laptop Recommendations

[PlutonianEmpire]

So, I'm online looking for a new computer. Those who have read some of my previous posts will know why.

What laptop do you recommend that I buy that can run Celestia at 15 - 20 fps in OpenGL 2.0 that is within $1,100 USD? My current computer can already do that, and it only cost $500 to $800 USD.

[Chuft-Captain]

This is definitely worth a look: http://hothardware.com/Articles/Asus-G5 ... op/?page=1

[PlutonianEmpire]

Do we know if Celestia will run okay on a 64 bit system?

Also, I neglected to mention that I like to listen to music on the computer while running celestia, so good speakers are a plus, and my $1,100 USD budget includes taxes and shipping.

My apologies for not bringing this up sooner.

[chris]

I've upgraded my computer hardware and installed Windows 7 64-bit. I can confirm that 32-bit Celestia runs fine on a 64-bit version of Windows. I'm working on making a 64-bit build for Windows--it may run faster on a 64-bit OS than the 32-bit version, but no guarantees.

Also, a $1000 laptop should be able to run Celestia at much faster than 15- to 20-fps. Look for laptops that have an NVIDIA or ATI graphics processor in them. I recently recommend a laptop with a GeForce GTX 260M, but that will cost more than $1100. Perhaps the GeForce GTX 250M?

--Chris

[PlutonianEmpire]

I found a laptop that has NVIDIA GeForce GT 130M, would that do any good?

[chris]

I found a laptop that has NVIDIA GeForce GT 130M, would that do any good?

It's faster than the GPU in my MacBook Pro (a GeForce 8600M), and Celestia runs very nicely on that system. There are faster laptop GPUs out there. See this table:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison ... 100_Series

There are lots of numbers in the table. Probably the most important indicator of speed is GFlops (gigaflops, or billions of math operations per second.) You can see how the 130M compares to other mobile GPUs. Try to get one with at least 256M of dedicated graphics memory (VRAM).

--Chris

[PlutonianEmpire]

The computer I found had a whole gigabyte of dedicated memory:

http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp ... 8094855881

And yes, I do realize there's better vendors out there...

And I've probably should've waited a while before making the purchase to see if there were better computers at that price.

Anyhoo, I can always return it, so I'm still open to suggestions.