[Beowulf] Mobile Graphics (or lack of it)

[stuffnstuff]

Thanks for the response even though it had nothing at all to do with
clustering. :-)

A few mix-ups that I should clarify:

I may not be playing the latest Quake or Doom, but that would be because of
the rating and the parental units that dictate, er, preside over me. On the
other hand, I want to be able to run around with a jedi in the latest Star
Wars using maximum resolution, texture quality, anti-aliasing, and
anisotropy levels and drive in Need For Speed's latest with maximum car
reflections and speed-filtering effects on. From reading PC World's recent
article about graphics, I gather that the high resolution is what really
bogs down the system, but I am addicted ever since I joined an art site
online.

As for power consumption and portability...lets just pretend I plan to have
it plugged in at all times and I have an aging mule dedicated solely to the
transportation of it. Whether it is on my lap or desk will vary, but I am
rather concerned about the heat in one aspect. I have seen one to many
people have heat issues with their laptops to the extent that they get so
choppy you can't run anything or they simply shut down. My sister's can't
play a graphics intensive game for more than 40 minutes without a cooling
break and my dad's old one cracked its heat sink in a drop and it crashed
doing anything besides word processing.

I do currently have Gimp and I plan to buy Photoshop in the future as well
(rather necessary for serious digital photography), and we might as well
throw in the rendering projects I work on that brought up that whole mess
over the summer. I would be running the resolution at...hold on! News Flash:
The specific laptop is no longer available off of hp.com, which means the
Consumer Reports and PC World data is currently for moot. This could change
a few things...

New Scenario: I look for a similar laptop that is cheap and upgradable
beyond reason, preferably sporting an AMD processor and an nVidia graphics
card, but since there are no current clear winners and Consumer Reports
needs time to update, I wait for Windows Vista. If there are any objections,
email me, but otherwise consider all of my questions answered.

Sorry about the ado,
         Luke
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://www.beowulf.org/pipermail/beowulf/attachments/20060120/8305d753/attachment.html>