Is this a good $500 gaming latop??

[supermgamer]

I want to play games like Minecraft and battlefield bad company 2, and maybe gta 4.. is this a good lapptop?

http://www.walmart.com/ip/Samsung-Series-3-15.6-Laptop-PC-with-AMD-Quad-Core-A8-Series-Accelerated-Processor-and-Windows-7-Home-Premium/17492781

 

[Brett928S2]

Hi

$500 does NOT get you ANY sort of gaming laptop....

All the best Brett

 

[nbelote]

They're right, $500 won't bag you a decent gaming laptop....not one that will play GTA4. You'd be able to play World of Warcraft on medium on that laptop you linked, you could probably get away with Starcraft 2 on low. Perhaps you could play Diablo 3 when it comes out but only on low. GTA4 requires dedicated texture RAM which that laptop does not have.

 

[photonboy]

I agree.
However, if you look around there are games that are fun and will play well. Examples to try (you might want to print this off)
- Minecraft
- Angry Birds (buy the standalone versions of "Angry Birds" and "Angry Birds Space")

Steam games that might work:
- Deus Ex #1
- Monkey Island series
- Sam & Max
- Star Wars Jedi Outcast
- Left 4 Dead 2 (maybe. it's well coded)
- Command & Conquer 3 (maybe)
- Bastion
- Magicka
- Serious Sam HD
- Torchlight
- Trine

 

[jaguarskx]

You can play GTA 4 with a Llano A8 series APU. I have seen videos of people playing GTA 4 with Intel's HD 3000 graphics core. The graphic core in the Llano A8 is more powerful than the HD 3000.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=slr0tNWKT-8

However, whether the performance level is acceptable for you based on much eye candy you want is a different matter.

 

[supermgamer]

so what would you guys recomend me for a $500 laptop, cuz ive seen in tigerdirect an acer with an a6 and a radeon 7670 in dual graphics for $530

 

[Jawny]

Minecraft yes, DEF NO for games like GTA. and prob even bfbc2



http://iwatchedyourfeed.org/sig.jpg

LOL not minecraft either. My cousin has a hard time on his $900 HP laptop playing minecraft... max settings

 

[Avro Arrow]

Ok, obviously none of these people have an A8-based laptop because they're feeding you a bunch of conjecture. Jawny said his cousin has a hard time playing minecraft on his $900 laptop? Probably because it has Intel graphics. I personally have (and am typing on at the moment) an Acer Aspire 5560-Sb401:
http://shop.amd.com/ca/home/Detail/Notebook/ecx-Mem-ca-MX36491
This is as good a gaming machine as you can get for under $500. In fact, it beats several Intel offerings up to $1000 in gaming. I play Skyrim on medium setting with literally no choppiness or artifacts. The ATi Radeon HD 6620G on-die graphics processor has about the same power as a Radeon HD 6500M. If you want to see how well the A8 APU plays games, here's tomshardware's own review of the mobile A8:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/a8-3500m-llano-apu,2959.html
You'll see that regardless of what all these "experts" are saying, the Llano mobile (Sabine) platform is designed specifically for budget gaming laptops and delivers incredible battery life (over 2 hours gaming). Intel's offerings at that price point all have the absurdly crappy Intel HD 3000 which literally gets its arse whipped by the Radeon HD 6620G in every situation. Read the review, it will make you conifdent you made the right choice. As for CPU power, the Llano cannot match Intel's offerings but let's face it, hardware is so far ahead of software these days. My Quad-Core Llano A8 feels very fast in every application I've ever used on my laptop and I'm sure that won't change because most people (like you and I) never do anything that requires the higher-level CPU power. We do however, often do things that take full advantage of the GPU (like HD movies, games, etc.) and this is where Llano really shines. Seriously, I've been using MS-Office and web browsers since the days of Win95 and the Pentium-1, do you really think that surfing the web and typical programs used by 99% of people have increased greatly in their hardware requirements since then? To be perfectly frank, AMD has changed the game with Llano making "budget" and "gaming laptop" no longer mutually exclusive. Trust me, you cannot go wrong with the laptop you listed.

 

[mitunchidamparam]

The A8 can play all the games you mentioned, go for the laptop

 

[supermgamer]

Best answer selected by supermgamer.

 

[kkdart]

Decent Machine but I'm wondering what Avro Arrow gets on batterylife with an AMD quad core. I'm getting a Intel i5 2410m w/ Nvidia 540m (Optimus), so I can get 2 hours gaming and 6+ surfing the web.

 

[Guest]

good luck playing BF2BC with that

 

[Avro Arrow]

Thanks for the best reply. It's not really me though. I read tomshardware's review of the A8-3500M so I got one myself on sale for $499CAD and they were right. I've never been so pleasantly surprised. I installed Skyrim to test it out and although Skyrim defaulted to high settings based on the hardware, I found it to be choppy in some places at high settings. Once I went to medium, all was well. Hell, even if you go to low settings, you're still playing at the graphics level of the Xbox 360 and PS3. I NEVER expected Skyrim to be playable on a $500 laptop but I was pleasantly proven wrong.

 

[Avro Arrow]

http://www.globalclimatescam.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/green-kool-aidman.jpg

So then, trusting a tomshardware review (which proved to be 100% accurate) is like drinking green kool-aid? Well, Lime Kool-Aid tastes much better than blueberry IMHO.

 

[Avro Arrow]

good luck playing BF2BC with that

http://techreport.com/articles.x/21099/14
Doesn't look too bad to me.

 

[Dark Lord of Tech]

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