SUMMARY: Computer gamers around the world often only look toward a desktop computer system for their gaming needs. Although as gaming increases in popularity, companies such as nVidia and ATI are working very hard to bring exciting new mobile graphics products to the market. In this investigation, Cameron "Mr.Tweak" Wilmot takes a look at Dell's speedy Inspiron 8200 notebook with ATI Mobility 9000 GPU and compares it to a standard desktop system with nVidia GeForce4 TI4200 graphics. Can notebook gaming really be taken seriously? We think so, and so should you!
Representing the desktop platform will be a standard purpose-built desktop PC for this article based around Intels 845E chipset with Pentium 4 2.2GHz processor, reference nVidia GeForce4 Ti4200 graphics card with 64mb of memory onboard, 512mb PC2700 memory and Windows XP Professional.
To level out the playing field somewhat, we choose to remove one 256mb stick of memory from the desktop computer, giving the notebook a 128mb advantage over the desktop computer not that it will make a great deal of difference. We did this since the notebook only uses DDR-266 memory while was the desktop computer uses DDR-333 memory. We thought this might help in evening things out nicely for us for our comparison.
Other than that, both systems have not been optimised in any way with OS tweaks, graphics card driver tweaks and so on. The only graphics related option we modified on each system was the disabling of vertical sync We did not want this option effecting the maximum amount of possible frames per second based on what the monitor refresh rate could handle. Additionally, since both the ATI Mobility 9000 and nVidia GeForce4 Ti4200 are no longer considered high end, we did not test any Anti Antialiasing options.
So without further ado, lets get onto the all important benchmarks. From the out set, we suspect the desktop computer will take honors but just keep in mind the technology behind both platforms and the simple fact one item is a notebook computer, and the other a desktop computer.
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