How lame is my girlfriends mini laptop for gaming?

[dovedescent7]

I recently caught the bug to start gaming.I've never even played a pc game b4. I've always been a hardware guy but don't know much about games or as much about VGA cards.
This year we bought two notebooks both Asus

A 15 inch k53e for me,which I swapped the i5 2410m for a i7 2670qm upgraded to ocz vertex 3 ssd and 8gb ram,but no dedicated card.

My girl got a new one too that I bought except hers has a dedicated card..she only goes on Facebook,the news and plays spider solitaire tho.
For 432$ I found a refurbished Asus u series u31 (I think) which u would swear was new on Amazon.. I upgraded it from i3 to i7 2630qm and swapped from 2gb ram up to 8gb and also added an ocz ssd vertex 3...

So if any play games I'm thinking it's the second one.. I've looked at minimum requirements for like Diablo 3 and also looked at which exact cards play d3 on which settings,if they play it at all..

My problem is that I see a bunch of different cards that are close but not the gt 520m.I've seen gt 530 and like 630 and a bunch of others,but no 520m...

Will either of our laptops play any games decently? Or should I wait to get into gaming untill we get better laptops?





P.s. if those don't work,I have a desktop w i72600k oc'd to 4.5,16gb ram and ssd.I'm assuming I could just pop in a radeon 6670 and I would be fine?

 

[nhasian]

you want the one with the dedicated graphics card for the video games.

 

[C12Friedman]

I would use the desktop for gaming - as you say, throw in a midrange graphics card, you should have enjoyable play (decent graphics settings and 30+ fps frame rate). The laptops should be able to "game" (at least the one with dedicated graphics) but you'll have to sacrifice on graphics quality in order to get acceptable (30+ fps) frame rates.

 

[dovedescent7]

Thank you for the replies...

Ok ,moving on..

Im reading that the gt 520m is somewhat of an entry level dedicated card... So maybe diablo 3 on low settings? Or is it just going to not play?


Its weird because i have read conflicting things... One post on yahoo said that with this card "you will be absoltely fine running diablo 3 on any settings" Which i got excited about... But he prob didnt know what he was talking about ?


One other question i had to a similar thing,i was noticing Amd's A series APU's (CPU+GPU) have 6550 ish graphics but integrated... That sounds pretty crazy.. Does anyone know if they make an Amd Apu that has like 6700 or 6900 graphics?

 

[RetiredChief]

Performance

As an entry level card, the GT 520M has to compete against the Intel HD Graphics 3000 in the current Sandy Bridge processors. In our tests, the card was only slightly faster, but the better driver support did make a difference. However, demanding games like Battlefield 3 or The Witcher 2 are not playable. Other modern games only run in low details, and therefore gamers wont be pleased with the performance. Low demanding games like Fifa 12, however, are playable with high detail settings.

Ref: http/www.notebookcheck.net/NVIDIA-GeForce-GT-520M.43104.0.html
IF you scroll down you will see the performance for a large number of games.

Based On The HD3000 (SB iGPU), Diablo 3 is probably playable on low to midium.
For HD 3000, FPS: Low 39 FPS, Med 18 FPS, High 10 FPS. (The 520 is just slightly better than the HD3000
Ref: http/www.notebookcheck.net/Computer-Games-on-Laptop-Graphic-Cards.13849.0.html

 

[dovedescent7]

@RetiredChief
Thank you... Simply flawless response.Perfect!

 

[dovedescent7]

Best answer selected by dovedescent7.