New laptop, with untested hardware

[Rennn]

I'm days away from ordering a laptop for college from Newegg, and since I was going to spend ~$600 anyway, I decided to get one that could run some of my older games. The one I'm almost certainly going to buy has these specs:

 

Intel i3 Dual Core CPU at 2.4Ghz

4GB RAM

500GB 5400Mhz HDD

GT 630m 1GB video card

 

I was planning on mostly playing games of Morrowind's age, but looking at the specs on the 630m it appears that I'll be able to run some higher spec games as well. How do you think that would run vanilla Oblivion? Usually I assume the cpu will limit Oblivion, but that graphics card isn't very powerful, so it's possible that the 630m will be the limiting factor. Thoughts?

 

I could buy a slightly more expensive laptop with a GT 630m 2GB, but I consider that virtually a non-factor. I'd never be able to run a game on that laptop that needs close to 2GB anyway.

It also had an i5 instead of an i3, but the specs in this case are virtually identical between the two so I'm considering that another non-factor. Is there some inherent performance improvement in having an i5, or should the two be very similar, assuming equal cache sizes and virtually equal speeds?

 

The battery life estimation on both is 4.5 hours, so we can reduce that to 3 hours or less in practical use. At this point, battery life is more critical than a 2 fps difference, so I'd especially like to hear if there's a difference in power consumption between an i3 and an i5 of equal speeds.

Edited July 18, 2012 by Rennn

[blakeasuar]

From the looks of it you'll be able to play the game on its highest settings but on a lower resolution (Probably between 640x480 to maybe a little higher than 800x600)

 

I have near the same specs as you, just a different video card but with the same amount of memory, so if you do have any bit of lag, I changed the lighting affects to bloom/none, though you may be able to set it to HDR.

 

Another thing you could do is look for the low poly grass mod, it helps a lot if you wanna play with the grass still on.

 

But without any modifications, ill say you'll probably get around 30-50 fps, And probably near 60 possibly 70 from using that low poly grass mod alone, or just disabling grass all together.

 

Hope that answers your question!