Ok, im really confused here. I need to buy a laptop and all these days i was locked on to buying Dell XPS 1530 with the following specs Core2 2.4 MHz Clock, 800 MHz Bus and 3 MB cache 4MB Memory nVidia 8600 GT 256 MB But I came across a ACER Aspire 6920 which is lot cheaper than XPS but comes with a very tantalizing spec Core2 2.0 MHz Clock, 667 MHz Bus and 2 MB Cache 4MB Memory nVidia 9500 GS 512 The confusing part is the graphics card. I haven't yet found a good review on 9500 GS but spec wise 9500 GS and 8600 GT are absolutely identical just 8600 in XPS comes with less memory. Some people even said that 9500 GS is slower than 8600 GT ( God knows why ? cuz they all have the same features ). Some even said the opposite!!! Nvidia website says 9500 GS comes with integrated Physx support. Does 8600 GT come with that too ? (im not sure). Please note that i will be doing quite a lot of graphics (graduate) research work on my laptop and most of it will be related to volume graphics so i need a good CPU too. Can you see why it is becoming difficult for me to weigh these two laptops...? XPS is 250 dollars more expensive than the Acer. But Acer apparently has a newer generation Graphics card ( i dont know how useful that is). XPS processor is more powerful than Acer ( and i need a good processor too). Which way do i go ???? and plz tell me more about the 9500 GS.. please Z.

There is no 9500 GS. If you mean 9500 GT, it has smaller size, and lower energy consumption than NV 8600 GT. NV 8600 also has two dual link DVI connectors, thought dunno if they would be included on laptop card.

I also wonder about these RAM sizes. If you'd like to become graduate, you should use these units properly.

400 MHz more is quite a lot, it also uses battery quite a lot more.

A proper research is being done on desktop computers, laptops are only for carrying work from place to place, and shouldn't be too expensive in case somebody would steal it.

I assume one has 512 memory RAM and the other 256 RAM, go with more system RAM when ever possible, task specific programs will allow you always to allocate in one manner or another system memory for rendering etc... If you meant,(which I think you did) that the 256 or 512 mb refered to is actually on card video memory, again more is always better, a 2.0 gig cpu will preform, read software specs you will be using, most specs are way below either system your looking at, check it out, total jaw dropper. Bus speeds for rendering is weird there are two bus speeds usually on a motherboard, the system bus, then the FSB, (front side bus) this bus is info freeway between cpu, and system memory, that is more important than system bus, as said above most, all, programs will allow user to allocate system memory for intense and even specific tasks, so look into that rather than depending on IBM to build a better tomato. All the latest video card exstentions, code, etc... are meaningless unless the software you are using knows it and is built to utilize it, save the $250.00, buy a fast external hard drive. There are things you can do to make any render scenario more stable, involves partioning, and reducing uneeded or reduntant video cyles.

I vote acer.

The 9500GS is identical to the 8600GT but consumes less power.


Generally a CPU upgrade doesn't help as much as a GPU upgrade so the 400mhz isn't going to help that much.

Moved to Hardware.

what kind of GDDR for the graphics cards? 2? 3?

With dual core i doubt you'll notice the 400 Mhz(s). I assume the L2 cache is shared, so 1 vs 1.5 MB per core, not too bad...

I think the difference in CPUs is bigger than the difference in GPUs, unless one uses GDDR2 and the other GDDR3 or something...

The 9500GS is the successor to the 8600GT. The 9500GS is essentially just a made on a smaller fabrication process - a die shrink - of the 8600GT in order to use less power and some minor optimisations thrown in for good measure to get a few extra frames per second out of certain games.