Notebook (GTX570M) vs. Desktop (HD5850)

[socrampy]

Which one of this systems do you think has more gaming performance?

- Desktop
Phenom II 960 Black Edition
Corsair water cooling system
750 watt PSU
Radeon 5850 Sapphire
4GB Corsair DDR2
7500rpm disk
23' monitor 1080p

- Notebook
this one
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834152293


I'm thinking of selling my desktop (the above) and buying that notebook, but dont know if ill be gettin more gaming fps or not.

I know its difficult to compare a mobility gpu to a desktop one, but if some one has any of these components, maybe you can debate on which you think it's best, and why.

 

[Cripple13]

Laptops and gaming don't go hand in hand. The biggest downfall of them is their lack of cooling. You can certainly play games on that thing without issue, but over time performance will take a hit and possibly even the hardware. There is no doubt that the laptop is better, but for 1600 you can build an even better desktop.

Unless you want/need the portability of the laptop, you should always go the desktop route when talking about a gaming pc. If you want to upgrade, sell off your desktop and build a new one

 

[PurpleHayes]

Just tried looking at some official specs (570M vs. 5850); the 5850 will outperform the 570M (higher Texel rate, memory bandwidth, and the Radeon has more stream cores than Nvidia CUDA cores by a large margin (although NVidia's CUDA cores usually do 2-3x the work of Stream cores)).

Cripple's right; laptops can't compete with desktops for gaming. That being said, if you're moving from a 1920x1080 desktop screen down to say, a 1366x768 laptop screen, the games you run will run on less resources, so you might not see a huge hit in FPS necessarily, although you'd be playing on a smaller screen. Also, gaming laptops will run very hot, and they'll have bad battery life (I've got a laptop that can do some decent gaming, and it's ~1.5 years old now and has about 2 hours of battery life )

 

[jeremyp1979]

If you can get 1500 bucks together after selling your current desktop, I personally would recommend building a new desktop. You can build an amazing system (2500k, 7970, ssd) for the price of the laptop, and get much better performance.

That being said, the laptop looks to be a nice little gamer. The video card is about 30 spots higher than your desktop on the Passmark video card benchmarks.

The i7 is a MUCH better processor than the phenom ii,so it will be a big upgrade too.

 

[Cripple13]

upgrade- yes
worth the cost- absolutely not

 

[FinneousPJ]

Good thing you asked. There's no contest, don't even consider the laptop.

 

[MKBL]

I used to be involved on ThinkPad product development for 4 years before it was bought by Lenovo. Based on my experience, however it is limited or seasoned, my recommendation to anyone who is looking for a new laptop is to expect it will last 3 years.

Although I had used a T41 machine until it became 7 years old when it died on me finally last month, the usefulness of a laptop barely exceeds 3 years, when it comes to least-hassle performance. After 3 years, usually your laptop would encounters hiccups here and there. That's when you use your laptop for streaming video, websurfing, office work, casual games, etc. When you play demanding games on your laptop, which I didn't do much, except Diablo 2 for a few months, I think it will generate a lot more heat inside, and your machine won't be able to manage the excessive thermal waste as efficiently as desktop. It's very crowded space there.

I'm sure PC manufacturers have improved engineering solutions for such disadvantage, but at the same time, demands for more performance also have increased dramatically, on top of the ever thinning platforms. Looking at modern day laptops' heat sink design, I don't see a dramatic improvement there, either. For this reason, I think gaming laptop has even shorter life span, not to mention of lack of upgradability.

Having said that, if you are concerned about return on investment over the long run, you better look elsewhere. However, playing game anywhere is of the greatest interest without worrying about cost effectiveness, it's your choice.

 

[jeremyp1979]

Just tried looking at some official specs (570M vs. 5850); the 5850 will outperform the 570M (higher Texel rate, memory bandwidth, and the Radeon has more stream cores than Nvidia CUDA cores by a large margin (although NVidia's CUDA cores usually do 2-3x the work of Stream cores)).

Cripple's right; laptops can't compete with desktops for gaming. That being said, if you're moving from a 1920x1080 desktop screen down to say, a 1366x768 laptop screen, the games you run will run on less resources, so you might not see a huge hit in FPS necessarily, although you'd be playing on a smaller screen. Also, gaming laptops will run very hot, and they'll have bad battery life (I've got a laptop that can do some decent gaming, and it's ~1.5 years old now and has about 2 hours of battery life )

These are the numbers according to pass mark:
The 570m scored 1615 on their benchmark and was the # 59 card on their list of high end video card rankings.
The hd 5850 scored 2527 and was ranked at #24
( I need to edit my original post, apparently i was looking at the mobility radeon hd 5850 the first time i searched the list), so the video card in the laptop would be a downgrade, albeit not a big one.