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Is 700Mhz enough?

racketboy - Feb 5, 2004

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		racketboy		Feb 5, 2004
			As some of you may know, I'm selling my two old laptops. With that money and a little extra, I hope to get a new, but still used laptop. I'm setting my eyes on either a Thinkpad T20 or T21. The T20 is a 700Mhz PIII. I'm wondering if this will be able to have enough horsepower for some tasks that I now take for granted on my P4 machine. Do you think the 700Mhz will be enough to watch Divx/Xvid DVD rips and be able to play games on ePSXe, VisualBoy Advance, and maybe even an N64 emu? This is probably the most intensive stuff I would have this laptop do. Just wondering if it would fair well enough. The T21 is 100Mhz more, but is also $100 or so more. Any thoughts?

		RitualOfTheTrout		Feb 5, 2004
			On my old pc it was a pentium II 350 i was able to to do most of the things you just listed.. the only thing is some of the quality settings had to be a bit lower.. like everything was set for best performance as aposed to best picture image and what not.. but it still managed to chunck through it. I imagine a 700 which is twice the speed should have no problem.. but im nto sure about the N64 emulation, never tried it on the old pc.

		Pearl Jammzz		Feb 5, 2004
			my p3 650 runs ePSXe pretty good, and it's good enuf for movies. Make sure u get sum decent ammounts of ram in there though. Also a good vid card....that was my 2 biggest gripes w/ my 650.

		racketboy		Feb 5, 2004
			well I don't have much of a choice of vid card on a laptop I think its an 8MB Savage. As for RAM, I'll be sure to get plenty of that

		IceDigger		Feb 5, 2004
			http://www.compgeeks.com/products.asp?cat=NBB... Computer Geeks has some really nice deals for used laptops if your still looking. Check it out.

		mtxblau		Feb 5, 2004
			I looked at the same exact laptops you looked at before I bought my Evo N1015v. It has the ATi U1 chipset (set at 32MB). It runs all those emulators perfectly. The thing about the Thinkpads (especially the T series) is that the modems tend to go bad sooner rather than later. I not sure what it is, but thinkpad quality has gone south (much like Dells). Though the form factor is still my favorite.

		Curtis		Feb 5, 2004
			Divx will be fine, ePSXe will probably be useable at lower quality. Don't know about VBA or a N64 emulator...probably fine.

		racketboy		Feb 5, 2004
			wow Compgeeks does have a nice selection. I'll keep watching them. My thinkpad (older) modem still is holding up. But if all else fails, I have a modem/NIC combo PC card laying around. I've heard XviD takes more horsepower than Divx. Is that true? I rip all my DVDs in XviD, that's why I ask. As for ePSXe, the "quality" settings, what are the defaults? I guess I never tweaked it much. What happens on low quality? And how do I make mine high-quality on my desktop?

		IceDigger		Feb 5, 2004
			Oh yea, I am a wholesaler under them so if you are interested in something there pm me and I'll give you the wholesale price and the code to use to get the discount.

		it290		Feb 5, 2004
			I think XViD does require a little more power; not sure how much though. The resolution and bitrate of the movies are also a big factor. If you find stuff running slow, you might just have to start ripping at lower bitrates or sizes to compensate. The 'quality' thing in ePSXe encompasses a lot of things- it depends on what plugins you're using. But mainly stuff will slow down with higher res, texture filtering, and sound sample rates.

racketboy

Feb 5, 2004

	
	
		
		
			Originally posted by IceMan2k@Feb 6, 2004 @ 01:35 AM



 Oh yea, I am a wholesaler under them so if you are interested in something there pm me and I'll give you the wholesale price and the code to use to get the discount.

wow -- sweet -- how much of a discount are we talking?

They have some very reasonable prices to start with -- esp for an actual store (ie not an auction)

		racketboy		Feb 5, 2004
			would a 500, 600, or 650 PIII be able to do all these things as well? (N64 isn't a big issue). I'm seeing some other possibilities on CompGeeks that are looking good edit: too bad they aren't all in super condition. according to their grading scale, all my laptops would be grade A -- better than most of theirs. They have one of my old models but want $300 for it.... Plus mine has way more RAM

		RitualOfTheTrout		Feb 5, 2004
			I like that place (Comp geeks) I never actually bought anything there, but they seem to always be getting in new and very reasoably priced items.. now i know who to contact for a discount if i ever need something there haha :banana

		racketboy		Feb 5, 2004
			ok -- another question -- how important is the video card to ePSXe? how many MBs of VRAM am I gonna need just to play. It doens't need to look great -- just run at close to full speed.

		it290		Feb 5, 2004
			It's not that important. Especially if you run with a software renderer, which I recommend for any 2d games. You're just gonna want to make sure that your card has decent OpenGL and/or D3D drivers. VRAM isn't really the issue, it's the chip that's more important. If you're going to want to run in 3d accelerated mode at a high resolution, you'll probably want something better than a laptop of that vintage is going to offer. Then again, results may vary. As a side note, I've always found VirtualGameStation and Bleem to run exceptionally well on older machines.

		Link Hylia		Feb 5, 2004
			Corn runs some games on a 200 Mhz CPU, so a 700 mhz should be fine. as others have said, pair that up with a descent video card and you should be set. descent here, does not mean new, anything from the past yaear or 2, like a Geforce 2 will work.

		racketboy		Feb 5, 2004
			well you do realize these older laptops don't have GeForce and such. The chips aren't gonna be the greatest. but how do I know which ones are acceptible?

		mtxblau		Feb 6, 2004
			From my experience, Savage is crap (desktop + laptop). Unfortunately, IBM refuses to put decent video cards in their laptops, even now. Avoid Savage at all costs. There are 'vintage' laptops (around 800Mhz) from Dell, Sony, and Compaq/HP that use 8MB ATi mobility cards which are D3D and OpenGL compatible.

		gameboy900		Feb 6, 2004
			Having a PIII 600 with an 8MB ATI Laptop I think I can answer most of these questions. Divx will play fine unless the bitrate is way high then it might lag a bit (more RAM helps this alot). XVid will probably stutter bad as it needs more omph to do it's thing. Again for both it will make a difference what resolution and bitrate the videos are at. N64...forget it. You may be able to run some games at 50-80% speed but there are some that will just chugh (heck they do on my Athlon 3200+). In this case the vid card will be a limiting factor as the pre radeon based mobile cards from ATI were the suck. PSX might be playable but depends on the game. Also you will need to turn off ALOT of the nice features and possibly run it at 320x240 resolution to get any decent speed out of it. If you can try to find a laptop that has the first gen radeon or geforce chip in it. They shouldn't be much more but would help alot. But with any of them more RAM will make it work better. Laptop harddrives are SLOW so the less time the swap file is used the better.

		ExCyber		Feb 6, 2004
			I found that a lot of stuff was playable on ePSXe on my 350MHz K6-2 / Nvidia TNT2 (remember those, kids? FFS, I feel like I'm talking about decades-old tech with the way every incremental improvement is hailed as a revolution in the gfx card market) with Pete Bernert's soft renderer set to "fast" settings. Generally I wasn't sitting around playing the games that look like tech demos though, so that probably explains some of it.

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