Diy Vidock vs new notebook

[KainXS]

so I have a notebook I got on the cheap its an Acer 5551, it has 4GB DDR3 and a P320 but a radeon 4250 I originally bought this for schoolwork but a friend of mine showed me thie Diy Vidock he had running with the GTX460 and the power adapter was pretty small for it, he was running this with his sony viao and I was pretty impressed and have been looking for a new notebook for a while now for gaming

so I just thought why not upgrade my notebook and do that.

after asking acer about this notebook they said the max it could get is an AMD Phenom II X4 X920 Black when the next bios update comes out and 8GB DDR3 1333 and I could upgrade to this for about 150 and still get pretty good battery life and the notebook itself I like.

Diy Vidock + Upgrade all together would cost about 330
A new notebook for gaming would be about 700 at least


which solution would you choose

 

[wahdangun]

Btw what is vidock?

 

[HalfAHertz]

are you sure the laptop chassis can provide enough cooling for a quad core + 4gb more ram?

Edit: Never mind they both have the same TDP. But that phenom sure has some low clocks 1,6GHz max and no turbo core or anything like that...Plus that vidock DIY runs only at PCI-e 1x speeds, so if you ask me you should better buy a new gaming laptop. Something with a HD5650 runs cool and plays all games at 1366x768 res.

 

[wahdangun]

are you sure the laptop chassis can provide enough cooling for a quad core + 4gb more ram?

Edit: Never mind they both have the same TDP. But that phenom sure has some low clocks 1,6GHz max and no turbo core or anything like that...Plus that vidock DIY runs only at PCI-e 1x speeds, so if you ask me you should better buy a new gaming laptop. Something with a HD5650 runs cool and plays all games at 1366x768 res.

oh, so the vididock is actually a PCIe extender ??? and it need to connect to express card ??


if that was true then, go with gaming laptop, because express card bandwidth will choke your card to death

 

[Mussels]

oh, so the vididock is actually a PCIe extender ??? and it need to connect to express card ??


if that was true then, go with gaming laptop, because express card bandwidth will choke your card to death

PCI-E 1x to 16x with external power. IIRC. without at least 4x bandwidth (which laptops dont have external connectors for, unlike the 1x for express cards) its not worth it.

 

[HalfAHertz]

If I was looking for a gaming laptop on the cheap, I'd probably go for something like this:

HP Pavilion dv6-3143us NoteBook Intel Core i3 370M... -600$ after rebate

Acer Aspire AS7551G-6477 NoteBook AMD Phenom II Tr... -600$, no rebate

These two are pretty evenly matched, but I'd probably go for the intel cpu and as much as I hate HP, I think they're still better quality than acer.

 

[KainXS]

yea i just checked on my desktop underclocked to about the same performance with my friends GTX460 and noticed the performance was only about 20% worst across the board . . . . . . ., tried a HD5870 and it downed it to nearly 40% it seems different cards get more affected than others.

I wish I could just find a 5552G motherboard to slam in there and be done with it.