so it seems to crawl and then speed up to normal again. Maybe RAM will help?

Yes, get more memory.

The easy answer is yes. I have a 4200RPM hard drive and it really gets annoying when loading big games, running huge programs, etc.

I would say that with any computer (at least with XP) you need a 5400RPM hard drive and up, and at least 512MB of ram. Although I would recommend you stick with a 7200RPM hard drive, the 5400RPM hard drive is fine. It loads programs much faster than the 4200RPM.

While upgrading the ram to about 1 GB is a great thing to do, it’s not replacement for upgrading the RPM of your hard drive. In my humble opinion, I would rather pay more for a 7200RPM hard drive.

So if you plan to run games, you need at least:

[1] 5400RPM hard drive

[2] 512MB of RAM

While a video game can run on a 4200RPM hard drive, it’s highly not recommended. In my experience, you will get frustrated with your computer if you don’t have a 5400RPM hard drive – I would know, because I have a 4200RPM hard drive and it annoys me like crazy when loading games and such.

After Church this past Sunday, I got to use my friends Compaq laptop. It had a 5400RPM hard drive and you could see a huge difference in speed. I can’t imagine the speed of a 7200RPM hard drive (just like my desktop!). So with my next laptop, I won’t make that mistake again.

So to save time, trouble, and frustration, get a 5400RPM hard drive or more if you can. Trust me, you will not regret it.

With 1gig of Corsair XMS memory and a 7k60, my 600m runs games like CS:S completely fine.

don't even touch 5400. go straight to a 7200, trust me you'll love it. it's like a 1.5 times performace of speed

D'oh!

With our laptop, I didn't even know what the drives RPM was until i checked out this board, but now i feel dumb since we too got 4200...but we got 1Gb of memory too so I guess that should balance it out... Oh well, how easy is it to replace a drive like that? And about what would the cost be?

Thanks

it'll be under 150 bucks and it fairly easy

About $150 for the drive (60 GB/7200 RPM) at Newegg.

About 5 minutes to physically install the drive

To transfer your windows XP installation... that is the long part...

You can transfer your installation by backup or straight drive copy depending on what hardware you have available. You can reinstall XP and start from scratch (which is not the end of the world... though the end of 2-5 hours).

Which drive?

which is overall the better buy

That toshiba 5400rpm 60Gb w/ 16MB buffer or
IBM travelerstar 7200rpm 60gb w/ 8mb buffer

i'm also curious about power consumption....
by the way im gettin my i86 today.. been reading the forums for a good week now

7200rpm all the way.

Has Dell started to cheap out? My old Inspiron 2650 has a 5400.