Nvidia Graphic card question...

[marekd]

Is it worthy paying $250 more for DUAL 512MB Nvidia GeForce Go 7950 GTX over

512MB Nvidia? GeForce? Go 8700M GT (single, non GLI enabled). 7950 series is

older than 8700m GT but will it work faster since it's dual? And will it make a

difference for Photoshop or video editing? That's what I'll be using the laptop

for. NOT GAMING. My OS will be Windows XP possible upgrade to Vista in about 1.5

- 2 years.

 

I will really appreciate your help guys. Thank you!

[don_e]

For 2d applications such as photo editing, the graphics card is not a critical component affecting speed or image quality, but the amount of system ram, the quality of the monitor, and a hardware calibrator are.

[emre]

It is not worth spending money on the card, but very much so on the monitor.

[james_lai]

Since you won't be gaming, I would take a pass on the dual cards. Just having the two cards installed will seriously cut down your run time on batteries. Even a single dedicated card will noticeably shorten the battery run time vs. integrated graphics. In your case, I would suggest checking into an integrated graphics option, such as the Intel X3100, if one is available for the laptop you're considering.

[randmcnatt]

The bottleneck with PS and other graphics pdrograms is not the graphics card itself, but processor speed, memory, and disk speed. You'd be better served to put your money in the fastest multi-core CPU you can afford, along with maxing-out memory and adding an extra hard drive just for swap/scratch space.

[bheiser]

I have a couple suggestions...

 

First, I would suggest getting a discreet graphics card rather than going with on-board video. Depending on the brand/model laptop, having on-board video may limit your ability to connect an external monitor at a high resolution, esp. if you plan to use DVI. More memory on the GPU is a good thing, though dual cards does seem like overkill for what you're planning.

 

Secondly, I would suggest getting the fastest hard drive you can. Many laptops come with 5400RPM hard drives. I'd suggest it's worth the cost to upgrade to 7200RPM. Disk I/O is likely to be your most serious bottleneck, so do what you can to mitigate it.

 

In my own case (in the desktop machine I built) I used an nVidia 8800 GTS with 640MB. Overkill, maybe, since I'm not a gamer... but OTOH it nicely supports dual 20" monitors, and would even support dual 30's if I could afford them :). My point here is your graphics card choice really depends a lot on what you plan to do in terms of monitors, or in the case of a laptop, connecting to external monitors.

[marekd]

Thank you all for your advice. Bill, I did get RAID 0 dual 320GB (2x160) 7200 RPM hard drives. Innitaily I customized my system with 4GB ram, but since 32bit Windows does not support it, I downsized it to 2GB. I also ended up getting dual graphic cards, reason being, the system I got - Alienware AREA-51 M9750 had those as the only option with Windows XP, and I really didn't want Vista.

 

I got stuck with Alieware after returning their 15'' laptop. I didn't like it for a number of reasons. The only way to avoid paying 15% restocking fee was to go with another system from them.

 

Well, thank you guys for your advice!