My current tower is 1 gig ram, 3.0 gig ht p4 with radeon x1600 pro 512 meg ddr2. I am interested in the following laptop from dell:

PROCESSOR Intel® Core™ 2 Duo T5470 (1.6GHz, 2MB L2 Cache, 800MHz FSB), English edit
OPERATING SYSTEM Genuine Windows XP Home Edition, SP2, English edit
LCD DISPLAY 15.4 inch Wide Screen XGA LCD Display with TrueLife™ edit
INTEGRATED WEBCAM No Webcam Option edit
MEMORY 1GB Shared Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM at 667MHz, 2 Dimm edit
HARD DRIVE 80G 5400RPM SATA Hard Drive edit
OPTICAL DRIVE 24X CD Burner/DVD Combo Drive, without Roxio Creator edit
GRAPHICS CARD 256MB NVIDIA® GeForce™ 8600M GT edit
WIRELESS CARD Dell Wireless 1390 802.11g Wi-Fi Mini Card edit
SOUND OPTIONS High Definition Audio 2.0 edit

I would like to know which would perform better for the most recent games (cnc3, maybe an fps or some'). I spoke with a sales agent and they said they could replace the hd with 160 gig 7200 rpm which is what i would do. total would be under $1250.00 canadian (without taxes).

Go for the laptop. The CPU is dual core and will be better for most games now and future games that will utilize multiple cores. The 8600GT is also better than an X1600.

What about the hard drive? Most laptops are 5400 RPM and desktops are 7200 RPM.

How well do you think this laptop will handle this years upcoming games? Transformers The Game, etc? Thanks!

And how come the 1.6 gig duo core laptop outperforms a 3.0gig desktop?

If you can get the 7200rpm drive, do so. You will notice the difference between the 72 and 54 if your desktop has a 72 drive. The 8600GT is a dependable card and shouldn't have much of a problem with current and most future games.

Processors no longer rely on clock speed for performance. It all depends on how the architecture handles the instructions. Add on top of that, the T5470 is a dual core so in essence you have two 1.6ghz CPUs instead of one 3.0ghz CPU that was slow to begin with. This all relates to how an AMD Athlon X2 @ 2.2ghz could outperform a Pentium D @ 3.2ghz.