Better gfx alternative for the I5150?

[daonesteven]

When I first bought this laptop, it came with the 32MB version of this card. I absolutely hated it, so I bought a new 64MB verison from dell parts, and I thought i was a somewhat decent upgrade. However, I read in many different sites that the ATI mobility 9000 64MB actually yields better performance than the 5200go 64MB. Now i'm sure I won't see a whole spanking lot of improvement, but ######, i'm sure some of you understand when I know that I gotta have the best for this laptop, and especially since I play a lot of WoW, i'm definitely up for improvements.

Would anyone know for sure if an ATI mobility 9000 would yield better performance for my I5150? Danke :)

[mew905]

The entire FX series was a screw-up. no doubts that ATI would have the upper hand 2 gens ago. The ATI Radeon 9000 has actually benchmarked almost TWICE (or more) the performance of the 64 MB FX Go5200. So... in short, yes, the ATI would be a much better choice. (I was an nVidia fan, and still am, at the time of purchasing my laptop in 2004)

[mew905]

Or, if you really want, you can wait until my project is done. It's listed in Nvidia Powered laptops section, in the topic "I5150 mod possible?"

I will be ripping apart a GeForce FX Go5200 and replacing the core with a Go5600 GPU, better performance than the Radeon Mobility 9000. If it is successful, I will be selling Go5600's for the I5150 for those who wont do it themselves, as well as posting a thorough walkthrough for those who do want to do it themselves for cheaper.

[Guest Guest]

Or, if you really want, you can wait until my project is done. It's listed in Nvidia Powered laptops section, in the topic "I5150 mod possible?"

I will be ripping apart a GeForce FX Go5200 and replacing the core with a Go5600 GPU, better performance than the Radeon Mobility 9000. If it is successful, I will be selling Go5600's for the I5150 for those who wont do it themselves, as well as posting a thorough walkthrough for those who do want to do it themselves for cheaper.

that woudl be supersweet, ill be looking out for that

[daonesteven]

that woudl be supersweet, ill be looking out for that

by the way mew, I know this has nothign to do with the graphics aspect of inspirons, but do you know what RPM is the hard drives in our inspiron 5150's? I'm looking at some of these 7200rpm hard drives and I'm thinking maybe that'll help improve framerates or just overall performance whenever I play WoW...

[mew905]

7200RPM is usually recommended as a bare minimum for gaming, hence why most high performance laptops only come in 7200 RPM HDDs. My HDD is only a 5400RPM harddrive, 60GB. With enough RAM, you shouldnt notice the HDD lag except during loading screens, while during the game the frames should hold steady. But a 7200 RPM HDD should improve performance by a little during games, greatly impove loading times as well as access times for other things.

[Guest Guest]

7200RPM is usually recommended as a bare minimum for gaming, hence why most high performance laptops only come in 7200 RPM HDDs. My HDD is only a 5400RPM harddrive, 60GB. With enough RAM, you shouldnt notice the HDD lag except during loading screens, while during the game the frames should hold steady. But a 7200 RPM HDD should improve performance by a little during games, greatly impove loading times as well as access times for other things.

hmmm i kinda don't care about long loading times in between worlds, but i do care about smoothness and fluidity in games at the cost of any quality. So I'm trying to see if a 7200rpm hard drive might be the solution. It doesn't happen all that often, but sometimes when I see some a lot of stuff in my screen or I just did some sort of move on my warrior, it'll give me like a half second pause in the game which is really annoying. Then sometimes i'd hear a huge "stopping" noise in my HD as if it just choked or something, and then everything would resume.