Hello hardware gurus,

My current laptop is an hp-dv7 2273cl which I plan on upgrading (or downgrading) to an hp-dv7 4053cl. As a college student I do find ways to kill time and those methods include video games. They aren't super intensive video games, but amongst them are Warcraft 3 and Team Fortress 2. I was wondering if the specifications of these laptops would be downgrading to performance (and graphics) or upgrading if I moved onto the hp-dv7 4053cl. Here are the hp.com specifications (I have replaced the HDD with a 128 GB SSD and added an extra 2 GB RAM chip):

http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/d...roduct=4230567 (dv7-4053cl)

http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/d...roduct=4041745 (dv7-2273cl)

Although the 2273cl has a dedicated video card and is a 4650 instead of a 4250, the difference in CPU is what concerns me.

Also, in case your scoffing, I currently have straight A's on my transcripts with the exception of a B in English.

On top of all that, I plan on making a desktop computer for when my real life begins. I've heard mixed responses and was curious for the correct answer. Is it possible to use an AMD Motherboard/CPU with an nVidia video card? I understand AMD Motherboards and CPU's in terms of performance are well-priced and nVidia cards have more support for Linux than ATI/AMD video cards.

Hi,

Your request for a move to Linux-Mobile for this thread is not the correct forum;
Maybe split the OP with the first half to Linux - Laptop and Netbook and your latter portion of the OP is appropriate for Linux-Hardware.

Maybe you should think about which forum to post too before submitting the post then reporting to make a request to move the post to another forum. You can look at the forum list by moving to the top menu bar and selecting Forums. When looking at each forum you will find a brief topic description to help decide type of post(s) within each forum.

HTH!

Yes, sorry that's the section I meant. For some reason mobile came to my mind first. Even though the second part is a hardware question it's already been answered via a PM so no need to go further with the 2nd part of my post.

To have a go at the substantive part of this.

The video cards are very similar. I have never fully understood why AMD/ATI/Radeon insist on their unusual naming structure. Basically, the first number (HD 4) means both are the same basic GPU. The other stuff adds bells and whistles, ram and clock speeds, etc. The higher number is better. So 4650 -->4250 is a downgrade. Does it matter? You decide.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compari...4xxx.29_series

I understand that much, and the drivers are just listed for the 4XXX series on their website. However what I'm wondering is would the processor upgrade help me even though the graphics card is a downgrade.

The fastest cpu in the world can't necessarily make a slow gpu go faster, unless the 2.2Ghz is limiting the pcie speed. I think the HD 4xxx types are advanced enough that no increase in speed will be noticed.

I also have an rs600 GPU from ATI with basically no vertex shading so that is now done with llvm as a compiler. You're in a better league.

You may of course speed up cpu bottlenecks if you have any.