| Introduction
Before we start, let me tell you a little about myself. By
night, I'm usually a hardcore gamer, whether it's Tribes 2, Black
and White or a little bit of anything else. But by day, I'm a
programmer and a pretty enthusiastic one, I might add. ;)
So, it has been my dream to own a laptop that will allow me to
code while on the road, in a restaurant or anywhere else. But so
far, that has been one slight problem - notebooks suck when it
comes to 3D games. Sure, they might have nice, big, fat Pentium
IIIs underneath the hood but without a decent video card, all that
processing power don't mean squat.
Thus, I held off getting my own laptop for a while. That is
until I heard that Dell had signed with NVIDIA to use the GeForce2
Go GPUs in their laptops! I waited and waited for the local Dell
branch to sell off all their old Inspiron stocks and the moment I
saw that the GeForce2 Go was an available option, I ordered one.
And I got a pretty good deal as well because Dell always changes
its offers. The special bonus I got was that both my hard disk
space and RAM were doubled.
Here's a quick spec readout of my laptop.
|
Marauder's Dell Inspiron 8000
|
| Processor |
900MHz Intel SpeedStep
Pentium III |
| RAM |
256MB |
| Hard Disk |
Some IBM 20GB Hard Disk |
| Display |
32MB DDR GeForce2 Go !!! |
The first thing I would like to point out is the SpeedStep
technology. SpeedStep CPUs can be throttled down to a lower
clockspeed when power conservation is important in order to reduce
power consumption.
So basically, if your laptop is plugged into a power source,
it'll operate at maximum speed. For instance, the processor of my
laptop runs at 900MHz when plugged in and at 600MHz when it's not.
The main advantage is lower power consumption at the lower
clockspeed. Of course, this feature can be disabled so that the
laptop can be on full speed all the time.
Another thing I'd like to point out is I have no idea whether
my laptop's display subsystem is actually equipped with DDR RAM or
not. I'm not the kind of person who pokes into these details
because I don't mind as long as they serve me well.
Well, if you just want to get to the GeForce2 Go benchmarks,
click here. The next
page will be about the laptop's features. ;) |
