Buying W700.Why nVidia, and how much VRAM do I need/want?

[Crunch]

Hey folks,

So, all but the W700's have ATI cards. How come the W700 has nVidia? What's going on with that?? I also would like to know if 512MB dedicated memory is more than enough, or if I should get the whole GB (of video RAM...gulp!).

I do nothing with graphics, but we do video editing and it has to play back 720p and 1080p BluRay's. My T60p (specs in sig) even has no problem with 256MB for 720p, and, if nothing else is running, 1080p's, too.

Does anyone actually OWN, or work with a W700 here?

Thanks a bunch!!

[awolfe63]

Any W700 will do a fine job playing back blu-ray and 1080p. You don't need a graphics upgrade. 64MB of graphics memory is plenty for blu-ray if the rest of the system is up to snuff.

If you do video editing, lots of RAM and RAID0 disks will be your best friend.

[visionviper]

What kind of video editing do you do? Are you working with large HD video files?

[proaudioguy]

I have a friend with a sony with RAID (shared for speed) and it has failures often. He has even replaced the drives. Nothing like working on a Happy Face video for 6 hours then having your computer crash when you are 15 minutes from finishing.

So my question is how reliable are these RAID systems?

The software I use regularly is switching over form processor intense to graphics intense to free up the processor to do more work. This means my X32 is no longer going to be enough. I will be able to do as much with this software as I have system so the faster the better. I was thinking quad core, with a gig of video ram, but the drive would still be the weak link which RAID would help, but I don't need to be reinstalling the system once a month and ordering new hard drives as often.

[awolfe63]

Ballpark - the failure rate of a RAID-0 system is (number of drives)^2 times higher than a single drive. So a 2-drive RAID-0 is 4x more likely to fail than a single drive. A 3-drive RAID-0 is 9x more likely to fail than a single drive. Etc. (I had to estimate the reliability of a 1000 drive RAID-0 for a client once - it wasn't pretty)