Taking before hand measures...

Howdy, I have recently (within the past month) ordered a new laptop, and after reading a thread (http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?t=251721) about graphics cards with compatibility, it has sort have gotten me worried. I was hoping if I posted the specs below, someone could tell me this: would it be compatible with CoX?

(Here is the receipt of what is going to be in my system...)

CLEVO, P170HM-T Core™ i7 Notebook Barebone, Intel® HM65, 17.3" Full HD LED Glossy, FPR, PCIe x16 MXM-III Discrete Graphics

INTEL, Core™ i7-2720QM Quad-Core 2.2GHz, HD Graphics 3000, 6MB L3 Cache, 32nm, 45W, Retail

COOLER MASTER, ThermalFusion 400 Thermal Compound, Electrically Non-Conductive

NVIDIA, GeForce® GTX 485M 2GB GDDR5 Mobile Graphics Card for P170HM (This in particular has gotten me worried..., the list above only has the 480M as compatible. I'm assuming the 485M is just a 480M with an extra 500mb's of video ram, but you can never be too careful with computers.)

CRUCIAL, 8GB (2 x 4GB) PC3-10600 DDR3 1333MHz SDRAM SODIMM, CL9, Non-ECC

CRUCIAL, 64GB RealSSD™ C300 SSD, MLC Marvell 88SS9174, 355/75 MB/s, 2.5-Inch, SATA 6 Gb/s, Retail (The only thing that will be installed on this is my OS and CoX, if CoX is compatible with SSD's.)

TOSHIBA, 500GB MK5056GSY (HDD2E61), 7200-RPM, 16MB cache, 2.5-Inch, SATA 3.0 Gb/s, OEM

RAID, No RAID, Independent HDD Drives

CLEVO, Dual Layer Super-Multi DVD±RW Optical Drive for Clevo P170HM

NETWORK, Built-in 10/100/1000 Mbps Ethernet LAN Card

WIRELESS, Centrino® Advanced-N 6230 Wireless Card and Bluetooh Module, IEEE 802.11a/g/n, 11/54/300 Mbps, Internal PCIe Half Mini Card

NOTEBOOK ACCESSORY, AC Adapter 100-240V (Included)

NOTEBOOK ACCESSORY, Built-in Fingerprint Reader (Included)

MICROSOFT, Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit Edition, OEM



If anyone could take a look at my specs, and let me know if CoX is compatible, I would greatly appreciate it.

As long as it doesn't try to use the Intel graphics for the desktop and switch to the nVidia discrete GPU for gaming (nVidia Optimus Technolgy). There seems to be a problem with laptops that use that and this game. Otherwise it should rock.

Those are some pretty kick-*** stats for a laptop. Looks good.

Quote:

Originally Posted by funnyhalo CRUCIAL, 64GB RealSSD™ C300 SSD, MLC Marvell 88SS9174, 355/75 MB/s, 2.5-Inch, SATA 6 Gb/s, Retail (The only thing that will be installed on this is my OS and CoX, if CoX is compatible with SSD's.)

It sure is. I'm running it off a 128GB Crucial SSD.

How are the loading times for your SSD? Also, anyone know how the the gtx 485 runs CoX?

The big advantage of a SSD is in seek time, rather than transfer rate. i.e. An application with large files like CoH sees a moderate improvement. Something that loads dozens, hundreds or thousands of files (like Photoshop, or Windows) sees a massive improvement.

Those outrageous claims about "Windows loads in 15 seconds" are absolutely true.

Even though the transfer rate of SATA II SSDs are in the 200MB/s+ range while the current crop of 1TB, 7200RPM hard drives are in the 100MB/s range, that doubling of speed isn't what makes SSDs seem fast, it's the nearly non-existent seek times.

Conventional hard drives, even the 10K RPM raptors, still have seek times in the 10-15ms range. That may not seem like a lot but that's 1 to 1.5MB worth of data NOT being transferred because of the average time for a single seek.

Let's look at it another way. HD Tune, a drive benchmarking tool, has a random seek test that will report the time it takes to randomly seek and read X amount of data. On a 1TB hard drive it takes 15 milliseconds, 0.015 seconds, to randomly read 4KB of data and 24 milliseconds to read 1MB of data. For a run of the mill year old SSD the times are 0.04 milliseconds, 0.00004 seconds, for 4KB and 3.7 milliseconds for 1MB (times taken from here, using the IBM X25-M as the SSD). That's 275 times faster for 4KB, 6.8 times faster for 1MB. The sequential transfer rates on average are 242MB/s for the SSD and 116MB/s for the hard drive, which is only a 2.1 times difference.

So while the next gen SSD will have even faster sequential transfer rates, over 400MB/s, it's still the near zero time "seek" that really makes an SSD fast compared to a hard drive.

Is the GtX 485M any good? I'm assuming it's just a 480 with higher video ram. IF so, how will it run CoH graphics wise?