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Ignoring Sandy beach and the like, please just post if you can give me an honest opinion on one of these laptops or offer another choice on a current product for gaming.
http://www.pcworld.co.uk/gbuk/hp-pavilion-dv7-4180ea-07756991-pdt.html
http://www.currys.co.uk/gbuk/hp-pavilion-dv7-4045ea-06590283-pdt.html
http://www.currys.co.uk/gbuk/acer-aspire-8943g-06539242-pdt.html
One thing I fail to understand is the difference in price between the HP laptops?
Comments
Don't get Acer. They make very low quality laptops.
Between the other 2 the main difference is the dv7-4180ea has a Blu-Ray player. That's the major price difference. The processors are pretty comparable, so if you want a BD player, go with the dv7-4180ea, if not go with the dv7-4045ea.
"There is as yet insufficient data for a meaningful answer."
I own a seperate bluray player, so thats the only difference? Ill take the 4180-ea off my list then, and thanks for the heads up about acer. EDIT: The 4045 is pretty decent for gaming?
Its so hard making a choice! Just when I think I should buy it I read that the AMD quad cores are bad processors !
Actually, it's pretty easy to choose what you should do now: wait for Sandy Bridge to launch next week. Between that and Bobcat, any laptop that you could possibly get today would be woefully obsolete next week.
The problem with AMD's current laptop processors is that they don't have anything analogous to Intel's turbo boost, and they also don't have power gating. The latter means they use way too much power at idle, which kills your battery life. The former means that they have poor single threaded performance. If you're running a single threaded program, then the Intel quad core will clock that core up to 2.8 GHz and shut down the others. The AMD quad core will keep all four cores running at 1.6 GHz. That means that the Intel processor will offer near double the performance of the AMD one in single threaded programs.
The only reason to get an AMD laptop processor right now is if you're on a very tight budget but want something faster than Intel's Atom. That changes with Bobcat next week, and AMD will take over the entire low end and leave no point in getting an Intel processor in machines under $500 or so. AMD won't be competitive at the high end at least until Llano launches in the spring, and possibly for long after that.
As much sense as that makes, its hard to decipher as, despite it apparently being the new thing in a single week, I havent heard of any products let alone the prices of these potential products, so I cant conduct any research or have any understanding of what the rest of the components may be like, the lack of information makes it seem like its months away, not a single week. If you know of any products, or price ranges, it would be much appreciated.
personal question edit, why on earth are they called sandybridge and, especially bobcat?
Ever hear of an NDA? Was there exactly nothing in the game in Rift until suddenly a massive amount of content was added when the beta events NDA ended last week? The difference between that and this is that for hardware, you don't end the NDA until the launch date.
Intel doesn't want to come out and publicly announce, you shouldn't buy our products today, but should wait until next week when we'll have something a lot better. They want their products that they've already built to get bought up rather than languishing on store shelves forever.
There are already motherboard manufacturers showing off motherboards with chipsets and processor sockets that don't fit any current processors, but they can't officially say that they're for Sandy Bridge. There are already Sandy Bridge processors on sale in some parts of the world where retailers decide to violate the NDA and sell them sooner. Tech media sites almost certainly already have the processors and are benchmarking them as we speak, but Intel has said you can't post your review until such and such time on such and such date. At least one site in China decided to break the NDA and has already posted it.
Sandy Bridge is coming next week. There's no real question about that. Maybe it will launch on Wednesday, or maybe not until Friday. But it's definitely coming next week. Intel is trying to suppress information about it, but it does leak out.
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Why did Sandy Bridge and Bobcat get those names? Why do any processor architectures get their names? AMD and Intel can internally call their parts whatever they want, and to some degree, pick code names to try not to make it obvious what they're talking about if information does leak out. In the Radeon HD 4000 series of video cards, AMD used code names of RV710, RV730, RV740, RV770, and RV790, which makes the relative product positioning obvious. For the Radeon HD 5000 series of cards, they used Cedar, Redwood, Juniper, Cypress, and Hemlock, so if Nvidia got a hold of some leaked information about, say, Juniper, they wouldn't necessarily know what sort of chip it was talking about.
Why did Intel's previous architectures of Conroe, Penryn, Nehalem, or Westmere get those names? Why did the future ones of Ivy Bridge, Haswell, and Rockwell get those names? I don't know. Intel has taken a lot of code names from geography near their Oregon design team (e.g., Nehalem is a small city on the Oregon coast, and there is a Nehalem River and Nehalem Bay campground nearby).
AMD takes some code names from rivers. They also have their server code names named after cities with F1 races (Barcelona, Shanghai, Istanbul, Magny-Cours, Valencia, Interlagos, etc.). Some of their processor architecture names are of intimidating sounding machinery, such as Sledgehammer or Bulldozer. But why Bobcat or Stars? I don't know.
Thanks for the info. Do you have any idea what kind of price range laptops with these sandy bridge will retail for? Or what kind of fps difference they will make to games? Actually, would it be ok if i private messaged you in a week or two to find out some sandy bridge laptops ? ^.^ Im always rubbish deciphering the model codes from one another
The Core i7 720QM (Clarksfield chip, Nehalem architecture) that you're looking at has a stock clock speed of 1.6 GHz. It has a TDP of 45 W, and as long as it isn't using too much power or getting too hot, it will clock a single core up to 2.8 GHz, two cores up to 2.4 GHz, or three or four cores up to 1.73 GHz.
The Core i7 2720QM (Sandy Bridge) that should launch next week has a stock clock speed of 2.2 GHz. It has the same TDP of 45 W, and so long as it isn't using too much power or getting too hot, it will clock as many of its four cores as are in use as high as 3.3 GHz. All four cores at 3.3 GHz simultaneously would take a very unusual workload, but the point is, unlike how Clarksfield will cap its performance, Sandy Bridge will clock itself as high as is safe in a laptop.
Both Clarksfield and Sandy Bridge measure power consumption and temperature, and change clock speeds on the fly to offer more performance when it is safe. Sandy Bridge is just more aggressive about it. Both will also shut down cores that aren't being used to save power, and can turn cores off and on several times per second if appropriate to the workload.
Furthermore, Sandy Bridge offers better performance per clock cycle than Clarksfield. A Sandy Bridge processor running at 2.2 GHz might well be roughly equivalent to a Clarksfield running at 2.5 GHz. I'm not sure about energy efficiency intrinsic to the architecture.
Sandy Bridge is also a full node die shrink from Clarksfield, so even apart from architectural considerations, doing the same computations should theoretically take about 30% less power. Alternatively, one can do about 40% more work while putting out the same amount of heat as before.
As for pricing, among stores that have released parts early, the desktop Sandy Bridge processors are priced about the same as the Lynnfield processors that they replace. Lynnfield and Clarksfield are the same processor die, but the former goes in desktops and the latter in laptops. Desktop parts get clocked and volted higher for better performance, while laptop parts get clocked and volted lower for reduced power consumption. The desktop and laptop versions of Sandy Bridge should likewise be the same processor die.
I'll be very surprised if Intel decides to jack prices way up on the laptop parts but not the desktop parts. They already charge around $300 for a Core i7 720QM, and if they try to charge $500 for Sandy Bridge, they'll just push people to wait for AMD to sell something for cheaper. You make more money by selling a processor for $300 than by not selling one for $500.
There are at least three different Sandy Bridge dies. The quad core one is launching next week. The dual core one should launch in the next few months. I don't expect it to launch next week, but it could. A six or eight core version should launch in the latter half of 2011, but that won't be appropriate for laptops.
One other advantage of waiting a week is that there might be some new laptop video cards that launch next week. A laptop version of Barts would be the best laptop card on the market for a high end gaming machine, but might be out of your budget. Turks could conceivably launch next week, and if it does, it will likely be something like half of a Barts chip and make a nice card for a gaming laptop.
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There is a big fundamental difference between processor performance and video card performance for gaming purposes. For video cards, more performance is better. A better video card lets you turn graphical settings higher and make the game look nicer. You can get by with a decent but not that great video card by turning video settings down, and still have smooth frame rates.
With processors, you can't do that. You either have a fast enough processor or else you really don't. Changing video settings has a tremendous impact on how hard a game pushes a video card, but only a slight impact on how much it pushes the processor. If a game is choppy at high graphical settings because your processor isn't fast enough, then it will probably still be choppy at low graphical settings. An inadequate processor will mean that a lot of games simply will not run smoothly.
Getting a good enough processor in a desktop is pretty easy. In a laptop, for a number of games, Sandy Bridge will be the first processors that really are good enough for the game to run smoothly. I'd say that's a huge deal, and worth waiting a week.
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Finally, you should get the standard warning: don't buy a gaming laptop unless you really need a gaming laptop in particular. Even if you need a laptop for some purposes and a gaming machine for others, that doesn't justify getting them both in one machine as a gaming laptop. Often it would be cheaper to buy both a cheap laptop and a gaming desktop rather than a single gaming laptop. The cheap laptop would be lighter and offer better battery life than the gaming laptop, and the gaming desktop would offer superior gaming performance to the gaming laptop.
Now, if you travel a lot and want to play games while away from home (e.g., there was a truck driver here who is only infrequently home), then a gaming laptop makes sense. But if you're just thinking that it would be nice to sit on the couch and play rather than sit at a desktop, don't. Gaming laptops tend to run fairly hot, so you don't want to set them on your lap while gaming, and may not want to use the built-in keyboard, either, as it will be hot. Gaming laptops are far less reliable than desktops, and much harder to repair if they do break. Laptops are also nearly impossible to upgrade. If you later decide that one particular part isn't good enough, in a desktop, you could replace just that one part; in a laptop, you have to replace the whole thing. A gaming laptop also tends to carry about double the price tag of a gaming desktop with comparable performance, if you don't need new peripherals for the desktop.
Is there any specific place where product launches with the new technology will be announced? Or just standard computer store websites?
Edit: Just thought of a brilliant question Quizzical, what laptop or desktop do YOU own?
Tech media sites will have reviews posted minutes after the launch. Intel's recent NDAs in the past expired at midnight EST on some particular day. Once the NDA expires, companies will be free to sell whatever they have. Some vendors will be quicker to get products out the door than others. There are probably millions of Sandy Bridge processors sitting in warehouses or stores by now waiting for Intel to give the OK to startselling them.
Personally, I don't have a laptop. I'm probably going to get a Bobcat laptop (Zacate E-350) with a good SSD shortly after they launch. That should finally offer the combination of a low price tag (unlike Intel's CULV processors), long battery life (unlike current AMD laptops), and passable even if not great performance (unlike Intel's Atom), but it won't really be appropriate for gaming. I'm pretty sure it would be able to run some older games like Guild Wars well, though.
The desktop I use is one that I built myself in October 2009. The key system specs are:
Intel Core i7-860
Sapphire/ATI Radeon HD 5850 (which now has a Zalman ZF3000A cooler on it because the original fan was malfunctioning and I didn't want to replace the entire card)
120 GB OCZ Agility
Asus P7P55D
4 GB 1333 MHz DDR3 7-7-7-24
Enermax Pro 82+ 525 W
Antec Three Hundred Illusion
CyberPower Systems CP1350AVRLCD
Two monitors, both 19", 1280x1024
My current plan is to replace the machine outright sometime around 2013. That date isn't set in stone, of course. Realistically, I'll replace it when one of the following three things happens:
1) The machine dies outright and is too expensive to replace whatever broke,
2) It doesn't run some particular program that I use very well and newer hardware would,
or 3) Monitor manufacturers come out with some thin bezel monitors and I decide to go for a three monitor Eyefinity setup (or whatever Nvidia equivalent will likely be out by then).
I might be hesitant to replace it for reasons 2 or 3, though, so long as the machine is reliable. I've had it for over a year, and it has never crashed in that time. No blue screens, no system lockups, no random reboots, no inexplicable shutdowns, nothing like that. Some particular programs have crashed, but not brought down the whole system. And it's been through stress testing, firmware flashing, power outages, and even my apartment flooding, so it's had plenty of excuses to crash if it were so inclined.
It's conceivable that I might pick up a gaming laptop in 2013, if AMD's 22 nm die shrink of Trinity is nice. I figure that's the earliest that there might be a decently nice gaming laptop on the market (as opposed to nice for a laptop, which means not very nice at all), though it might take a number of years beyond that for good gaming laptops to appear.
Also just found this from alienware, in 8 days time, something is coming, and its huge, exciting , skinny , awesome, super, gnarly, badass , dope, and sexy.... Skinny? I presume the timing isnt just coincedence with the processor but.. skinny hints at laptops