Laptop Graphics

[Steve Woodward]

I'm looking to buy a new laptop to run the Phoenix Sim. I'm not familiar with computer specification, and am confused as to what level of graphics card I should be looking for. Any advice?

[Pat (rActive) Harbord]

The more you pay the more you get. You will need to be paying over a grand to get fabulous performance. Email the phoenix guys and ask them direct. You will find their email address on the website.

[Colin Bernard]

According to the Phoenix website you need the following minimum spec -

 

IBM-compatible PC computer with 1.0 Ghz Pentium 3/4 or AMD Athlon/64 compatible processor

• Microsoft Windows XP, Windows Vista or Windows 7 operating system

• 256MB system memory (RAM)

• 1.5 GB free, uncompressed hard-disk space*

• ATI Radeon 9800/NVidia Geforce Ti4200 with at least 128MB memory 

• Microsoft DirectX 9.0c or higher

• DVD-ROM Drive for installation

• 1 free USB 1.1/2.0 port

• 100% DirectX 9 compatible sound card (optional) 

 

For info I run Phoenix fine on a 3 year old Samsung R20  laptop and the spec on that is -

Windows XP

768MB RAM

ATI Radeon Xpress 1250 with 506MB

 

Performance on the laptop is just as good as on my beefier and more up to date desk top. (The latest 'R' series laptops are around £400) 

 

 

[birdy]

The minimum spec is slightly pointless; it depends on the resolution of the screen you use and the settings for the graphics; my desktop was fine at full graphics till I bought an full HD screen. For a modern computer, you will also be running windows 7, so you need a lot more ram than 256Mb for the operating system. Try and get something with 2gb or more. Avoid anything with pentium, athlon or atom written on it, because they'll be underpowered. Chances are that even the lowliest of integrated graphics would be fine - you dont need a graphics card, but it would be better...

 

If you interested, my pc, which only struggles at HD resolution and is pretty out of date:

Windows Vista

Athlon 64 duel core

Nvidea GeForce 8200 integrated graphics 

Edited By birdy on 27/10/2010 12:03:23

[Steve Houghton 1]

I've just replaced my old HP510 laptop which ran Phoenix just fine. The spec was:

 

Intel® Celeron® M Processor
60GB Hard Drive

256MB memory which I upgraded to 512MB

Intel® 910GML Express Chipset

I've now bought a Dell Studio 15 with:

 

Intel Core i3 CPU 2.27Ghz

4GB memory

500GB Hard Drive

ATI Radeon HD 5470

 

I bought this spec as I edit HD video, my HP wasn't up to it, dropping thousands of frames and leaving me with jumpy video. I have to say the spec was above what was required but I need the laptop to last about 3 years so I wanted to try to future proof it by as much as I could afford to.