few general lappy questions

[Anubis]

ok this current dell deal has me excited and i need these answered quick

1) what is the diff in speed between a dell lappy with one of thoes new P4 3.06GHz and one from someone that uses a AMD 3000+ both with 1 gig of ram?

2) what is the best vid card for them, the 64MB DDR NVIDIA® GeForce? FX Go5200 & the 128MB DDR ATI's MOBILITY® RADEON? 9600 PROTURBO? - are thoes i see offered most, - will do lite gameing, prob not doom3 level but decent stuff

3) XGA, SXGA+, UXGA??? WTF do all these mean, id like to be able to do 1280x1024 on a 15in LCD wide screen is just a novelty

 

[uOpt]

For starters, here's the resolutions. It's annoying that these idiots don't want to bother the poor customers with (gasp) numbers, isn't it?

SVGA: usually 800x600
XGA: usually 1024x768
XGA sometimes: 1152x900
SXGA: 1280x1024
SXGA+: 1400x1050, sometimes 1400x1040
WXGA: 1280x800, sometimes 1400x1050
WXGA+: 1440x900
SXGAW: 1600x1024
WSXGA+: 1680x1050
UXGA: 1600x1200
WUXGA: 1920x1200
HDTV: 1920x1080
UXGAW: 1900x1200
QXGA: 2048x1536

 

[uOpt]

As for the P4 versus Athlon 64, the main difference is that the P4 only runs fast for applications that are written with P4s in mind and that are highly optimized. In a word, not for games, which development cycle doesn't allow developers to fiddle with the code more than neccessary.

If you run Linux or FreeBSD, you can do 64 bit on the AMD64, obviously.

The Pentium-4 has hyperthreading. I didn't really benchmark mine too much yet, but I have to try really really hard to even get 10% overall speed advantage out of HT under FreeBSD. Maybe Linux does a little better. Some people strongly claim that working on the GUI when some video or audio encoding is running in the background will feel much smoother. Didn't try it myself yet.

Generally I am an Intel fanboy, but my applications are somewhat special and my newest computer is a server where I wanted 800MHz RAM, CSA ethernet and a no-surprises chipset, so I got an Intel one. In the notebook you don't get dual-channel RAM and ethernet will suck anyway, so that doesn't really apply.

For a notebook I would try getting a Pentium-M, no doubt.

 

[ActuaryTm]

Originally posted by: MartinCracauer
SVGA: usually 800x600
XGA: usually 1024x768
XGA sometimes: 1152x900
SXGA: 1280x1024
SXGA+: 1400x1050, sometimes 1400x1040
WXGA: 1280x800, sometimes 1400x1050
WXGA+: 1440x900
SXGAW: 1600x1024
WSXGA+: 1680x1050
UXGA: 1600x1200
WUXGA: 1920x1200
HDTV: 1920x1080
UXGAW: 1900x1200
QXGA: 2048x1536

With regard to notebook displays, some of the above are incorrect, especially with the use of "usually" or "sometimes" (resolutions can be misquoted, but they are by nature definitions, and therefore do not carry any ambiguity). Below is a list of the more common LCD display native resolutions and corresponding aspect ratios, in increasing vertical resolution size:

• XGA : 1024x768. 4:3
• WXGA: 1280x800, 16:10
• WXGA+: 1440x900, 16:10
• SXGA: 1280x1024, 5:4
• SXGA+: 1400x1050. 4:3
• WSXGA+: 1680x1050. 16:10
• UXGA: 1600x1200, 4:3
• WUXGA: 1920x1200, 16:10

Note that the leading W in the acronym translates to "widescreen", which should be apparent by the aspect ratio listed.