What GPU do I need?

Altered Phoenix

New Member
I am working on buying a nice gaming laptop. A dedicated video card is very important.

My main game I am looking forward to playing is Skyrim. I don't know what the system requirements are yet but I need to know if anyone can guess how powerful of a card do I need?

I will have a quadcore with at least 2.0 GHz and at least 8GB of DDR3 RAM.
On the Dell XPS models I was looking at, I can get either a:
NVIDIA® GeForce® GT 550M 1GB graphics with Optimus
NVIDIA® GeForce® GT 540M 2GB graphics with Optimus
NVIDIA® GeForce® GT 555M 3GB graphics with Optimus​
These are all very powerful.

On the ASUS models I am looking at I can get:
NVIDIA GeForce GT 540M 1GB GDDR3 VRAM with Optimus Technology
NVIDIA GeForce GT425M with 1GB DDR3 VRAM​

OR with a G- series laptop (A little bulky for me, but more powerful...)
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460M w/1.5GB GDDR5 VRAM

Obviously the ones with the Dell are more powerful but I would take an ASUS over a Dell any day. I just need to know what a 1GB video card can handle and how much of a difference would there be between 1GB and 3GB VRAM.
 
Ok. How about for doing 3D modeling? I'm an engineering major and some of my classes would be a lot easier if I could work on stuff like this outside of class.

And I've read a bit about "overclocking" but I'm not too sure what that is. Could I get a quick explanation on that?
 
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