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Buying a Gaming Laptop, and need a little help :)
So I'm going to buy a new laptop, now that I begin studying, and I need some help.
First of all, let me say that I already have a gaming desktop that I'm satisfied with. The reason I need a laptop is that I need something that is able to run most new games and game design software as smooth as possible. As I am going to have to do some travelling in and outside the country for the next few years, and need to able to both test new games and work as I travel.
I found a rig that seems pretty much satisfying, but I do have a couple of questions, and I will greatly appreciate all comeback 
the PC I'm thinking of buying is Multicom Kunshan P150E 15.6", (I've attached a link, but keep in mind, the website is in Norwegian).
So these are the specs I'm thinking of buying, as well a couple of questions about them.
- INTEL 3rd Generation Intel® Core™ i7-3820QM Processor (is this a good processor? how is it compared to the i7-3720QM or i7-3920QXM?)
- 8GB DDR3 SO-DIMM 1333MHz (2x4GB) (is 8GB good enough or is 16 much better? also should I rather go for 8GB DDR3 SO-DIMM 1600MHz?)
- NVIDIA GeForce GTX680M 4GB GDDR5 (now this is a big question, should I go for this one, or AMD Radeon HD 7970M 2GB GDDR5? there is about a $400 difference)
- 500GB SATA 7200RPM
- Windows 7 Home Premium (or should I go for Professional?)
Comments
The laptop is a Clevo P150EM, by the way.
The difference between a Core i7-3720QM and a Core i7-3820QM is 100 MHz and 2 MB of L3 cache. The Core i7-3920XM has a higher TDP and is overclockable. But Intel's latest processors have gotten fast enough that they're not going to hold back gaming performance anytime soon apart from stereoscopic 3D or a severe case of badly-coded syndrome. It's unlikely that you'll ever notice the difference outside of synthetic benchmarks. The Core i7-3720QM features performance that would be pretty good in a desktop, even, let alone a laptop.
The performance difference between 1333 MHz memory and 1600 MHz will rarely be more than a rounding error. If the price difference is barely more than a rounding error (which is actually the case for desktops if you buy the memory modules yourself), then maybe you shell out for the faster memory. If you're running HPC applications that are very sensitive to memory bandwidth, then you'd want the faster memory. But if you're running HPC applications on a laptop, you're doing it wrong.
Getting 8 GB of system memory is already double what you're likely to have any use for today, so that already has a lot of future-proofing built in. If you want to spend a ton of money and are looking for things to spend it on, then maybe you get 16 GB. But there's no real reason to do so unless you run applications that use unusually large amounts of memory--which tend to be things that you shouldn't run on a laptop, anyway. In the unlikely event that you discover a few years from now that you need more than 8 GB of video memory, it's easy to add more yourself. Right now, it costs about $40-$50 to buy the other 8 GB, and that's likely to get cheaper as time passes.
My guess from the specs is that a GeForce GTX 680M would be a little faster (e.g., single-digit percentages) than a Radeon HD 7970M, but not a lot faster. They're close enough that I wouldn't be terribly surprised if the 7970M is faster on average--and would be very surprised if there aren't quite a few particular games where each card is faster than the other. If they were the same price, I'd lean toward the GTX 680M, but there would be a case for the 7970M. But with the huge price chasm that Nvidia charges because they can't make 28 nm cards right? The 7970M is an easy call if you care about the price tag. The only meaningful difference between 2 GB and 4 GB of video memory in a laptop is that 4 GB means higher power consumption--which is bad, so don't get hung up on that.
The cards are based on a desktop GeForce GTX 670 and Radeon HD 7870, respectively. The GTX 680M has ~70% (an exact number is impossible due to GPU turbo) of the clock speed and 60% of the memory bandwidth of a GTX 670, while the 7970M has 85% of the clock speed and 100% of the memory bandwidth of a 7870. A desktop GTX 670 is substantially faster than a desktop Radeon HD 7870, but will it still be faster if it's underclocked so much further? If both cards are purely constrained by shaders, TMUs, and/or ROPs, then yes. If they're purely constrained by memory bandwidth, then no--and in this case, the 7970M would not merely be faster, but a lot faster. That's the sort of thing that will vary from game to game. The GTX 670 already seems to be substantially constrained by memory bandwidth, more so than the 7870.
If you're not sure whether you need the Home Premium or Professional versions of Windows, then you want Home Premium. The idea is that Microsoft makes everything that they think home users have a realistic chance of wanting available in Home Premium, but restricts a handful of features that businesses are likely to want to the Professional version. The Ultimate edition seems to exist mainly so that people looking to buy the best of everything will give Microsoft more money than they have to; its main advantage seems to be that you can switch languages whenever you feel like it.
You didn't mention getting an SSD, by the way. Getting something like a ~240 GB SSD instead of a hard drive if you don't need ridiculous amounts of storage, or the 120 GB mSATA SSD in addition to a hard drive if you do need ridiculous amounts of storage, would make a huge difference. I'd put a much higher priority on that than upgrading the processor above a Core i7-3720QM or the video card above a Radeon HD 7970M.