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Glengrant
TOHA Heavy Industries
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Posted - 2009.04.26 17:31:00 -
[1]
Hi,
I'm looking for a new laptop and I want to make sure it can also serve my EVE gaming for the foreseeable future (my current Inspiron 9400 was fine with classic but now only borderline ok with the current premium graphics engine).
Is anybody here using the Dell XPS M1730 with the 2x NVIDIA Geforce 8700M (SLI) graphics adapter?
Any issues? How's the performance? Did you get both cards going - or just one? --- Save the forum: Think before you post. ISK BUYER = LOSER EVE TV- Bring it back! Laptop, NVidia7900GS, Ubuntu 8.04, WINE |
Veskya
Elite Aeronautic Developer Syndicate Kraftwerk.
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Posted - 2009.04.27 20:13:00 -
[2]
Working perfectly fine here on M1730 with 2x 8800 GTX. But using only one GPU, SLI is pretty much useless.
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Glengrant
TOHA Heavy Industries
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Posted - 2009.04.27 22:00:00 -
[3]
Edited by: Glengrant on 27/04/2009 22:00:43 Hi Veskya,
thanks for the feedback.
What distro are you using? And is SLI useless because you can't use it under Linux - or because it does work - but doesn't provide any improvement over a single card?
What's your overall opinion about the M1730 (running under Linux - I won't keep Windows on it)? Would you buy it again?
How is the sound quality? How noisy are the fans (during EVE play - and during normal - say surfing - use)?
Anything else worth mentioning?
Sorry for the many questions. :-)
TIA
--- Save the forum: Think before you post. ISK BUYER = LOSER EVE TV- Bring it back! Laptop, NVidia7900GS, Ubuntu 8.04, WINE |
Xianthar
STK Scientific The Initiative.
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Posted - 2009.04.28 06:20:00 -
[4]
i have a similar specced laptop, c2d @ 2.4ghz, 8600m (8700m is just an higher clocked 8600m), 3gb ram, 1680x1050 screen....
runs 2 premium clients fine, 3 or more gets slower (wouldn't fight on 3)
running ubuntu 9.04, compiz enabled, i run eve @ 1440x900 windowed.
i would assume you can expect even better graphics performance than i get with 2 of a high clocked card...
if your looking for recommendations tho i think your better off with this for eve:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834220511
quad core should handle more clients than the dual as eve is usually cpu limited, the single 9800m gs is quite similar is performance to the 8700m sli and you don't have to deal with the PITA of setting up SLI and you get better power usage, less heat, etc.
i'm slightly biased tho as i've never had a good experience with dell but own 3 asus laptops all running ubuntu atm and had 2 others in the past that were also great.
cheers,
xian
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Glengrant
TOHA Heavy Industries
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Posted - 2009.04.28 23:21:00 -
[5]
Thanks for the infos and recommendation.
Anything that can run 3 eve client decently and 2 well is more than good enough for my purposes - I only run 1 account.
The ASUS sure has nice specs and I would like a quad core - but it costs ca $200 more than the M1730 and I have no use for the extra power. EVE is the most graphically demanding app I run on my laptop - everything else is development stuff and the usual browsing etc... For all else except EVE even my > 3 year old Inspiron 9400 is still overkill. And it still can manage EVE - but with classic gone the graphics chip is running hot and the fps not exactly pvp level.
I had 3 Dell Laptops and all worked according to spec and their LCD are high quality in my experience. Sound is decent. And they used to be among the very few to offer the good keyboard layout (sadly recently they followed the rest of the industry and go with the stupid keys right of backspace/enter layout - urggh). Not the sleekest machines around but good bang for the buck. --- Save the forum: Think before you post. ISK BUYER = LOSER EVE TV- Bring it back! Laptop, NVidia7900GS, Ubuntu 8.04, WINE |
Agent Known
Apotheosis of Virtue
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Posted - 2009.04.29 06:07:00 -
[6]
Dell also has their famous support. Break it and they'll send a tech to fix it for you if they can. Obviously what I say isn't always what my alliance thinks. I hate to break it to you, but this is in fact my signature. |
Xianthar
STK Scientific The Initiative.
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Posted - 2009.04.29 07:22:00 -
[7]
Originally by: Agent Known Dell also has their famous support. Break it and they'll send a tech to fix it for you if they can.
yea, met a few of em when they came to fix friends laptops, often repeatedly, its not uncommon for them to bring "refurbished parts" with obvious crap hand solder jobs (i'm an EE), at current count, i've had one friend get this service 5 times (faulty power connector). I do appreciate the ideal but remember they will make you do "dell diagnostics" before sending anyone, and since this is the linux forum your basicly tying yourself to keeping the dell windows image and dual booting and even that will be an issue with such support, or so i've found in the past...
On the other hand the only problem i've ever had with any of my asus laptops was a broken screen hinge. Asus sells the replacement part for $15 which i installed in about 20min with no special tools (small screw drivers is all)
anyway, back on point, there are issues with SLI in all OS's linux is no different:
http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=109514
in my personal experience i've seen 6800 series desktop cards perform better solo under linux than 6800 SLI combos, on my desktop i threw out dual 6800's for a single GTX260 and a matrox triplehead2go to handle all my screens. my only advice is to avoid SLI no matter what your OS for eve or any game you want to play in a window. if your playing 1 game full screen on 1 screen thats one thing but all these setups seem to start to brick in windowed mode with multiple instances of any software.
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Veskya
Elite Aeronautic Developer Syndicate Kraftwerk.
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Posted - 2009.05.05 22:47:00 -
[8]
Originally by: Glengrant Edited by: Glengrant on 27/04/2009 22:00:43 Hi Veskya,
thanks for the feedback.
What distro are you using? And is SLI useless because you can't use it under Linux - or because it does work - but doesn't provide any improvement over a single card?
What's your overall opinion about the M1730 (running under Linux - I won't keep Windows on it)? Would you buy it again?
How is the sound quality? How noisy are the fans (during EVE play - and during normal - say surfing - use)?
Anything else worth mentioning?
Sorry for the many questions. :-)
TIA
Using Arch Linux... SLI rather seems to make things run slower on Linux but even on Windows i never noticed any advantage of it other then in benchmarks. The sound quality is fine for my uses, but im not overly picky when it comes to that ^^ The fans are alot quieter even when running at full speed then my old Desktop, but cant really say how it compares to other laptops but it never bothered me.
These days i most likely wouldnt buy this laptop again because of the 2 GPU's which are pretty much a waste of money and they dont offer it with just one 8800 GTX. They also offer a Raid 0 setup but that is just a software raid which you can easily do yourself using mdadm if you have 2 Harddisks. Also the USB slot layout is a bit sucky imo, there is only one USB port on the back, two on the right and one on the left side, id prefer having some more on the back for keyboard, mouse etc.
So it might be worth looking around for similar Laptops maybe.
But as far as the Linux compatibility goes its pretty much fine, Ubuntu had some problems with it which is why i use Arch Linux where everything works just fine.
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