Bang for the buck laptops, can this one be beat?

[tom-knox]

I'm going to have to delay my plans for a big rig and get a laptop for now. I want plenty of bang for my buck and i have £600 ($820) to spend. Can anyone beat the Acer Aspire 6930G. Prices from the US must be shippable to the UK and this must come into cost at less than $30.

Here's the 6930G's spec.
Processor - Intel Core 2 Duo T5800 / 2 GHz ( Dual-Core )
RAM - 3 GB (installed) / 4 GB (max) - DDR3 SDRAM ( 1 x 1 GB + 1 x 2 GB )
Hard Drive - 250 GB - Serial ATA-150 - 5400 rpm
Operating System - Microsoft Windows Vista Home Premium
Screen - 16' TFT 1366 x 768 ( WXGA ) - 24-bit (16.7 million colours) - CineCrystal
Optical Drive - DVD±RW (±R DL) / DVD-RAM - integrated
Graphics - NVIDIA GeForce 9300M GS
Price: £469.20

OR, with a beefier GPU

Processor - Intel Core 2 Duo P7350 / 2 GHz ( Dual-Core )
RAM - 3 GB (installed) / 4 GB (max) - DDR2 SDRAM ( 1 x 1 GB + 1 x 2 GB )
Hard Drive - 250 GB - Serial ATA-150 - 5400 rpm
Operating System - Microsoft Windows Vista Home Premium
Screen - 16' TFT 1366 x 768 ( WXGA ) - 24-bit (16.7 million colours) - CineCrystal
Optical Drive - DVD±RW (±R DL) / DVD-RAM - integrated
Graphics - NVIDIA GeForce 9600M GS - 512 MB
Bluetooth - No
Notebook Camera - Integrated - 0.3 Megapixel
Warranty - 1 year warranty
Price: £597.08

Plus, what kinda gaming performance can i get from each and is the difference between the 9300GS and the 9600GS worth the difference in price?

 

[J03]

You can do some reasonable gaming on the 9600GS, but not so much on the 9300GS... What games would you want to play?

The 2nd one you listed is a pretty good value laptop.

 

[tom-knox]

Can you give me a guess-timate figure on the following

COD 4
L4D
CS:S
gMod
WoW
GW
FC2

 

[Holysky]

settings wise on the second one?

cod4- medium high

L4d- med high

cs:s Max

Wow- max

fc2-med

gw max

gmod max

 

[tom-knox]

I could really get that good on the first? Wow. Max on all for the second? Is there any better price-to-performance laptops you know of?

 

[Holysky]

NONONONONONOO!!! SECOND lol fail on me

 

[tom-knox]

Did get the feeling that it was a little too good to be true. You got any idea of levels for the first one? I wanna try and gauge the difference between the 9300gs and 9600gs

 

[Holysky]

oh the 9300gs might be able to pull low-med to low on all those games.

except for older games like GW and Gmod you can probaly get high on those

 

[J03]

High? On gMod!? I doubt it. It might not have the best graphics, but there are often 1000's of entitys within the game, and it can make CPU/GPU/Memory usage skyrocket.

 

[tom-knox]

Thanks for your help Holysky. Grats on nearly hitting the 1k mark.