Best place to build a gaming laptop

[Jay]

I want something that's good the newest games that isn't priced like Alienware. Suggestions?

[Tikker]

I ended up with a dell because of that

it's pretty tough to find a decent laptop, with a good gaming card that doesn't cost a billion dollars

i think that powerpc site has semi decent laptops, but expect to pay 2500ish for a 17 inch laptop with a real vid card

[Lyion]

I want something that's good the newest games that isn't priced like Alienware. Suggestions?

I'm going to say HP is your best bet. Better deals, better laptops than Dell, and good bundles.

Check around and find something wholesale.

[Tikker]

when i was pricing them out, dell consistently had better bundles than HP for "gaming" laptops

specifically, the bigger vid cards were available at dell, while HP had so-so cards

[Tikker]

at HP you can get a c2d with a 8600, and 3gb ram for 2500ish

at dell you can get c2d, 7950 and 2g ram for 2100ish



haha oh shit

Dell has WoW laptops

you can get a horde, or an alliance one

http://configure.us.dell.com/dellstore/ ... WOW1&s=dhs

granted, they start at 4500 bucks

[Tikker]

haha oh shit

FACTION Horde edit
PROCESSOR Intel® Core™ 2 Extreme X7900 (2.8GHz/800Mhz FSB, 4MB Cache) edit
OPERATING SYSTEM Genuine Windows Vista® Ultimate Edition edit
MEMORY 4GB Shared Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM at 667MHz edit
HARD DRIVE RAID Performance: 128GB (2x64GB) Solid State Drive edit
INTERNAL OPTICAL DRIVE Blu-ray / DVD / CD Burner (Blu-ray Disc Drive) edit
WIRELESS CARDS Intel® PRO/Wireless 4965 a/g/n Mini Card edit
MOBILE BROADBAND NO MOBILE BROADBAND CRD edit
BLUETOOTH OPTIONS Built-in Bluetooth capability (2.0 EDR) edit
SOUND OPTIONS ExpressCard Sound Blaster X-Fi® Xtreme Audio Sound Card edit
My Software & Accessories
ANTIVIRUS SOFTWARE Trend Micro Internet Security 24-months edit
My Service
WARRANTY AND SERVICE 3Yr In-Home Service, Parts + Labor, 24x7 Phone Support edit
ACCIDENT AND THEFT PROTECTION 1Yr LoJack for Laptops Theft Protection (CD Shipped Separately) edit
DATASAFE ONLINE BACKUP Included 10GB DataSafe Online Backup for 1Year edit
ALSO INCLUDED WITH YOUR SYSTEM
LCD PANEL 17inch UltraSharp TrueLife Wide-screen WUXGA
VIDEO CARD 512MB Dual NVIDIA® GeForce® 8700M GT with NVIDIA® SLI®
BATTERY OPTIONS 85 WHr 9-cell Lithium Ion Battery
WORLD OF WARCRAFT EXTRAS World of Warcraft themed Backpack, T-shirt and Mouse Pad
Gaming LCD Logitech® GamePanel Display
PHYSICS CARD AGEIA™ PhysX™ Physics Accelerator
Adobe Software Adobe® Acrobat® Standard 8.1
Labels Windows Vista™ Premium
Processor Branding Intel Centrino Core Duo Processor
PRODUCTIVITY SOFTWARE No Pre-installed Productivity Software
PHOTO AND MUSIC SOFTWARE No Entertainment Software Pre-installed
DIAL-UP INTERNET ACCESS No ISP requested


total price?

8193

the 120gb SSD was like 1700 bucks by itself

[Haylo]

I built my gaming laptop from Dell. Granted it's not a monster machine but I play WoW on it all the time with absolutely no problem. I realize WoW doesn't really test a machine but still.

[Naethyn]

I've had horrible experience with dell laptops.

[Evermore]

http://www.cyberpowerpc.com/

[Tikker]

some of the powerpc ones look pretty good actually

how does an 8600 compare to a 7950? (other than the directx10 support of course)

[Tikker]

http://www.cyberpowerpc.com/system/Xplo ... urator_top

that one looks like it has a ton of potential actually. I know when I bought my dell, I looked at them, and they didn't have the same stuff that dell had then

the one I linked tho looks very decent

[Jay]

Is there such a thing as a dock so it will work with my Sony TV?

[Tikker]

sure, lots of them will have docks


my laptop has vga, dvi and s-video out

so if you had my laptop, i'd just take a dvi-hdmi connector and plug it in that way, then just use a bluetooth keyboard/mouse to control it

lots of the docks are more just port replicators, and not real docks anymore, but google them up (lots are usb based now)

[Lyion]

at HP you can get a c2d with a 8600, and 3gb ram for 2500ish

at dell you can get c2d, 7950 and 2g ram for 2100ish

Try the HP Voodoo gaming laptop. Better deals, better reliability.

http://www.voodoopc.com/system/quotekit ... =78#imgmed

[Narrock]

haha oh shit

FACTION Horde edit
PROCESSOR Intel® Core™ 2 Extreme X7900 (2.8GHz/800Mhz FSB, 4MB Cache) edit
OPERATING SYSTEM Genuine Windows Vista® Ultimate Edition edit
MEMORY 4GB Shared Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM at 667MHz edit
HARD DRIVE RAID Performance: 128GB (2x64GB) Solid State Drive edit
INTERNAL OPTICAL DRIVE Blu-ray / DVD / CD Burner (Blu-ray Disc Drive) edit
WIRELESS CARDS Intel® PRO/Wireless 4965 a/g/n Mini Card edit
MOBILE BROADBAND NO MOBILE BROADBAND CRD edit
BLUETOOTH OPTIONS Built-in Bluetooth capability (2.0 EDR) edit
SOUND OPTIONS ExpressCard Sound Blaster X-Fi® Xtreme Audio Sound Card edit
My Software & Accessories
ANTIVIRUS SOFTWARE Trend Micro Internet Security 24-months edit
My Service
WARRANTY AND SERVICE 3Yr In-Home Service, Parts + Labor, 24x7 Phone Support edit
ACCIDENT AND THEFT PROTECTION 1Yr LoJack for Laptops Theft Protection (CD Shipped Separately) edit
DATASAFE ONLINE BACKUP Included 10GB DataSafe Online Backup for 1Year edit
ALSO INCLUDED WITH YOUR SYSTEM
LCD PANEL 17inch UltraSharp TrueLife Wide-screen WUXGA
VIDEO CARD 512MB Dual NVIDIA® GeForce® 8700M GT with NVIDIA® SLI®
BATTERY OPTIONS 85 WHr 9-cell Lithium Ion Battery
WORLD OF WARCRAFT EXTRAS World of Warcraft themed Backpack, T-shirt and Mouse Pad
Gaming LCD Logitech® GamePanel Display
PHYSICS CARD AGEIA™ PhysX™ Physics Accelerator
Adobe Software Adobe® Acrobat® Standard 8.1
Labels Windows Vista™ Premium
Processor Branding Intel Centrino Core Duo Processor
PRODUCTIVITY SOFTWARE No Pre-installed Productivity Software
PHOTO AND MUSIC SOFTWARE No Entertainment Software Pre-installed
DIAL-UP INTERNET ACCESS No ISP requested


total price?

8193

the 120gb SSD was like 1700 bucks by itself

Sounds like it's $5k overpriced.

[Ganzo]

side note, anyone have experience designing good video/photo editing pc, i'm building one for a friend, wanna spend about 1k for something he can use professionaly, have the software already, i'll put it together myself, just wanna see what others think would be good cpu/gpu combo for it; any reason to make it SLI?

[Lyion]

side note, anyone have experience designing good video/photo editing pc, i'm building one for a friend, wanna spend about 1k for something he can use professionaly, have the software already, i'll put it together myself, just wanna see what others think would be good cpu/gpu combo for it; any reason to make it SLI?

Yup, buy an Apple. That's what they're built for.

[Ganzo]

he don't wanna spend 1800 on mac pro than buy 2k worth of adobe stuff, i have adobe cs3 for windows already, hence building windows based machine

[Tikker]

SLI for photoshop seems overkill

now if he's doing a bunch of 3d rendering, maybe

basically, get something quad core, and a decent video card, and lots of ram, and life will be good

[10sun]

I run out of processing power more than anything these days while dealing with 5 megapixel images.

I have a Athlon 64 3000+ (I know, weaksauce nowadays).
2 gigs of Corsair dual channel ram
ATI x850 Pro
Running my cache on a 10k rpm Raptor w/ OS on a 7.2k rpm crap drive.

Processing power is my current bottleneck. If I apply certain filters, it will take 15 seconds to process everything.

-Adam

[Ganzo]

so basicly overkill with cpu ang ok gpu and ton of ram got it. does he need dx10 or can i load xp for him and run dx9 and still be fine?

[10sun]

so basicly overkill with cpu ang ok gpu and ton of ram got it. does he need dx10 or can i load xp for him and run dx9 and still be fine?

I can't think of a reason to have DX10 while just doing graphic design / photoshop.

Be sure to give him multiple disk drives. Preferably 3. Two to run RAID-1 & a third to act as the cache drive.

That way if and when something does fuck up, there will be protection & redundancy.

-Adam

[Lyion]

he don't wanna spend 1800 on mac pro than buy 2k worth of adobe stuff, i have adobe cs3 for windows already, hence building windows based machine

There's a reason the industry uses Apple for this.

Again, if he just wants home stuff, have him get a cheap Linux box. If he wants to do it professionally, get an Apple.

[Ganzo]

he don't wanna spend 1800 on mac pro than buy 2k worth of adobe stuff, i have adobe cs3 for windows already, hence building windows based machine

There's a reason the industry uses Apple for this.

Again, if he just wants home stuff, have him get a cheap Linux box. If he wants to do it professionally, get an Apple.

I think you are missing the point. He got $1000 he is still learning this and just starting out. So when he has 5k+ to buy macpro adobecs3 and final cut, he will do it; for now i was asking for pc counterpart that whould get him to learn the business