PC vs. Laptop performance

Omatic810Omatic810 Gainesville, FL
edited May 2006 in Hardware
I recently purchased a Gateway 7515mx (I think that's the model), and thinking it's specs matched up with my PC, tried playing the same games I would on the PC. However, everything seems to run much slower on the laptop. The relevant specs for both are below:

Laptop:
2.60 gigahertz AMD Athlon 64 4000+
Ati Mobility Radeon X600 128MB
1 GB ram (PC 2700)
100 GB HD (5400 RPM)

PC:
2.08 gigahertz AMD Athlon 2800+
Ati Radeon 9700 Pro 128MB
1 GB ram (PC 3200)
120 GB HD (5400 RPM)

The only real difference in terms of gaming I can see is the RAM speed, but I wouldn't think it would make that big of a difference, so it has to be something else. The games I tried running are TES4:Oblivion (medium/low quality), Star Wars: Empire at War, Rise of Legends (demo), and Black and White 2.

The difference in performance ranged from 10 to 25 FPS between my 'top and my 'puter. I turned off most of the background applications on my laptop during testing to give it as much as an edge as possible, as well.

Any suggestions anyone?

Comments

  • LeonardoLeonardo Wake up and smell the glaciers Eagle River, Alaska Icrontian
    edited April 2006
    Your laptop may be "clock throttling" when the CPU and video card start getting hot. No matter how well one is designed, laptops just don't have the ability to cool themselves very well. Laptop hard drives can also get very hot with minimal cooling ability.

    I am sure there are other reasons too. The ones above are just the ones I though of.
  • RWBRWB Icrontian
    edited April 2006
    My laptop has an X700 and it's more compairable to a 9600 than a 9700, so I'd figure that x600 is possibly like a beefed up 9200... the x800 is supposed to be like a x1800 or something. It's the card plain and simple.... plus it's a gateway :P
  • V-PV-P State College, PA Member
    edited April 2006
    RWB wrote:
    ...plus it's a gateway :P
    Imagine if it was a dell...:shakehead
  • GHoosdumGHoosdum Icrontian
    edited May 2006
    Omatic, I'm willing to bet it's your video card, like RWB says.

    I have an eMachines notebook that is basically the predecessor to your Gateway, and my notebook has a Mobility 9600 in it. I have had to tweak the graphics settings quite a bit in order to get Oblivion to run comfortably on the PC. I can get a playable experience at 848x480. For Oblivion, I recommend turning off AA, turning the Specular Dist(ance) slider down to 0, and turning off as many of the shadows as you're comfortable with. These items will have a big performance hit.

    Also, I recommend installing the latest driver for mobile graphics cards from ATI's website. They've done a lot of tweaking to the mobile drivers lately, and if you're running the one that came with the notebook, you're likely able to get better performance out of ATI's latest.
  • Omatic810Omatic810 Gainesville, FL
    edited May 2006
    I was afraid that maybe my laptop had some kind of defect that was making it act all slow-like. I figured x600 > 9700 pro and 4000+ > 2800+, so by that logic, I'd be getting a system faster than my PC (which is showing it's age badly). I guess PC's and laptops are on two different scales...

    Thanks for all the info and suggestions guys, I'll download new drivers and make sure it's not underclocking itself. You all should be recieving a batch of karma cookies within the week.
  • Sledgehammer70Sledgehammer70 California Icrontian
    edited May 2006
    When you buy a Laptop you can get the highest spec'ed Lappy in the world and it can not contend with desktop PC's.. Now higher end Laptops can keep up in most games, mostly at lower settings. I knew when buying my DV8000t form HP I would be able to game on it, but I also knew I wouldn't be cranking the Graphics up.

    If you want good performance in a Laptop 2 Gigs ram and a 7200RPM drive is a must, or 2 5400RPM drives are good. Just install the games off of the operating system drive onto your 2nd drive. Also graphics are cut in like 1/4's take a 7800GTX and take a 1/4 of its speed and there you have a 7800GTX Go card. My 7400 Go series card performs about the same as a 6600GT which is good enough for me.

    Also AMD's CPU's for laptops are a little different than there desktop counterparts. The desktop chips being faster, where you lose out I think it is transistors, but I could be wrong.

    The funny thing is Laptop makers tease you. as they give you these nice huge 17" LCD's that can run 1680 x 1050 but no new games will run at playable rates on mid range laptops or even on some higher end laptops.

    I tired to run Oblivion on my laptop on highest settings... yeah that didn't work out to well. but at 1024 x 768 on medium it runs perfect :) you just have to come to your scenes and realize the graphics hit you took and be happy with it.
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