Which Nvidia card should you look for?

I'm looking at laptops and was told here that Nvidia is a good brand to look for video cards. but theres so many brands which one should I look for?

http://www.nvidia.com/object/wtb_notebooks.html

and I dont want to spend too much so I dont need a top of the line graphics card and computer, but something to play COH reasonably well would be great

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Global: @Fire Beam

I saw a 16" Acer laptop with a nVidia 9600GS for around $700 on the egg. I think something like that should run the game okay and not destroy your budget.

I use an Everex XT5000T (17" with 7600GS) that I bought several years ago for about $600 and it plays pretty well. Unfortunately these aren't sold any longer.

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We don' need no stinkin' signatures!

GPU power ======
To use a current political metaphor, the power of a *gaming* PC rests on a three legged stool: CPU, GPU, and RAM.


[u]GPU[u]


Graphic Processor Unit manufacturers (nVidia and ATI) create a range of GPU chips that range from simply showing pictures and basic video, to rendering the high-end 3D graphics polygons, textures, and special Graphical FX.

For nVidia, the second number of the series number will tell you how powerful the GPU is in rendering high-end graphics from 0 to 9. So, you may have numbers like: 5000, 7200, 6500, 8800, 290. The graphical savvy of those GPUs are, respectively: 0, 2, 5, 8, 9. To do 3D gaming right, it should be 6 or higher. The first number indicates the generation. The current nVidia generation is 9000 or 200. Last year it was 8000, and before that 7000 and so on. For CoH, you shouldn't go back past 6000.

Lastly, the suffixes go (roughly) GTX > GTS> Ultra > GT >GS > (nothing) > LE

Before you get a graphics card, you'll need to make sure your power supply has enough juice to power it.



[u]RAM[u]

If you turn up all the graphical bells and whistles, CoH/V can use up to 1.3 GB of RAM. At the low graphical end, it certainly goes over .5 GB. Thus, the usual recommendation is 2 GB of RAM. Since many claim Vista itself needs 2 GB to run anything well, you'll often here people say 3 GB is needed for Vista, though, on my Vista computer, I've never seen memory usage go over 2 GB.

It's important to have more RAM that the game + operating system use, otherwise, you'll start to swap memory to the hard drive ('page filing'), which is excruciatingly slow compared to RAM.




[u]CPU[u]

For CoH/V if the first two legs above are sturdy, then a previous generation of CPU is OK. Any old Pentium 4 would work or an Athlon 2000+ and up. But, more power is better. *Any* dual core is more than sufficient. The game isn't written to take advantage of quad cores, so there's no advantage there unless you want to run background programs, which usually isn't recommended for intensive programs like a 3D MMORPG, which is what CoH/V is.

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