T61 and Gaming!

[Redmumba]

I just wanted to post an initial insight into the T61's gaming performance with the nVidia NVS 140m card. I must say... I am impressed. Unfortunately, the only game I have installed right now is World of Warcraft, but I have gotten nothing but amazing performance from it.

My original laptop has a Mobility Radeon X700 in it, which is nice but more than two years old. Not only did it make my laptop roast when I had it running for long periods of time (to the point where it would occasionally crash), but the frame rate was nothing extraordinary.

So I decided to give my new T61 a spin, and I really was impressed! At 1440x900 (native), all graphical settings maxed, AA at the middle, I was getting 60fps (with frame limiting on) just about everywhere. If it would jump, it would never drop below 30fps. On top of that, the laptop is amazingly cool--considering my girlfriends T43 will get piping hot under normal use, I was astonished that the laptop remained ~50*C under hours of heavy load. The fans were not even audible, that's how low they were.

No hardcore benchmarks, unfortunately, but since I know this was one of my concerns when I purchased it, I thought I would let people know that it seems like its more than up to the gaming task. I'll post benchmarks later!

[Miller88]

I have a T60 and it's pretty good at gaming. Only problem I have is I run out of memory

[santalink]

Wow, thats great!

I brought my wife a similar configuration except I upgraded it to 4GB (I know I can only use 3GB).

I really wish I could install wow in her machine!

I am still using my old desktop brought in 2003 to play wow and I can only use very minimum settings.

[sokos]

great news Andrew!
I ll be testing soon Battlefield2 which i like to play online sometimes when i got free time (rarely) so I ll be posting soon my impressions.

But on the other hand I m trying to keep space for my VM's and also once u start gaming you lose sense of time, so i m trying hard not to use any games.. i m just happy knowing that I have the horsepower under the bonnet

[Tholek]

I went X3100 for power conservation, and since I had to for the 15.4" screen. (atm) I know it won't perform as well, but would you say that most games that will run on the 140m, will run on the X3100, but at reduced performance, or just not at all? I didn't get a T61 to game of course, but I'd like to know.

[ryengineer]

More modern/latest/newer games will definitely be going to bug you:

-as no thinkpad is being made and targeted for gamers.
-nVidia is not the best card for this purpose in the market.

However little older and less demanding games will run without a problem. Vista gives nVidia a score of 4.0, which is not bad at all.

I am not sure who does gaming on notebooks but here is a new one from Asus claiming to be great for gamers.

[Tholek]

That, being the 140m. What about the gap between it and the Intel?

[ryengineer]

That, being the 140m. What about the gap between it and the Intel?

Vista rates it 3.4 for graphics/aero and 3.5 for 3-D gaming.

[Redmumba]

Frankly, I don't give the Vista score any value as far as actual comparable benchmarks.

The nVidia performed pretty darn well, more than twice as powerful as my X700 which, from what I remember, is ~ATI 1300. I remember this anomaly being true for some of the Dell business laptops, where the "lightweight" Quadro card ended up blowing the lids off the equivalent "consumer" laptop graphics cards.

I'll be posting up 3DMark06 scores in an hour or two.

EDIT: 1688 3DMarks06

[XIII]

Interesting, the V5250 only scores 1685 in 3DMark06.

[Tholek]

That, being the 140m. What about the gap between it and the Intel?

Vista rates it 3.4 for graphics/aero and 3.5 for 3-D gaming.

Unfortunately, I don't know the X3100 scores, so that's lost on me.

Also, I don't know if the difference would answer my previous question about whether the X3100 would support most of the games the 140m would, but just at reduced performance versus not being able to run them whatsoever.

[Redmumba]

I actually had the chance to use the previous chipset's integrated graphics solution, and I was fairly impressed--not stellar performance, but it worked and it was stable. Just expect to have the settings bottomed out at the native resolution.

[jcvjcvjcvjcv]

great news Andrew!
I ll be testing soon Battlefield2 which i like to play online sometimes when i got free time (rarely) so I ll be posting soon my impressions.

But on the other hand I m trying to keep space for my VM's and also once u start gaming you lose sense of time, so i m trying hard not to use any games.. i m just happy knowing that I have the horsepower under the bonnet

Battlefield 2 runs fine at 1440x900 viewing disctance 100%, textures high, geometry high, no lighting or shadows, terrain low

I tested in the map Warlord on my own clanserver (84.244.131.54:16567) with around ~25 players in it. FPS was around 50, dips to 30.

Quite good, but nothing compared to what my 7900 GTX desktop scores. But for BF2 I use my T61 as a UAV: get an additional BF2 license, join same server, and put in the other team.

Also very usefull as admintool. Simply ingame watching while doing some browsing on your desktop. I kicked a lot of mainbaserapers, caught by my laptopaccount.