Will this laptop run SL fast?

[nt891995]

http://www.dell.com/us/p/xps-l502x/pd

 

thank you! :D

[Peggy Paperdoll]

It depends entirely on how you customize it.  I didn't see an option to get a discrete video card above the 540 range..........slightly below mid range for the 500 series nVidia card.  You can get it run SL well but you won't get that for the lower price.  One more potential problem.......the CPU chipset has intergrated HD graphics.  The CPU is supposed to automatically switch from the onboard video to the discrete card when the demand is high........I'm not, at all, sure that auto-switch works as advertised and the onboard HD grapics will not run SL at anymore than low settings and not fast at all.  Until the auto-switching technology perfects a little more I would steer clear of any CPU with that feature.

 

I wouldn't buy that computer at this time.......no matter how I could customize it.

[Nalates Urriah]

You may want to read through this rather long article: How To get a Faster Second Life.

Right now SL tends to be CPU bound rather than video card bound. nVidia 200 series cards give so pretty good results with quad core computers. You can see what performance people are getting here: How Fast is Your Viewer? - Second Life. Add your information if you will.

The i3 is duel core. The i5 can be duel or quad. Both have Hyperthreading and each core acts more like a separate CPU. So, both can give prettygood results. The i7 is the top of the line and can have up to 6 cores. 

I suggest you spend more dollars on the CPU than the video card. Peggy is right the Intel HD that is built-in won't cut it. You need a nVidia card/chip. 200 series are older. 500 series is the newest. The middle diget, the 6 in a 560, tells you which GPU generation the chip is. Larger is better.

Laptops tend to have chips optimized for movies. Laptop are not considered game machines. But, they will give decent performance with SL with a good CPU, decent video card, and 4gb or more of RAM.

 

[Hitomi Tiponi]

I have to disagree with you Nalates - GPU and CPU are important - in my experience GPU makes the biggest difference, running an Intel dual core with an aged Nvidia 8600GT is still a good mix, and an Nvidia Ion on any netbook certainly makes a vast difference.  But you do have to tune the rest of your system to take advantage of it - I feel this is one reaon why Hamlet gets such lousy performance from his Alienware laptop.

[LoveAngeL Lyre]

Hello. I will agree with others. This is no a laptop for SL. Maybe, you can run the application with Medium Graphics tolerably in regions without lag and many avatars but definitely no fast.