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[Lord Shonus]

Anything Alienware is massively overpriced. The only reason the brand EXISTS is to get people to pay far more money than the computer is worth.

Just as importantly, you keep posting machines with i7 processors. The i7 costs much, much more than a i5, but provides next to no performance increase for gaming. The i7 is primarily useful for video editing or 3D rendering, but for gaming you might get one or two more FPS.

[wierd]

Hell, a good i3 is suitable for a great many game titles.

Unless you have an engineering workstation, you dont need an i7.  For a high end game box, a good i5 is more than enough.

[Flying Dice]

Alienware is the pinnacle of "I'm twelve and I used mom's credit card to buy a super kool gaming computer ecks dee", frankly. Overpriced garbage with hideous visual design.

[Reelya]

Just as importantly, you keep posting machines with i7 processors. The i7 costs much, much more than a i5, but provides next to no performance increase for gaming. The i7 is primarily useful for video editing or 3D rendering, but for gaming you might get one or two more FPS.

Clock speeds hit a wall years ago, then they got more performance out of each core, and adding more cores. But now, per-core performance is leveling out too, and adding more cores or more cache is how they add more power. Not every application is going to benefit from more cache and cores than we have right now.

[wierd]

For some, increasing the bandwidth of the FSB is also how they are doing it, what with quad channel memory access and the like.

[BigD145]

Alienwares tend to burn themselves out fast. Less than a year before something fails.

i7's are just what you end up getting in a lot of models with current nvidia cards. Some don't give you options for cpu's. Half the time when they do give the option it's an i7 or AMD with Radeon.

[heydude6]

Well, since we're here, can I just post something here to express my buyers remorse.

I bought one of those overpriced hideous "gaming" computers. I tired my best not to (I was looking for a laptop that had at least a 980m graphics card), but I couldn't find anything cheap that was good enough. I knew that high-end laptops in general we're overpriced, so I thought there weren't any alternatives and relented. The laptop I eventually bought cost $1700 (it normally cost $2500, but cyber Monday) which I thought was a steal (it was the cheapest computer of that calibre I saw). Sadly, that was $1700 American, and with currency conversion plus shipping fees, it ended up costing somewhere in the low 2000s, plus they stole $250 from us for no reason.

Anyway, now I'm hearing about $999 laptops that can run Witcher 3 on high, and all I can feel is regret. The computer itself is fine, it runs games well, but I just hate how I was basically robbed.

Thanks for listening to this rant. Probably should have posted this in the sad thread, but I felt like posting here.

[AzyWng]

Speaking of gaming-related hardware, but my new laptop's graphics card adapter is an Intel(R) HD Graphics 520, that currently has 128 MB of memory dedicated out of 6212 MB available in total. In spite of a whole six gigs available if needed, my PC does still have a questionable framerate when running some games (Max Payne 3, Unturned, and The Division, for instance).

Hoping to boost the dedicated memory to about a gig or a gig and a half, I've tried to take a look at the UEFI menu by bringing up Window's boot options (the menu that appears when you hold shift and click on "Restart" or "Shut down"), but there's no tab or option in the boot options menu to set dedicated memory (or if there is, I didn't see it).

Am I just going to have to trust my laptop to use the amount of memory needed, or is there a way to set the amount that I've missed? Or perhaps there's some other aspect of my computer that is the source of the low framerates?

[Reudh]

Your dedicated memory is physical. Your card has 128MB dedicated to GPU processing. The remaining 6GB or so is not dedicated, it is "shared" memory. This is generally slower, and is as the name suggests shared with other components like RAM.

If you're using a laptop with a HD 520 @ 128MB of ram, i really don't think you're going to play modern games on that.

[wierd]

intel's video has come a long way. some of its newer gpus are quite capacle, just that they dont have dedicated ram, and share heat dissipation with the cpu.

you can run modern games, just on low to medium settings. 

MUCH better than the days of yore, where their chips could barely handle a spinning cube, and would display anomalies on triangle edges.

[Thief^]

Intel HD is still not really capable of AAA gaming. Graphics ram has very little to do with performance, but even if you could assign more ram to it (I believe the poster above saying it has 128MB of physical ram is wrong, it certainly has never been the case in the past with Intel chips) you can never expect more than 12-20 FPS from The Division even on lowest settings (that's still much better than it used to be for Intel!). 30 FPS is generally considered to be an absolute minimum for playability of an action game (and many people would argue for higher), so that falls far short.

Sorry but if you want to play vaguely recent AAA games like The Division then you need a proper dedicated graphics chip, either nVidia or AMD. Unlike Intel, you can sometimes get away with AMD's integrated graphics, but you still have to severely compromise on settings.

Interestingly AMD and Intel appear to have signed a new tech sharing agreement which looks to have given AMD access to hyperthreading patents (though they won't call it that, their next CPU ("Ryzen") appears to be hyperthreaded) and may have given Intel access to some of AMD's integrated graphics technology in return (this is unconfirmed). There could be interesting times ahead for CPUs!

[AzyWng]

So Unturned qualifies as "AAA gaming"?

In any case, it's still a step up from what I had last. Thanks for telling me about this.

[Thief^]

Haha Unturned may not be AAA (I've just looked it up) but it is an early access game. These tend not to be optimised and may run even worse than an actual AAA release!

[Lord Shonus]

A bit of an odd question, but is there a way to block certain games from detecting your controller? I use a flight stick for War Thunder (which, I know, is not the best idea but I can't get the hang of the keyboard flight controls), but if I have it plugged in it interacts badly with Xcom and Tower of Guns.

[TheBiggerFish]

Well you could just...unplug it, but I assume that's not practical.  I don't know what else.