Ya the problem is that I am travling a lot more for my company. I am away from home 2 weeks at a time. I have a good desktop but when I'm sitting in a hotel room I want to be able to play my favorite games.
Quiz- Thanks for that info. Do you have a couple links of laptops that you think would fit my budget?
A Google search for W870CU turns up AVA Direct, Xotic PC, iBuyPower, RK Computers, and Eurocom.
I'll let you compare prices and configurations yourself. Storage is the tricky thing to get, as some vendors don't offer an SSD at all, or only offer garbage ones based on bad controllers. The Intel and Indilinx controllers are all right, too, but I'd recommend an SSD with a SandForce controller, as listed above.
For the OP, i personally own this laptop MSI GX740-235 and its well worth the money. Like you i had a budget and have needs to move this laptop almost daily into work. It has a very powerful GPU for a laptop and a good CPU. Solid build and after a bios update it doesnt get extremely hot. I would still recommend a laptop cooler for it though.
For corber, you have a very large budget for a laptop. I would reccomend something like this ASUS G73JW for $1,745. If you still want to spend that extra 250 bucks you can get a SSD for 200 and replace one of you 500GB HD and throw it into this, still putting you under 2k. Just make sure you have a copy of windows 7 x64 ready to reinstall when you swap in the SSD.
Edit: With this CPU and GPU combo you certainly want a laptop cooler as it will melt your palms!
For corber, you have a very large budget for a laptop. I would reccomend something like this ASUS G73JW for $1,745. If you still want to spend that extra 250 bucks you can get a SSD for 200 and replace one of you 500GB HD and throw it into this, still putting you under 2k. Just make sure you have a copy of windows 7 x64 ready to reinstall when you swap in the SSD.
Don't get a GeForce GTX 460M, or at least not until Nvidia releases the full specs on it (including the TDP!). Most likely, compared to a Mobility Radeon HD 5870, the GTX 460M will:
1) be slower
2) run hotter, and
3) cost more.
That's not a good combination.
I base point 1 on a comparison of desktop parts. A Radeon HD 5870 badly beats a GeForce GTX 460, and would still win handily if the GTX 460 didn't have to disable 1/8 of the shaders and some other bits. The mobile parts of similar names are Juniper and GF106, respectively, rather than Cypress and GF104. Juniper is basically half of a Cypress, while GF106 is just over half of a GF104, so performance presumably scales down accordingly.
As for running hotter, AMD's desktop cards destroy Nvidia's in performance per watt, and I'd expect that to continue in the mobile space. In particular, Nvidia's shocking inability to make a GDDR5 memory controller that works properly is really going to hurt them here. GDDR5 memory runs hotter than DDR3, so Nvidia has to give the GTX 460M three memory channels as compared to the 5870's two, and the 5870 still has more memory bandwidth. The GTX 460M is going to need two extra memory chips (6 total, compared to 4 for the 5870) pumping out heat, which is going to hurt the TDP. And that's apart from the GPU itself likely running hotter.
On point 3, Nvidia does tend to charge more for previous generation mobile parts. The GTX 460M is a much more expensive card to make than the Mobility Radeon HD 5870, too. Three memory channels versus two and a 20% larger die size add to the cost. Nvidia's struggles with TSMC's 40 nm bulk silicon process means that they'll probably have to do a lot more binning work to get parts that meet the specs, and if only a small fraction of your chips meet the specs, then you have to charge more for them. The large number of (desktop) Radeon HD 5870s say that AMD has no problem making fully functional chips; Nvidia, on the other hand, has yet to launch a card based on a fully functional GF100 or GF104 die. They can't even get enough such dies for $4000 Tesla cards and $5000 Quadro cards.
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For an SSD, it's better now to get SandForce rather than Intel if you have the choice. People still pushing Intel SSDs apparently haven't realized that SandForce ones have been on the market and faster (and cheaper in $/GB, too!) for the last six months or so.
Much of the point of an SSD in a laptop is to not also need a hard drive. If you do want an external SSD, though, USB 2.0 is way too slow. For that, you'd want to find a laptop with USB 3.0 (I'm not sure how common this is) and get an OCZ Enyo, which has an Indilinx controller inside, but more importantly, can take advantage of USB 3.0.
Very interesting how in depth you went with that, all supported by numbers and facts. I wasnt aware nvidia was having issues with the 460. What exactly do you mean by sandforce? is that a brand or the technology? Aslo i was implying putting the ssd in the laptop, i dont see it being cost effective whatsoever to have an external SSD.
SandForce is the company that designed the SSD controller chip and writes firmware for it. It's much like how AMD and Nvidia don't actually assemble video cards themselves, but only design the GPU chip (while TSMC actually manufactures it) and sell that to companies like Asus, Gigabyte, MSI, Sapphire, or EVGA to actually assemble and sell completed video cards, and then AMD and Nvidia write the drivers for the cards. (Well actually, they write the drivers before they sell any GPU chips, but they do write the all-important driver updates later.) One can talk about a SandForce SSD the same way one talks about an Nvidia video card. Indeed, one could argue that SandForce has a bigger impact on the performance of their SSDs than Nvidia does on their video cards, as heatsinks and fans and PCB layout are a huge deal on video cards, but pretty trivial on SSDs.
And yes, Nvidia's Fermi cards have been a complete disaster in manufacturing so far. Two chips in the lineup are out, namely, GF100 and GF104. So few of the chips work properly that Nvidia has to disable parts that don't work and sell what's left. Kind of like how if you buy a three core processor from AMD, it's really a four core processor where one core didn't work and was disabled. This sort of salvage part is common, and AMD does it with their video cards, too. The difference is that while AMD sells fully functional Cypress chips (Radeon HD 5870) and salvage parts that have part disabled (Radeon HD 5850 and 5830), Nvidia doesn't have enough properly working GF100 or GF104 dies to be worth selling, so they only sell salvage parts that have varying amounts of stuff disabled.
The GDDR5 memory controller issues are kind of shocking, too. The lowest clocked GDDR5 memory chips that the memory manufacturers sell are clocked at 1 GHz. Thus, you can't save money beyond that by buying cheaper, slower memory. The Radeon HD 5670 uses GDDR5 memory, but two channels of GDDR5 is more bandwidth than the card can use, so AMD buys the cheapest GDDR5 memory, clocks it at 1 GHz, and puts it on their 5670 cards. The only cards in the Evergreen lineup for which AMD clocks GDDR5 memory below 1 GHz are the Mobility Radeon HD 5750 and 5770, which they clock at 800 MHz to save power, as even 800 MHz gives the card more memory bandwidth than it can use, and the lower clock speed saves on power. AMD also clocks memory higher on cards that need more memory bandwidth, notably the Radeon HD 5750, 5770, and 5870, as memory manufacturers have faster memory to sell for those willing to buy it.
Nvidia, on the other hand, has never released a video card with GDDR5 memory clocked as high as 1 GHz. The $500 reference version of the GeForce GTX 480 can only manage 924 MHz. Even the factory overclocked versions never clock memory over 950 MHz. And that's in desktop parts where the heat from memory barely matters. In mobile parts, Nvidia's announced lineup doesn't have a single card that clocks GDDR5 memory above 625 MHz. Even in Tesla and Quadro cards that cost thousands of dollars, Nvidia can only clock the GDDR5 memory at 750 MHz. That's just embarrassing. Meanwhile, they have no problem with clocking DDR3 memory at 800 MHz in the lower end cards that use that.
Nvidia does more or less make up for the low clock speeds by adding more memory channels, which will compensate just fine in raw performance. (A Mobility Radeon HD 5870 has about 6.7% more memory bandwidth than a GeForce GTX 460M.) But that adds to the cost and the heat.
You should know that if you buy a laptop from the US you need to pay 17.5% vat, so £777 end up being £913 + shipping, and on the 1st of january 2011 its going up to 20%
and whats wrong with the asus g51j, I brought it from the US myself a while ago, and it's running great apart from being quiet hot, i7 running at 1.6ghz / 2.80ghz with turbo boost , 4gig of ddr3, 2x 7200rpm HDD, 260gtx (similar to a 9800GT for desktop). backlit keyboard. 1080p resolution.
Presumably you meant "quite" hot, as that's not going to be quiet. But here's your problems:
"2x 7200rpm HDD, 260gtx"
You know why it's hot, don't you? It's those specs. A Mobility Radeon HD 5870 would be much faster and also release much less heat. It might even be cheaper, though at worst, it isn't much more expensive.
Laptop hard drives are expensive, and instead of two of them, you could get a good 60 GB SSD for cheaper, and it would also be dramatically faster, dead silent, and put out virtually no heat. If you're doing anything where you need a ton of storage space, you probably shouldn't be using a laptop for it.
Bish your comparing 2 differant laptops. The one his talking about is the g73jw. Yours isnt bad just an older GPU which is still pretty good for a laptop. And im sure does make some noise with the 2 hard drives in it lol.
well sorry english isn't my first language, and if you look at OP first post, he's saying the G51J is a gimmicky laptop, and my 260gtx is older then the 5870, so I dont know why you're comparing them here.
There is no such thing as a budget gaming laptop. You can have any two out of the three. If you drop "budget" to just get a gaming laptop that costs a fortune, it still isn't that nice, either, as it's too []much heat in too little space. I'd say wait for Llano, which will offer integrated graphics that are actually nice (likely competitive with a Mobility Radeon HD 5730) with a low] power draw, except that you seem to want higher performance than that.
For what it's worth, a Mobility Radeon HD 5870 has performance about comparable to a (desktop) Radeon HD 5750, and maybe 40% of that of a (desktop) Radeon HD 5870. If you're one of those people who really wants high performance to max settings in everything, then get a desktop.
I can tell you what you should get on that budget for a gaming laptop:
Processor: Core i7-740QM or higher
Video card: Mobility Radeon HD 5870
These two above are fairly clear and straightforward. Thanks.
Storage: 120 GB SandForce SSD, and no hard drive.
Depending on which company sells you the SSD, it could be branded as OCZ Vertex 2, OCZ Agility 2, Mushkin Callisto, Mushkin Callisto Deluxe, G.Skill Pheonix, G.Skill Phoenix Pro, Patriot Inferno, and some others... won't reach its full speed without SATA 3.
These Solid State Drives are really pricey. My current XP laptop with not much to it already has about 90GB of space used up. Is 120 GB really feasible with Windows 7 and maybe getting Office Professional, some MMOs, etc.? Because 120 GB SSD is already about $250 more than a normal 500 GB HDD, or $500 more for200 GB SSD. Am I to assume that I shouldn't be using this device to store anything other than programs, that any media/data should be stored on an external drive? Because going 200 MB seems like a budget buster for me.
Memory: 4 GB of DDR3, in a configuration of two modules of 2 GB each
Why 4 GB of 2x2MB? Why not 1x4MB? Is there a long term benefit to shelling out a bit extra for 2x4MB? Or is it always going to be overkill?
Thanks in advance for any further advice. You've been a big help so far, Quiz.
I must admit, I almost feel like going with a desktop, but I hate being relegated to a gaming cave if/when I want to play in different rooms of the house.
I made the mistake of buying a top of the line gaming laptop years ago. For its time it was great, set me back aroun $1900 bucks.
Now it sits in my closet collecting dust because it cant be upgraded any further and technology moves so fast that its outdated as soon as you open the box it shipped in.
I must say for about a year or so it was great to be able to game on the go wherever I wanted. Then the next gen or 2 of tech came out and suddenly that top of the line laptop was midline at best. I spent around 300 in upgrades and it still wasnt up to snuff with the newer games.
My opinion is buy a decent laptop that you can play some older games or less graphic intensive ones and use it more as a media experience for dvd, blu ray, music, ect while you travel and spend the rest on an uber desktop.
The money you will spend on a great laptop that may last you a year or so before being obsolete is better spent on a top of the line desktop you can upgrade and use for years to come.
I must admit, I almost feel like going with a desktop, but I hate being relegated to a gaming cave if/when I want to play in different rooms of the house.
If you don't already have a gaming desktop, then that's what you should get unless you can't use a desktop for some reason. Thinking it might be kind of nice to move from one room of your house to another is not a reason why you can't get a desktop. Even needing a laptop for non-gaming purposes to take to class or when you travel is not a reason why you can't get a desktop; if you need a laptop for that, then you're better off getting a gaming desktop plus a cheap laptop. A reason why you can't get a desktop would be something like a job where you have to constantly travel and aren't home to use the desktop very often.
Compared to a gaming desktop, a gaming laptop will be much slower, far less reliable (and much harder to fix when it does break), much more ergonomically awkward, obsolete far sooner (and basically impossible to upgrade, unlike a desktop), and much more expensive. And it's not a trade-off of pick two out of the five. You're stuck with all five at once, and there's no way around it.
My recommendations above were for Corber, who said he already has a nice gaming desktop, and wants a gaming laptop to take with him when he travels, as he often does. It probably won't be nearly as nice as the desktop he has at home (and if it is, then he should upgrade the desktop), but that's the sort of reason why someone might reasonably get a gaming laptop. And he had a $2000 budget for it, too, which is enough to get something nice--or at least nice for a laptop. You don't sound like that's your situation.
Furthermore, I strongly believe in respecting the budget. If someone has a $2000 budget, I'm not going to pick out a $1000 machine and say this is what you should get, when he could get something much nicer for $2000. Conversely, if someone has a $1000 budget, I'm not going to pick out $2000 worth of parts and say, you should get this instead because it's a lot better. If your budget isn't $2000, then you should probably pick different parts that make more sense on your budget.
"Is 120 GB really feasible with Windows 7 and maybe getting Office Professional, some MMOs, etc.?"
If it's the only storage you have, then 120 GB will be enough for some people and not enough for others. But it shouldn't be the only storage that you have, as you shouldn't get a gaming laptop unless you already have a gaming desktop, and can store media files in a hard drive on the desktop if you need to. You can uninstall and reinstall programs on the laptop as needed, if you quit one game and want to play another.
There are several problems with hard drives. Perhaps the most immediate one, and the reason why I'd say don't get a hard drive in a laptop at all unless you need something cheap, is that they're fragile. A 7200 RPM hard drive has platters rotating furiously at 120 revolutions per second. Meanwhile, it has read/write heads hovering mere nanometers above the surface of the platters, to read data off of the platters and write data to them. If a head runs into a platter (a "head crash"), it causes a great big scratch and kills the drive.
If that sounds like a precarious situation, that's because it is. Laptop hard drives do try very hard to keep them safe, and have the whole mechanism suspended inside the case so that the platters and drive heads can all shift together if the drive shakes. They also try to yank the heads away and put them somewhere safe at the first hint of jostling the drive. But there's only so much that can be done, and dropping or shaking a laptop while it is running runs a significant risk of killing the drive. There isn't much risk of dropping a hard drive in a desktop when the hard drive is attached to the case by screws and the case is seated firmly on the ground. But that's not how laptops tend to get used.
A solid state drive, on the other hand, has no moving parts--and hence no moving parts that can theoretically break. I wouldn't recommend dropping an SSD, but if you do, it's no big deal. It's kind of like if you have a CD in one of those little paper cases and drop it on the ground, there's no real risk of damaging it, as it would take quite a bit of physical force to break it.
A good solid state drive is also very, very fast, and far faster than any hard drive that will ever be made. And yes, I do expect that people will still be using hard drives for some purposes 30 years from now, and even the hard drives they use then will be slower than solid state drives today.
In 1998, I bought a computer with a 7200 RPM hard drive. If you get a laptop hard drive today, it might be 7200 RPM, or it might actually be slower than that. The sequential transfer speeds will be much faster, but sequential speed doesn't matter very much. Everything is fast at sequential reads and writes (well, if you use SATA, that is, as opposed to USB 2.0 or earlier). But the latency to access data will be about the same as it was on my hard drive from 12 years ago, as it still has to wait for the hard drive to physically spin to the right spot before it can do anything, and 7200 RPM today is the same rotation rate as 7200 RPM was then. Everything else in the computer is dramatically faster than it was then, but hard drive speeds haven't really improved much. That means that when you have to wait for your computer to do something, you're usually waiting for the hard drive.
See a comparison of random read and write speeds, for example:
The VelociRaptor down at the bottom is generally regarded as the fastest consumer hard drive on the market. The Seagate Momentus below it is a more typical laptop hard drive. They aren't shown on the second graph, as the length of the bars would round to 0 pixels. And yes, longer bars are better here.
Solid state drives also use virtually no power, and considerably less power than a hard drive. That doesn't matter in a desktop, but it does mean longer battery life in a laptop.
Solid state drives are also dead silent, so you can be free of the annoying humming noises that hard drives make. You might not care about that, but I think it's rather nice.
"These Solid State Drives are really pricey."
Yeah, they are. That's why people still use hard drives when they need to store a ton of data. That's why hard drives will still be used for decades to come for mass storage, even though solid state drives of a given capacity will get dramatically cheaper in the coming decades, and more and more people will move to them either in addition to or instead of a hard drive.
But if you wouldn't have any problem with paying $300 for a processor, and you wouldn't have any problem with paying $300 for a video card, then why would you object to paying $300 for a solid state drive? Apart from frame rates while gaming, the solid state drive will make a far bigger difference in performance than a faster processor or video card would. And if you would object to paying $300 for a processor or video card, then you can't afford a gaming laptop, anyway. If you're in that boat, wait about six months for Llano, which will get you passable gaming performance in a laptop very cheaply.
"Why 4 GB of 2x2MB? Why not 1x4MB? Is there a long term benefit to shelling out a bit extra for 2x4MB? Or is it always going to be overkill?"
I assume you mean GB there, not MB. Anyway, the reason to get two memory modules rather than one is so that you can use both memory channels. The memory controller in most modern processors has two channels, and each memory module can only use one of those channels. If you don't put a module in to fill both of them, then you lose half of the memory bandwidth that you should have had. That will cripple your performance.
As for 4 GB versus 8 GB, if you're never going to actually use more than about 3 GB at a time, then it doesn't matter if you have 4 GB or 8 GB of physical memory sitting there. 32-bit programs (which includes all games that I'm aware of on the market now, and likely all that will release in the next several years) can only address 2 GB of memory at a time, anyway. And if you do need to run high-powered 64-bit programs that need massive amounts of memory, you'll probably need the power of a desktop anyway.
As a note, my personal situation is that a desktop would have to go in a certain room in the house, upstairs. All the activity in the house goes on downstairs, and while I could get a desktop and play upstairs, I'd be humping up and down the stairs a lot, taking care of this or that, answering the door, who knows. I hate yelling from up to downstairs if there's a question someone needs answered, it's nice to just call out to the next room or even take a few steps. What if a pickle jar needs opening, or a spider needs to be dealt with? LOL.
Plus, keeping an eye on kids is easier if you can set up a laptop on a tray table in the TV room if they're got a movie on; or sit down at the table if they're doing arts and crafts or homework; or set it down at the picnic table outside if I'm chilling out with a beer while they're running around the backyard. It's rare that I can just hunker down without a care in the world for long enough periods of time to withraw from the world into what I'd call a "gaming cave".
For me, a gaming laptop just suits my particular, well, lifestyle I guess you'd call it. So while I understand all the advantages of having a desktop over a laptop, for me, the choice isn't all about gaming options. I've had a desktop, and the lack of flexibility didn't work out for me.
Again, thanks for all the information and the time you took to reply.
Well then, make sure that you understand the drawbacks of a gaming laptop as opposed to other laptops. It's not just that they're more expensive. It's that they also put out a lot of heat. Trying to get too much heat out of too small of a space means that they run noisy. It also makes parts more likely to die sooner.
Furthermore, unlike a desktop, the heat that a laptop puts out isn't way off to the side. It's in the main chassis, primarily underneath the keyboard. If you use the keyboard included as part of the laptop, it's going to be awfully hot while gaming. And don't get any ideas about actually putting the laptop on your lap. Silicon can handle temperatures like 150 Fahrenheit, but human skin doesn't handle that sort of temperatures so well. You're going to have to clear a space on a desk or table to use the laptop, and if you have that, you might well be able to put a desktop there, too.
Also, it's a lot of heat because it uses a lot of power. Gaming laptops tend to have very short battery lives. And the battery can't handle the laptop at all while gaming. Don't come in with ideas about how you're going to be sitting there playing a game, and then move from one room to the next while in the game. You'll have to shut down the game at minimum to be able to unplug the laptop and have it continue to function.
If you can put up with all of that, then what's your budget?
I've got all the information I needed from all of your postings. My budget is fungible, anywhere from $1,500-2,500, but I want to assess each "upgrade" and the relative value of each. You keep adding $300 over and over, then you're eventually talking about some serious cash.
I already have a 1TB storage device, so storage itself isn't really a huge issue, I'm just worried about how much space Windows 7, Office Professional and maybe 5 games would leave me if I went with a smaller SSD. Games seem to run 5-20 GB each, so I've just gotta decide how I'm going to go with this.
EDIT: I was hoping to get a higher quality laptop for when Guild Wars 2 comes out, but I tried the LotRO F2P and I think that game is going to tide me over for a while, so I think I'm going to wait until the next generation of AMD stuff comes out next year that everyone's talking about.
Waiting for the next generation of AMD stuff? Which is that, again?
If you're waiting for Llano, which will offer passable gaming performance without getting unduly hot, it sounds like that may be delayed a bit, possibly as late as next summer. Or that might just be some bad rumors floating around.
If you're waiting for the Northern Islands generation of video cards that probably launches next month, then don't. That's desktop parts. I'd expect laptop parts on the same architecture to launch early next year. But that's more interesting in desktops than laptops. The new parts will almost surely use more power than the old parts, in addition to giving more performance. In a desktop, that's fine, as 20% more power for 20% more performance means better performance, and the added power isn't a problem so long as the power consumption isn't out of hand (which it wouldn't be from merely a 20% jump over Cypress). But in a laptop, 20% more power is a much bigger problem.
There are also rumors saying that Barts is going to have a 256-bit memory bus, and thus need eight GDDR5 memory chips, as compared to four for Juniper. If that's so, it could easily have worse performance per watt than Juniper in a laptop, as GDDR5 memory chips take quite a bit of power. I don't find those rumors terribly credible, for what it's worth, though they might well be true as a lucky guess. But even if they're not true, I wouldn't be expecting much of an improvement in performance per watt from AMD's next generation of cards. Those improvements mostly come from new, smaller process nodes, while AMD's next generation of video cards is going to be made on exactly the same TSMC 40 nm bulk silicon process node as their last one.
What could be more interesting is Intel's next processor architecture, Sandy Bridge. That one is on Intel's 32 nm HKMG process, as compared to 45 nm for Nehalem. It looks like Intel is going to offer considerably higher clock speeds within the same TDP, as well as improved performance per clock cycle. Rumors say that the desktop parts launch in January, and I'd expect the mobile parts to launch at about the same time, as the first chips are more interesting for laptops than desktops anyway. A fast desktop processor isn't much of a problem for games, but the laptops are somewhat more processor bound, because they have to clock the processor so much lower. Turning down graphical settings can greatly ease the load on the video card, but doesn't help nearly so much with the processor.
Anyway, you've seen my advice on a processor and video card if you want a high end gaming laptop right now. If you wait, a Core i7 2720QM should replace the Core i7 740QM whenever Sandy Bridge launches, and for about the same price. That's still rumors, not an official announcement from Intel, but I'd regard them as very credible.
And I do think you should get a solid state drive, especially in a laptop and on your budget. Things don't take as much space as you might think. There are a handful of games that take a ton of space, and if you can "only" have five games installed without having to uninstall things that you haven't played in a year and will probably never play again, I don't think that would be such a big problem. Media files are about the only things that take enough space to matter anymore, and games do have a fair bit of that, but other software doesn't. I've got Excel 2007 installed on my system, and the whole Office folder only takes about 170 MB. I've got six games installed on my system (Guild Wars, Civilization 4, Europa Universalis 3, Champions Online, League of Legends, and Uncharted Waters Online), and my 120 GB SSD is less than half full.
If you've got a 1 TB hard drive in your desktop already, then you can store movies or whatever there if you have them, and don't need them on the laptop anyway, or at least not massive numbers of them all at once. Go to your desktop and check the size of your Program Files folder if you like; programs don't take much space anymore. If you've got a 64-bit operating system, also check the Program Files (x86) folder, as there will probably be more programs in there.
If you wait for Sandy Bridge, then there may be new SSD controllers out by then. Intel's Lyndonville controller should launch in the first quarter of next year (which may mean the day before Sandy Bridge, or may mean the end of March), and Indilinx's Jet Stream controller should launch, well, eventually. The Sandy Bridge chipsets are apparently going to include SATA 3 support, too, so there might be SSDs out by then that are a lot faster than the ones on the market now. Or there might not; performance of future SSDs is hard to predict. Regardless, they'll likely be cheaper by then for a given capacity, too, as they'll probably be using the 24-27 nm NAND flash that recently started production at four different companies rather than the 34 nm or so process that is used now.
Incidentally, if you wait for Sandy Bridge, then AMD may have released their "Vancouver" cards that are the laptop equivalent of Northern Islands. If that's the case, then you could at least check to see how they compare to the Mobility Radeon HD 5000 series and perhaps get them if they're better. They likely will be, but I'm not expecting anything revolutionary.
Hard drive performance has been stagnant for so long, and the claims that SSDs are so vastly better are so revolutionary that claims of such a big leap in performance may well seem incredible. But not having to constantly sit there and wait for your computer to do something is really, really nice. Not having to worry that you'll kill the drive if you drop it is very nice in a laptop, too. The reduced power consumption and lack of noise are also nice bonuses.
Thanks again for all the information you've provided.
I would wholeheartedly recommend you comb through your posts and put together a "highlight reel", so to speak, that MMORPG.com could sticky. I've learned so much in this thread, but I venture there's still so much I might need to know to make a truly informed decision.
Again, your information has been great. Now I just need to see if I want to wait and see what 6-9 months might bring.
Jeez. Writing "6-9 months" really makes that seem far off!
I would wholeheartedly recommend you comb through your posts and put together a "highlight reel", so to speak, that MMORPG.com could sticky. I've learned so much in this thread, but I venture there's still so much I might need to know to make a truly informed decision.
I don't care to maintain a thread on more than one forum, as it's too much work.
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If you're going to wait before getting a gaming laptop, then the reasonable choices are to wait until January if you want a high powered gaming laptop that will run hot but play games decently (and very well for a laptop), or until Llano launches, whenever that is, if you want something that will run cooler and give passable gaming performance, even if it will only offer maybe half the video performance of a higher end gaming laptop.
Comments
Ya the problem is that I am travling a lot more for my company. I am away from home 2 weeks at a time. I have a good desktop but when I'm sitting in a hotel room I want to be able to play my favorite games.
Quiz- Thanks for that info. Do you have a couple links of laptops that you think would fit my budget?
A Google search for W870CU turns up AVA Direct, Xotic PC, iBuyPower, RK Computers, and Eurocom.
I'll let you compare prices and configurations yourself. Storage is the tricky thing to get, as some vendors don't offer an SSD at all, or only offer garbage ones based on bad controllers. The Intel and Indilinx controllers are all right, too, but I'd recommend an SSD with a SandForce controller, as listed above.
For the OP, i personally own this laptop MSI GX740-235 and its well worth the money. Like you i had a budget and have needs to move this laptop almost daily into work. It has a very powerful GPU for a laptop and a good CPU. Solid build and after a bios update it doesnt get extremely hot. I would still recommend a laptop cooler for it though.
For corber, you have a very large budget for a laptop. I would reccomend something like this ASUS G73JW for $1,745. If you still want to spend that extra 250 bucks you can get a SSD for 200 and replace one of you 500GB HD and throw it into this, still putting you under 2k. Just make sure you have a copy of windows 7 x64 ready to reinstall when you swap in the SSD.
Edit: With this CPU and GPU combo you certainly want a laptop cooler as it will melt your palms!
Don't get a GeForce GTX 460M, or at least not until Nvidia releases the full specs on it (including the TDP!). Most likely, compared to a Mobility Radeon HD 5870, the GTX 460M will:
1) be slower
2) run hotter, and
3) cost more.
That's not a good combination.
I base point 1 on a comparison of desktop parts. A Radeon HD 5870 badly beats a GeForce GTX 460, and would still win handily if the GTX 460 didn't have to disable 1/8 of the shaders and some other bits. The mobile parts of similar names are Juniper and GF106, respectively, rather than Cypress and GF104. Juniper is basically half of a Cypress, while GF106 is just over half of a GF104, so performance presumably scales down accordingly.
As for running hotter, AMD's desktop cards destroy Nvidia's in performance per watt, and I'd expect that to continue in the mobile space. In particular, Nvidia's shocking inability to make a GDDR5 memory controller that works properly is really going to hurt them here. GDDR5 memory runs hotter than DDR3, so Nvidia has to give the GTX 460M three memory channels as compared to the 5870's two, and the 5870 still has more memory bandwidth. The GTX 460M is going to need two extra memory chips (6 total, compared to 4 for the 5870) pumping out heat, which is going to hurt the TDP. And that's apart from the GPU itself likely running hotter.
On point 3, Nvidia does tend to charge more for previous generation mobile parts. The GTX 460M is a much more expensive card to make than the Mobility Radeon HD 5870, too. Three memory channels versus two and a 20% larger die size add to the cost. Nvidia's struggles with TSMC's 40 nm bulk silicon process means that they'll probably have to do a lot more binning work to get parts that meet the specs, and if only a small fraction of your chips meet the specs, then you have to charge more for them. The large number of (desktop) Radeon HD 5870s say that AMD has no problem making fully functional chips; Nvidia, on the other hand, has yet to launch a card based on a fully functional GF100 or GF104 die. They can't even get enough such dies for $4000 Tesla cards and $5000 Quadro cards.
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For an SSD, it's better now to get SandForce rather than Intel if you have the choice. People still pushing Intel SSDs apparently haven't realized that SandForce ones have been on the market and faster (and cheaper in $/GB, too!) for the last six months or so.
Much of the point of an SSD in a laptop is to not also need a hard drive. If you do want an external SSD, though, USB 2.0 is way too slow. For that, you'd want to find a laptop with USB 3.0 (I'm not sure how common this is) and get an OCZ Enyo, which has an Indilinx controller inside, but more importantly, can take advantage of USB 3.0.
Very interesting how in depth you went with that, all supported by numbers and facts. I wasnt aware nvidia was having issues with the 460. What exactly do you mean by sandforce? is that a brand or the technology? Aslo i was implying putting the ssd in the laptop, i dont see it being cost effective whatsoever to have an external SSD.
SandForce is the company that designed the SSD controller chip and writes firmware for it. It's much like how AMD and Nvidia don't actually assemble video cards themselves, but only design the GPU chip (while TSMC actually manufactures it) and sell that to companies like Asus, Gigabyte, MSI, Sapphire, or EVGA to actually assemble and sell completed video cards, and then AMD and Nvidia write the drivers for the cards. (Well actually, they write the drivers before they sell any GPU chips, but they do write the all-important driver updates later.) One can talk about a SandForce SSD the same way one talks about an Nvidia video card. Indeed, one could argue that SandForce has a bigger impact on the performance of their SSDs than Nvidia does on their video cards, as heatsinks and fans and PCB layout are a huge deal on video cards, but pretty trivial on SSDs.
And yes, Nvidia's Fermi cards have been a complete disaster in manufacturing so far. Two chips in the lineup are out, namely, GF100 and GF104. So few of the chips work properly that Nvidia has to disable parts that don't work and sell what's left. Kind of like how if you buy a three core processor from AMD, it's really a four core processor where one core didn't work and was disabled. This sort of salvage part is common, and AMD does it with their video cards, too. The difference is that while AMD sells fully functional Cypress chips (Radeon HD 5870) and salvage parts that have part disabled (Radeon HD 5850 and 5830), Nvidia doesn't have enough properly working GF100 or GF104 dies to be worth selling, so they only sell salvage parts that have varying amounts of stuff disabled.
The GDDR5 memory controller issues are kind of shocking, too. The lowest clocked GDDR5 memory chips that the memory manufacturers sell are clocked at 1 GHz. Thus, you can't save money beyond that by buying cheaper, slower memory. The Radeon HD 5670 uses GDDR5 memory, but two channels of GDDR5 is more bandwidth than the card can use, so AMD buys the cheapest GDDR5 memory, clocks it at 1 GHz, and puts it on their 5670 cards. The only cards in the Evergreen lineup for which AMD clocks GDDR5 memory below 1 GHz are the Mobility Radeon HD 5750 and 5770, which they clock at 800 MHz to save power, as even 800 MHz gives the card more memory bandwidth than it can use, and the lower clock speed saves on power. AMD also clocks memory higher on cards that need more memory bandwidth, notably the Radeon HD 5750, 5770, and 5870, as memory manufacturers have faster memory to sell for those willing to buy it.
Nvidia, on the other hand, has never released a video card with GDDR5 memory clocked as high as 1 GHz. The $500 reference version of the GeForce GTX 480 can only manage 924 MHz. Even the factory overclocked versions never clock memory over 950 MHz. And that's in desktop parts where the heat from memory barely matters. In mobile parts, Nvidia's announced lineup doesn't have a single card that clocks GDDR5 memory above 625 MHz. Even in Tesla and Quadro cards that cost thousands of dollars, Nvidia can only clock the GDDR5 memory at 750 MHz. That's just embarrassing. Meanwhile, they have no problem with clocking DDR3 memory at 800 MHz in the lower end cards that use that.
Nvidia does more or less make up for the low clock speeds by adding more memory channels, which will compensate just fine in raw performance. (A Mobility Radeon HD 5870 has about 6.7% more memory bandwidth than a GeForce GTX 460M.) But that adds to the cost and the heat.
You should know that if you buy a laptop from the US you need to pay 17.5% vat, so £777 end up being £913 + shipping, and on the 1st of january 2011 its going up to 20%
and whats wrong with the asus g51j, I brought it from the US myself a while ago, and it's running great apart from being quiet hot, i7 running at 1.6ghz / 2.80ghz with turbo boost , 4gig of ddr3, 2x 7200rpm HDD, 260gtx (similar to a 9800GT for desktop). backlit keyboard. 1080p resolution.
"quiet hot"
Presumably you meant "quite" hot, as that's not going to be quiet. But here's your problems:
"2x 7200rpm HDD, 260gtx"
You know why it's hot, don't you? It's those specs. A Mobility Radeon HD 5870 would be much faster and also release much less heat. It might even be cheaper, though at worst, it isn't much more expensive.
Laptop hard drives are expensive, and instead of two of them, you could get a good 60 GB SSD for cheaper, and it would also be dramatically faster, dead silent, and put out virtually no heat. If you're doing anything where you need a ton of storage space, you probably shouldn't be using a laptop for it.
Bish your comparing 2 differant laptops. The one his talking about is the g73jw. Yours isnt bad just an older GPU which is still pretty good for a laptop. And im sure does make some noise with the 2 hard drives in it lol.
well sorry english isn't my first language, and if you look at OP first post, he's saying the G51J is a gimmicky laptop, and my 260gtx is older then the 5870, so I dont know why you're comparing them here.
yeah? http://www.uggs-boots-shop.com/ugg-classic-metallic-boots.html
Thanks in advance for any further advice. You've been a big help so far, Quiz.
I must admit, I almost feel like going with a desktop, but I hate being relegated to a gaming cave if/when I want to play in different rooms of the house.
I made the mistake of buying a top of the line gaming laptop years ago. For its time it was great, set me back aroun $1900 bucks.
Now it sits in my closet collecting dust because it cant be upgraded any further and technology moves so fast that its outdated as soon as you open the box it shipped in.
I must say for about a year or so it was great to be able to game on the go wherever I wanted. Then the next gen or 2 of tech came out and suddenly that top of the line laptop was midline at best. I spent around 300 in upgrades and it still wasnt up to snuff with the newer games.
My opinion is buy a decent laptop that you can play some older games or less graphic intensive ones and use it more as a media experience for dvd, blu ray, music, ect while you travel and spend the rest on an uber desktop.
The money you will spend on a great laptop that may last you a year or so before being obsolete is better spent on a top of the line desktop you can upgrade and use for years to come.
Just my opinion from my personal experience.
Good luck in whatever you choose
If you don't already have a gaming desktop, then that's what you should get unless you can't use a desktop for some reason. Thinking it might be kind of nice to move from one room of your house to another is not a reason why you can't get a desktop. Even needing a laptop for non-gaming purposes to take to class or when you travel is not a reason why you can't get a desktop; if you need a laptop for that, then you're better off getting a gaming desktop plus a cheap laptop. A reason why you can't get a desktop would be something like a job where you have to constantly travel and aren't home to use the desktop very often.
Compared to a gaming desktop, a gaming laptop will be much slower, far less reliable (and much harder to fix when it does break), much more ergonomically awkward, obsolete far sooner (and basically impossible to upgrade, unlike a desktop), and much more expensive. And it's not a trade-off of pick two out of the five. You're stuck with all five at once, and there's no way around it.
My recommendations above were for Corber, who said he already has a nice gaming desktop, and wants a gaming laptop to take with him when he travels, as he often does. It probably won't be nearly as nice as the desktop he has at home (and if it is, then he should upgrade the desktop), but that's the sort of reason why someone might reasonably get a gaming laptop. And he had a $2000 budget for it, too, which is enough to get something nice--or at least nice for a laptop. You don't sound like that's your situation.
Furthermore, I strongly believe in respecting the budget. If someone has a $2000 budget, I'm not going to pick out a $1000 machine and say this is what you should get, when he could get something much nicer for $2000. Conversely, if someone has a $1000 budget, I'm not going to pick out $2000 worth of parts and say, you should get this instead because it's a lot better. If your budget isn't $2000, then you should probably pick different parts that make more sense on your budget.
"Is 120 GB really feasible with Windows 7 and maybe getting Office Professional, some MMOs, etc.?"
If it's the only storage you have, then 120 GB will be enough for some people and not enough for others. But it shouldn't be the only storage that you have, as you shouldn't get a gaming laptop unless you already have a gaming desktop, and can store media files in a hard drive on the desktop if you need to. You can uninstall and reinstall programs on the laptop as needed, if you quit one game and want to play another.
There are several problems with hard drives. Perhaps the most immediate one, and the reason why I'd say don't get a hard drive in a laptop at all unless you need something cheap, is that they're fragile. A 7200 RPM hard drive has platters rotating furiously at 120 revolutions per second. Meanwhile, it has read/write heads hovering mere nanometers above the surface of the platters, to read data off of the platters and write data to them. If a head runs into a platter (a "head crash"), it causes a great big scratch and kills the drive.
If that sounds like a precarious situation, that's because it is. Laptop hard drives do try very hard to keep them safe, and have the whole mechanism suspended inside the case so that the platters and drive heads can all shift together if the drive shakes. They also try to yank the heads away and put them somewhere safe at the first hint of jostling the drive. But there's only so much that can be done, and dropping or shaking a laptop while it is running runs a significant risk of killing the drive. There isn't much risk of dropping a hard drive in a desktop when the hard drive is attached to the case by screws and the case is seated firmly on the ground. But that's not how laptops tend to get used.
A solid state drive, on the other hand, has no moving parts--and hence no moving parts that can theoretically break. I wouldn't recommend dropping an SSD, but if you do, it's no big deal. It's kind of like if you have a CD in one of those little paper cases and drop it on the ground, there's no real risk of damaging it, as it would take quite a bit of physical force to break it.
A good solid state drive is also very, very fast, and far faster than any hard drive that will ever be made. And yes, I do expect that people will still be using hard drives for some purposes 30 years from now, and even the hard drives they use then will be slower than solid state drives today.
In 1998, I bought a computer with a 7200 RPM hard drive. If you get a laptop hard drive today, it might be 7200 RPM, or it might actually be slower than that. The sequential transfer speeds will be much faster, but sequential speed doesn't matter very much. Everything is fast at sequential reads and writes (well, if you use SATA, that is, as opposed to USB 2.0 or earlier). But the latency to access data will be about the same as it was on my hard drive from 12 years ago, as it still has to wait for the hard drive to physically spin to the right spot before it can do anything, and 7200 RPM today is the same rotation rate as 7200 RPM was then. Everything else in the computer is dramatically faster than it was then, but hard drive speeds haven't really improved much. That means that when you have to wait for your computer to do something, you're usually waiting for the hard drive.
See a comparison of random read and write speeds, for example:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/3681/oczs-vertex-2-special-sauce-sf1200-reviewed/6
The VelociRaptor down at the bottom is generally regarded as the fastest consumer hard drive on the market. The Seagate Momentus below it is a more typical laptop hard drive. They aren't shown on the second graph, as the length of the bars would round to 0 pixels. And yes, longer bars are better here.
Solid state drives also use virtually no power, and considerably less power than a hard drive. That doesn't matter in a desktop, but it does mean longer battery life in a laptop.
Solid state drives are also dead silent, so you can be free of the annoying humming noises that hard drives make. You might not care about that, but I think it's rather nice.
"These Solid State Drives are really pricey."
Yeah, they are. That's why people still use hard drives when they need to store a ton of data. That's why hard drives will still be used for decades to come for mass storage, even though solid state drives of a given capacity will get dramatically cheaper in the coming decades, and more and more people will move to them either in addition to or instead of a hard drive.
But if you wouldn't have any problem with paying $300 for a processor, and you wouldn't have any problem with paying $300 for a video card, then why would you object to paying $300 for a solid state drive? Apart from frame rates while gaming, the solid state drive will make a far bigger difference in performance than a faster processor or video card would. And if you would object to paying $300 for a processor or video card, then you can't afford a gaming laptop, anyway. If you're in that boat, wait about six months for Llano, which will get you passable gaming performance in a laptop very cheaply.
"Why 4 GB of 2x2MB? Why not 1x4MB? Is there a long term benefit to shelling out a bit extra for 2x4MB? Or is it always going to be overkill?"
I assume you mean GB there, not MB. Anyway, the reason to get two memory modules rather than one is so that you can use both memory channels. The memory controller in most modern processors has two channels, and each memory module can only use one of those channels. If you don't put a module in to fill both of them, then you lose half of the memory bandwidth that you should have had. That will cripple your performance.
As for 4 GB versus 8 GB, if you're never going to actually use more than about 3 GB at a time, then it doesn't matter if you have 4 GB or 8 GB of physical memory sitting there. 32-bit programs (which includes all games that I'm aware of on the market now, and likely all that will release in the next several years) can only address 2 GB of memory at a time, anyway. And if you do need to run high-powered 64-bit programs that need massive amounts of memory, you'll probably need the power of a desktop anyway.
Thanks for all the advice.
As a note, my personal situation is that a desktop would have to go in a certain room in the house, upstairs. All the activity in the house goes on downstairs, and while I could get a desktop and play upstairs, I'd be humping up and down the stairs a lot, taking care of this or that, answering the door, who knows. I hate yelling from up to downstairs if there's a question someone needs answered, it's nice to just call out to the next room or even take a few steps. What if a pickle jar needs opening, or a spider needs to be dealt with? LOL.
Plus, keeping an eye on kids is easier if you can set up a laptop on a tray table in the TV room if they're got a movie on; or sit down at the table if they're doing arts and crafts or homework; or set it down at the picnic table outside if I'm chilling out with a beer while they're running around the backyard. It's rare that I can just hunker down without a care in the world for long enough periods of time to withraw from the world into what I'd call a "gaming cave".
For me, a gaming laptop just suits my particular, well, lifestyle I guess you'd call it. So while I understand all the advantages of having a desktop over a laptop, for me, the choice isn't all about gaming options. I've had a desktop, and the lack of flexibility didn't work out for me.
Again, thanks for all the information and the time you took to reply.
Well then, make sure that you understand the drawbacks of a gaming laptop as opposed to other laptops. It's not just that they're more expensive. It's that they also put out a lot of heat. Trying to get too much heat out of too small of a space means that they run noisy. It also makes parts more likely to die sooner.
Furthermore, unlike a desktop, the heat that a laptop puts out isn't way off to the side. It's in the main chassis, primarily underneath the keyboard. If you use the keyboard included as part of the laptop, it's going to be awfully hot while gaming. And don't get any ideas about actually putting the laptop on your lap. Silicon can handle temperatures like 150 Fahrenheit, but human skin doesn't handle that sort of temperatures so well. You're going to have to clear a space on a desk or table to use the laptop, and if you have that, you might well be able to put a desktop there, too.
Also, it's a lot of heat because it uses a lot of power. Gaming laptops tend to have very short battery lives. And the battery can't handle the laptop at all while gaming. Don't come in with ideas about how you're going to be sitting there playing a game, and then move from one room to the next while in the game. You'll have to shut down the game at minimum to be able to unplug the laptop and have it continue to function.
If you can put up with all of that, then what's your budget?
Quiz,
I've got all the information I needed from all of your postings. My budget is fungible, anywhere from $1,500-2,500, but I want to assess each "upgrade" and the relative value of each. You keep adding $300 over and over, then you're eventually talking about some serious cash.
I already have a 1TB storage device, so storage itself isn't really a huge issue, I'm just worried about how much space Windows 7, Office Professional and maybe 5 games would leave me if I went with a smaller SSD. Games seem to run 5-20 GB each, so I've just gotta decide how I'm going to go with this.
EDIT: I was hoping to get a higher quality laptop for when Guild Wars 2 comes out, but I tried the LotRO F2P and I think that game is going to tide me over for a while, so I think I'm going to wait until the next generation of AMD stuff comes out next year that everyone's talking about.
Waiting for the next generation of AMD stuff? Which is that, again?
If you're waiting for Llano, which will offer passable gaming performance without getting unduly hot, it sounds like that may be delayed a bit, possibly as late as next summer. Or that might just be some bad rumors floating around.
If you're waiting for the Northern Islands generation of video cards that probably launches next month, then don't. That's desktop parts. I'd expect laptop parts on the same architecture to launch early next year. But that's more interesting in desktops than laptops. The new parts will almost surely use more power than the old parts, in addition to giving more performance. In a desktop, that's fine, as 20% more power for 20% more performance means better performance, and the added power isn't a problem so long as the power consumption isn't out of hand (which it wouldn't be from merely a 20% jump over Cypress). But in a laptop, 20% more power is a much bigger problem.
There are also rumors saying that Barts is going to have a 256-bit memory bus, and thus need eight GDDR5 memory chips, as compared to four for Juniper. If that's so, it could easily have worse performance per watt than Juniper in a laptop, as GDDR5 memory chips take quite a bit of power. I don't find those rumors terribly credible, for what it's worth, though they might well be true as a lucky guess. But even if they're not true, I wouldn't be expecting much of an improvement in performance per watt from AMD's next generation of cards. Those improvements mostly come from new, smaller process nodes, while AMD's next generation of video cards is going to be made on exactly the same TSMC 40 nm bulk silicon process node as their last one.
What could be more interesting is Intel's next processor architecture, Sandy Bridge. That one is on Intel's 32 nm HKMG process, as compared to 45 nm for Nehalem. It looks like Intel is going to offer considerably higher clock speeds within the same TDP, as well as improved performance per clock cycle. Rumors say that the desktop parts launch in January, and I'd expect the mobile parts to launch at about the same time, as the first chips are more interesting for laptops than desktops anyway. A fast desktop processor isn't much of a problem for games, but the laptops are somewhat more processor bound, because they have to clock the processor so much lower. Turning down graphical settings can greatly ease the load on the video card, but doesn't help nearly so much with the processor.
Anyway, you've seen my advice on a processor and video card if you want a high end gaming laptop right now. If you wait, a Core i7 2720QM should replace the Core i7 740QM whenever Sandy Bridge launches, and for about the same price. That's still rumors, not an official announcement from Intel, but I'd regard them as very credible.
And I do think you should get a solid state drive, especially in a laptop and on your budget. Things don't take as much space as you might think. There are a handful of games that take a ton of space, and if you can "only" have five games installed without having to uninstall things that you haven't played in a year and will probably never play again, I don't think that would be such a big problem. Media files are about the only things that take enough space to matter anymore, and games do have a fair bit of that, but other software doesn't. I've got Excel 2007 installed on my system, and the whole Office folder only takes about 170 MB. I've got six games installed on my system (Guild Wars, Civilization 4, Europa Universalis 3, Champions Online, League of Legends, and Uncharted Waters Online), and my 120 GB SSD is less than half full.
If you've got a 1 TB hard drive in your desktop already, then you can store movies or whatever there if you have them, and don't need them on the laptop anyway, or at least not massive numbers of them all at once. Go to your desktop and check the size of your Program Files folder if you like; programs don't take much space anymore. If you've got a 64-bit operating system, also check the Program Files (x86) folder, as there will probably be more programs in there.
If you wait for Sandy Bridge, then there may be new SSD controllers out by then. Intel's Lyndonville controller should launch in the first quarter of next year (which may mean the day before Sandy Bridge, or may mean the end of March), and Indilinx's Jet Stream controller should launch, well, eventually. The Sandy Bridge chipsets are apparently going to include SATA 3 support, too, so there might be SSDs out by then that are a lot faster than the ones on the market now. Or there might not; performance of future SSDs is hard to predict. Regardless, they'll likely be cheaper by then for a given capacity, too, as they'll probably be using the 24-27 nm NAND flash that recently started production at four different companies rather than the 34 nm or so process that is used now.
Incidentally, if you wait for Sandy Bridge, then AMD may have released their "Vancouver" cards that are the laptop equivalent of Northern Islands. If that's the case, then you could at least check to see how they compare to the Mobility Radeon HD 5000 series and perhaps get them if they're better. They likely will be, but I'm not expecting anything revolutionary.
Hard drive performance has been stagnant for so long, and the claims that SSDs are so vastly better are so revolutionary that claims of such a big leap in performance may well seem incredible. But not having to constantly sit there and wait for your computer to do something is really, really nice. Not having to worry that you'll kill the drive if you drop it is very nice in a laptop, too. The reduced power consumption and lack of noise are also nice bonuses.
Thanks again for all the information you've provided.
I would wholeheartedly recommend you comb through your posts and put together a "highlight reel", so to speak, that MMORPG.com could sticky. I've learned so much in this thread, but I venture there's still so much I might need to know to make a truly informed decision.
Again, your information has been great. Now I just need to see if I want to wait and see what 6-9 months might bring.
Jeez. Writing "6-9 months" really makes that seem far off!
That would be this thread:
http://forums.champions-online.com/showthread.php?t=102211
I don't care to maintain a thread on more than one forum, as it's too much work.
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If you're going to wait before getting a gaming laptop, then the reasonable choices are to wait until January if you want a high powered gaming laptop that will run hot but play games decently (and very well for a laptop), or until Llano launches, whenever that is, if you want something that will run cooler and give passable gaming performance, even if it will only offer maybe half the video performance of a higher end gaming laptop.