A new laptop for christmas

Download game today
Die prematurely tonight!

Advanced search

If you registered for membership on this site but have not yet received the confirmation activation email, there are 3 main reasons.

1. It ended up in your junk or spam folder, please look there to see if it's in there.

2. You did not enter your correct email address.  Please register with a new username and the correct email address and try again.

3. Your IP address and or your Email Address is listed in the Stop Forum Spam (spam protection) database as a known spammer and when either your IP address and or your email address appears in that database, your account can not be approved.  As such if you are a spammer, please move along, our community is too small for you to bother with.  If you are NOT a spammer, contact the owners of Stop Forum Spam and get your information removed from their database and register a new account.

[City Builder]

There is a mod, that unfortunately I don't recall it's name, that lets you set better visuals in skyrim, so that you can see things farther way, and it doesn't impact performance all that bad if you don't go crazy with it.  When I set it to like 7 I believe, I was blown away at how many things I could see farther away, simple things like bonfires would show up and really helped with the game visually appealing.

As far as CXL, I'm not sure of the fps, as I didn't have fraps running when I was trying to get CXL to run on the laptop, but I'll likely turn on fraps next time to see what kind of performance I'm getting with medium settings.  The thing that bugs me though about cxl is that on medium settings it's so darn f-ugly.  It's a game that is all about visual appearance and really needs (for me) to be run on high settings to get that great looking game.  Without good visuals in CXL, (again, for me) it's really a game that would not be worth playing as I don't really find the gameplay all that engaging, to me it's all about making pretty looking cities as well as you can within the constraints of the games mechanics.

But on lower settings, yes I would think that you'll likely get high fps, at least until it starts to bog down, either by the reported memory leak, or just by the size of the city.  For many, 500,000 population (sometimes though as low as 100k) seems to be the point where CXL starts to get sluggish.  Of course you may be one of the lucky ones though and end up being able to get a 2M population city still play at acceptable frame rates, although I'm not one of the lucky ones.  Even on my desktop computer which is really a workhorse, at 2M it's almost a slideshow (almost).

[Bruschev]

Ah yes, I know that mod, I tried to run it the other night, but it required the latest patch and I don't think I download it because I think Skyrim needs to be activated within steam? Which if it does, my mate would of already done? Either way, that mod would be great, will probably end up buying it on pc anyway, which is a shame, because I have a oerfectly fine copy on xbox, (just I can't use mods which I adore).

Ah yes, you are one for graphics I think I may work up to get the will to buy it sometime soon, though as you said, their coding hasn't been the greatest which is sad, because I am in dire want of a decently produced city builder game with a nice budget to flesh out those sort of bugs like memory leaks and such. I did install anno 1701 recently and it still looks gorgeous. I think I will definitely go for Tropico 4 first, been wanting to play it for a while and the demo has definitely got me wanting more.

Looking on steam currently something like sanctum also quite interests me, or dungeon defenders. Not sure yet, just want a decent city builder game thats fairly recent heh.

[City Builder]

I've got those two, (sanctum and dungeon defenders).

Sanctum didn't really interest me (unfortunate I didn't find out until after buying it), and dungeon defenders to me could have been a really great game with the sole exception that it requires the whole WASD keys to move around.

They do have a first person sort of view at a very shallow zoom level, which had they extended that view and control set to the farthest zoom, I'd play the game a lot, but I just can't seem to get a hang of using the whole WASD keys to move around when pressing W doesn't move me in the direction of where my mouse is aimed unfortunately.

Magika was an enjoyable game, although for me was quite difficult in single player after a very short time, but I enjoyed the overall design of the game and the tongue in cheek of some parts of it.

And of course I have my old favorite, Simcity 4 on this laptop and now that I've sorted through my plugins again (still about 4.5GB) and deleted some trouble makers, it seems that SimCity 4 is stable for the most part again.  It does still occasionally crash but I have to attribute that to a bad plugin somewhere, since removing all plugins and it's rock solid on this laptop.

[City Builder]

Well, I purchased a really nice Corsair 3 SSD 180GB drive today and WOW, HOLY Fidgets, WOW, what a difference it makes on this laptop.

Prior to the new SSD, I had the Diablo 3 beta installed on the regular hdd, and every 10 seconds or so, it would get really jerky, now with the ssd drive installed and D3 beta on the ssd, it is soooo silky smooth running.  No jerkiness at all.

Definitely the best upgrade that I can suggest for laptop or desktop.

Now windows starts in somewhere between 5 and 10 seconds (yes, literally 5 to 10 seconds), before it was anywhere from 30 to 45 seconds or more.  Granted this is a fresh install of windows, but even so, with the regular hdd, it couldn't come anywhere close to that.  It's almost as fast as coming out of sleep mode now from boot up.

I put one of my web design programs on the new ssd and when I click the link to start it up from the start menu, theres no thinking time at all anymore, now it literally just pops on the screen.

Definitely the best upgrade to me for the price.  For the 180GB corsair 3  I paid $204.00 plus taxes and wow, definitely money well spent.  I've never seen such a performance increase with any type of upgrade I've ever done, whether it be more RAM, or one of the high speed 15,000 rpm hdd's.

Definitely, definitely worth it and I highly recommend it if you can get one with enough GB's for a reasonable price.

My only wish now would be to find a 1TB SSD drive for somewhere around the same price.... Hmm, maybe in a couple more years they'll be up to that size and down to that price.   One can dream.