Will this run FS9 okay? And other mid-high end PC games?

[ScottyB]

Hi, I think I might buy this laptop for mostly everyday use and it would be a bonus if I could run FS9 qutie well on it... Here are the basic facts and figures:

Dell Inspiron 15

Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo T6500 (2.1GHz, 800Mhz FSB, 2M)
OS: Windows 7 Home Premium 64bit
Display: 15.6" 720p WLED (1366x768)
Memory: 4GB Dual core DDR2 SDRAM
Hard Drive: 250GB SATA Hard Drive
Opitcal Drive: 8X DVD+/-RW drive with DVD double layer write capability, with Roxio burn 1.0 for Win 7
Grahics Card: 512MD ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4330

Cheers,
SB

[ScottyB]

And a question.....

Is it a 4.2GHz processor all up because it's a has two cores? Or is each 1.05 Ghz?

[bluebird79]

That should run FS9 without any problems at all.

Cheers
Ian

[dbcunnz]

QUOTE (ScottyB @ Oct 19 2009, 04:36 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

And a question.....

Is it a 4.2GHz processor all up because it's a has two cores? Or is each 1.05 Ghz?

The processor is Intel Core 2 Duo T6500 (2.1GHz, 800Mhz FSB, 2M) so it is two 2.1GHz cores running in parallel = 2.1GHz overall speed.
If they were in series then it would be 2.1GHz plus 2.1GHz giving you a total of 4.2GHz but unfortunately all multi core processors run in parallel.

[ScottyB]

So are there two cores running 1.05GHz each?

And i take it that there are 2x 2gb of ram?

Thanks,
SB

[toprob]

There is no real simple answer to this -- for one thing, in the old days the clock speed gave a very good indication of operating speed, but these days it can represent different things on different systems. The worst of this is the habit for system sellers on Trademe to multiply the clock speed by the number of cores.

Depending on whether they have a shared cache and how they share RAM etc, all cores have the potential to run at their full stated clock speed (except AMD, which is another story), but this will never happen in reality. Take a look at Amdahl's law, which gives an idea of why this happens.

On a highly optimised dual core system, for instance, the programmer needs to decide what can be off-loaded to the second core. Getting the two cores balanced has to be done at this stage, you can't just tell the processor to divide the work up evenly:)

Some programs are simply not designed for more than one core. For instance, when I run Resample to build photo scenery, it uses 100% of the first core and nothing of the second. Since most programs don't have the ability to choose cores, I'm left with an unusable system for the couple of hours that Resample can run. There's all that spare processor power on the second core, but it won't automatically kick in if the first core is in use.

So the simple answer is that running software optimised for more than one core, it'll run faster than the processor clock speed, but probably not twice as fast.

[ScottyB]

Thanks very much toprob. Really appreciate that. So what are your views on this laptop? Do you think it would run FS9 fine?

[toprob]

I don't have much to do with laptops, but if I wanted a nice laptop, that'd be a good choice.