Advice on laptop specs

[Davidh12]

Hi all hope you can help and advise.

Reason for the following questions is looking at buying laptop, in the main to play pte 5 shows using video projector.

1. I Have seen the minimum requirements for pte 5 is there a maximum? above which it is a waste of money or worse detrimental to running shows.

2. Looking through the threads of specifications I noticed a comment that type of CPU was not as important as graphics card correct?

3. Therefore there is no real advantage in having top of the range CPU. Example a Core 2 Duo T7400 2.16Ghz over a T7200 2.0 Ghz?

4. I have been looking at a laptop directed towards the gaming market (say Rock) because it tends to have best graphics. Standard here seems to be Nvidia Geforce Go 7950 GTX 512 mb and an option would be Quadro 3500m cards that are better for Open GL based 3D applications. Would this be something the pte program (hardware acceleration) would make use of?

5. Would holding on till later in the year when direct X 10 becomes available be an idea. Again would pte use that?

Understand I would like to get the best I could afford that would run pte5 shows to advantage and not get to complicated so that it causes the program trouble.

Thanks David

[alrobin]

David,

It sounds like you will have no trouble running v.5 with those specs. Any new laptop, with gaming in mind, is likely to work fine. If you're really in doubt, just take along a few shows with you to try out before you buy. The video card is the most critical component - I would get one with at least 256 Mb of RAM in order to handle larger-size images. Don't worry about anything better than that being detrimental. Just be careful not to load it up with too many video and game programs, especially ones running in the background, that could bog things down.

No need to wait for Direct X 10 (9 is sufficient). Best of luck!