Thinkpads Forum

This is my first post. This is a great forum that has helped me select the Think Pad.

I am set on getting the T420 but want some insight on the Graphics Card it comes with.

I already determined that the T420 will meet all my business requirements.

But I want to know if it meets my gaming requirements. I play Command and Conquer 3, Starcraft 2, and Age of Empires.

I currently have a 1 year old MacBook Pro with Nvidia GT330M Card. It can play all the games mentioned in Ultra settings without any issues.

Can the current T420 at least match or exceed that?

Below is the system requirements for Command and Conquer 3:


OS: Windows XP/Vista (64-bit not supported)

CPU: 2GHz, 2.2GHz (Vista)

RAM: 512 MB, 1GB (Windows Vista)

HDD: 6GB free space

Video card: nVIDIA GeForce 4, ATI Radeon 8500 or greater (ATI Radeon 9200 and 9250 PCI, nVIDIA Geforce 4 MX cards not supported.); for Windows Vista NVIDIA GeForce 6100 or ATI Radeon 9500 or greater

Sound card: DirectX 9.0 compatible

The Quadro NVS 4200M is not as fast as the GeForce GT 330M (3DMark06 scores ~4800 vs. ~6000) but it is well above the minimum requirement for C&C3 (3Dmark06 scores for Radeon 9500/GeForce 6100 are in the 200-400 range).

I can confirm that a T420s with a NVS4200M is more than capable of playing StarCraft 2. I play it plenty at native 1600 x 900 resolution and pretty high quality settings.

On the T420, you might have enough thermal headroom for a fair overclock. I was able to overclock the older T400 a significant amount. I recommend GPUTool CTP1 for overclocking. TPFanControl also lets you max out your fan at level 64, which gives you more cooling and allows more overclock.

Update your drivers using the NVidia site; they have newer drivers with performance improvements