NVIDIA GeForce GT 650M 2.0GB DDR3

[antobag]

I am thinking of buying a laptop for university work and some gaming. I preferably want to spend around £700 or less - I know this won't buy me much, but I want to see what I can do with that amount.

At the moment, I'm looking at a laptop with the GT 650M (2gb ddr3). I've heard that this is roughly the bare minimum you can use for a gaming laptop. I'd use it with 8gb of RAM and a 2.6 or 2.7 GHz CPU (dual core, i5 3230M or 3340M). I also have the choice of choosing a quad core i7 (3630QM, 2.4 Ghz), but I'm not going for it because I've heard: a) hyper-threading is not widely used in games as of yet, b) the 650M will bottleneck it anyway and c) it's more expensive.

Assuming that I can't upgrade the GPU, my questions are:

1) What sort of games could I play with this, and at what graphics settings?

2) Would the fact that the card is ddr3 mean that it could never fully utilise its 2gb? Apologies if I'm completely mistaken with this.

3) Am I right in thinking that there is no point in using a quad-core i7 processor with such a weak GPU?

Any help would be much appreciated.

 

[plasmastorm]

GT650m will be fine in a laptop. Im currently running a core i3 1.4ghz with a GT640m at 1366 resolution playing guild wars 2, wow, diablo 3 etc etc all at around 40-60fps.
personally i'd stick with the i5 in the laptop if gaming, get the i7 if you ar multi tasking for work etc however.

 

[blazorthon]

Hyper-Threading is widely used by the dual-core CPUs. The quad-core CPUs and up don't benefit from it often because gaming doesn't really use eight threads that effectively except in a few situations (granted they are increasing in number as newer games come out and older ones get patched). Basically, games don't know the difference between a virtual thread and a physical thread since they just see them as threads. Whether or not they can use them effectively isn't really impacted by whether or not they're Hyper-Threading threads or large core counts. I do agree that the i7 is not worth getting in your situation because the GTX 650M is not fast enough to be bottle-necked by a decent dual-core Sandy/Ivy Bridge CPU.

1) You'd be able to play just about any game, but some of the most intensive games would play poorly except at or near minimum settings in low resolutions. The GTX 650M can play games, but it's still only an entry-level gaming graphics card. Lighter games such as Diablo 3 and such would probably have no trouble running at or near maxed out settings in your resolution, but that's not saying much since such games are so light that some far older games can be way heavier on the graphics (extreme example- the first Crysis).

2) Yes, it will never fully utilize its 2GB of RAM. I doubt that it can really use more than 512MB. Mobile graphics cards are often given far more memory than is necessary, presumably to try to trick people into thinking that they aren't far weaker than the desktop versions (as an example, the GTX 650 is something like 50% faster than the GTX 650M DDR3).

3)Well, I suppose I got ahead of myself and pretty much answered this above.

 

[antobag]

Many thanks to both of you for your replies

 

[antobag]

Just another quick question - I am thinking of getting a 1920x1080 screen with this graphics card (the GT 650M ddr3). Would I be able to play many modern games in full HD (1920x1080) resolution (if I, for example, lowered the graphic detail), or would I have to downscale to a lower resolution and therefore suffer the blurriness inherent with non-native resolutions?

 

[blazorthon]

Just another quick question - I am thinking of getting a 1920x1080 screen with this graphics card (the GT 650M ddr3). Would I be able to play many modern games in full HD (1920x1080) resolution (if I, for example, lowered the graphic detail), or would I have to downscale to a lower resolution and therefore suffer the blurriness inherent with non-native resolutions?

You could play with lowered graphics settings like that, but it's usually agreed that you're better off getting a lower resolution screen and using higher settings at its native resolution if you're looking for an ideal gaming experience and can't play well at a higher resolution due to performance constraints.

 

[antobag]

You could play with lowered graphics settings like that, but it's usually agreed that you're better off getting a lower resolution screen and using higher settings at its native resolution if you're looking for an ideal gaming experience and can't play well at a higher resolution due to performance constraints.

Okay. Thanks again blazorthon, you've been a real help to me over the last couple days, on this thread and other ones. In terms of the screen resolution, it seems that I need to decide whether I want a larger, crisper workspace for general use but decreased performance/graphics for gaming, or a smaller workspace with visible pixels but better gaming performance/graphics. I'll have a look around at other laptops in stores, get a feel for what I want and then make my decision. Thanks again!

 

[blazorthon]

Glad to help