Best laptop/notebook for cIV?

[Era Vulgaris]

I'm in the market for a new laptop/notebook and thought it might be a good idea to make sure what ever I buy can run cIV properly.

Does anyone know of a laptop/notebook that runs cIV properly. That is, runs the game smoothly, quickly and without any hassles.

[Urban Ranger]

You are going to look at something very expensive.

[boonewaser]

As long as you get something with a decent video card and enough RAM, you should be fine. I'm running Civ 4 on a laptop with a Pentium 1.6ghz, 1 gig of RAM, and an ATI Radeon 'Mobility' 9700 (really just a dressed up 9600) with 64 megs of video memory, and I haven't had any real problems, even running on the highest graphics settings with patch 1.61. Things slow down a bit when I reach the modern era on huge maps, but it's still quite playable - if I get impatient I can just temporarily lower the settings slightly, but I haven't had to yet.

I'm guessing that the gig of RAM is what's really helping me out, since I never see any disk activity at all, apart from when I save and load the game. It appears that with enough RAM, everything is cached and processed in memory, which is much, much faster than if it had to access the hard drive.

I got this system in Jan 2005 for around £1200 GBP - this is equivalent to around $2000 US, but prices on electronics usually don't transfer directly. I probably could have gotten it for $1500-1800 US, and this was over a year and a half ago.

B

[Mattimus20]

A few months ago I purchased the Gateway - 4200 w/ Media Center for about $980. Then I popped in the ATI - Radeon X1600 Pro for about $180.

You can get this whole package for about $1080 at Best Buy (In the U.S.) right now.

The game play is similar to what Boonewaser had described. I have the graphics level on the highest setting and it looks pretty good. I'm not sure how is Radeon 9700 compares to the X1600... The X1600 has 512 meg of Video Memory, but it doesn't seem to change the game play.

If you get something similar to these with 1-2 gig of RAM and a Video/Graphics card you'll be fine.

[kiky]

I play on laptop with 1GB ram and radeon 9000 (32MB video ram). Have to play on lowest graphic setting and running Static Leaderhead mod. Game play smooth even on huge map.

So make sure you have at least 1GB ram and better graphic card.

[Dcon67]

I use about a 3 year old Thinkpad...2.0Ghz, 1GB ram, 64mb video and it runs fine even on the high graphic settings. Slows down a tad in the modern age on a large map, but still very playable, and sometimes I get a bit of stuttering on the videos...That can be annoying but once I've seen 'em once I skip over them anyway.

[Mateo1041]

It works great on my 1+ year old Compaq with 64 MB video card and 512 MB RAM. The special building videos get a little weird from time to time, but I think I just have too many apps running in the background.

[Jonalisk]

I am thinking of getting the Dell E1405 with 1GB RAM, 1.67 GHZ Core 2 Duo and Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 950 (in other words, no dedicated graphics card).

Y'all think this would be able to run Civ4 without any problems....or would I have to upgrade to the E1505 with a 128 MB ATI Radeon X1300 (HyperMemory).