TR Forums

I've been eyeing an laptop upgrade for a while now. My current DTR model is now more than three years old and subsequently out of warranty.

Presently I have a T7500 Intel Core 2 Duo (Memrom) 2.2GHz, with 4GB of DDR2 RAM (400MHz), 8600M GT, and most importantly a 17" 16:10/1920x1200 screen. In my searches around the interweb I haven't found anyone excepet Alienware to still offer 17" 16:10 screens for laptops. So with the holiday deals in play I decided to see what I could build.

Operating System Genuine Windows® 7 Ultimate, 64bit, English

Processor Intel® Core™ i7 840QM Quad Core Processor, 1.86GHz (3.20GHz Turbo Mode, 6M Cache)

Memory 8GB Dual Channel Memory (2x 4GB DDR3)

Display Panels 17-inch WideUXGA 1920 x 1200 RGB LED (1200p)

Video Card SLI® 1GB GDDR3 NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 285M

Hard Drive 640GB 7,200RPM SATA-II HDD

CD ROM/DVD ROM Slot-Loading Dual Layer Blu-ray Reader (BR-ROM, DVD+-RW, CD-RW)

Sound Internal High-Definition 5.1 Surround Sound Audio

Wireless Intel® Ultimate N WiFi Link 6300 a/g/n 3x3 MIMO Technology

Service 3 Year Advanced Service Plan, DMLP

Bluetooth Internal Wireless Bluetooth® 2.1 with EDR

Final price: $3,200

My current DTR is pretty resonable. I can manage UT3 games still, so long as I beat them with the ugly stick and run at 1024x768. I also can do VM work on it, I'm seeing some posibilities for my job where having the extra cores and memory would allow me to do more. I'd of course like to have my cake and eat it too, that is, getting all that without losing screen real estate.

Is there some viable alternative I'm missing? I'm plain crazy for considering said laptop is a reasonable response too. I'm debating pretty hard if I want to make this purchase or not.

I'd also look at the m6500 if thats what your looking at. It would be a little less flashy and a bit more business like. I just configured one for $2,702.00. It has ATI FirePro M7820 which according to http://www.notebookcheck.net/ATI-FirePr ... 234.0.html is supposed to be a mobile 5870 (really the 5770/5750). I also configured it with the 17" Wide Screen WUXGA RGBLED LCD Panel, basic 3yr nbd, same processor, and 8 gigs of memory. You should easily get a discount off that to lower the price.

I suppose that you ruled out the HP Envy 17 and the Sager NP8120 because they're 1920x1080?

Envy 17 models were landing at ~$2,700 before shipping and tax. Ruled them out because of the 16:9 screen. Though for the price difference between the Envy and M17x, I get an extra video card in the M17x. So the prices seem very similar.

The m6500 is better than the M17x and it shows as you watch the sticker price rocket into the five grand range. It's not as value oriented at the M17x, but it is definitely a great deal more robust and expansive (16GB of memory in a laptop!). I couuldn't get the m6500 to settle in near the price of the M17x. I also have the M17x funded with a 23% discount, so I think that's gonna make it tough.

I appreciate the suggestions!

The Sager NP8120 is a nearly identical laptop; I wonder if that's who Alienware sources it from. Setting the NP8210 up the same lands the price at three grand before shipping and tax (if applicable). So very little price difference. Really the only big difference is the 16:9 on the Sager vs the 16:10 on the Alienware.

I think this M17x is a good deal. Outside of the workstation m6500 and the M17x I'm not seeing 16:10 laptop screens anymore. I guess they're dying out.

I might could get Dell to take a little bit more off the top if I called them Wednesday. Now I need to decide if I want to spend the pile of money or keep swimming in it.

I'm not sure how mobile you need this to be, but is buying a laptop with a smaller screen plus a large standalone monitor out of the question?

I have to be honest, is the difference between 1920x1200 and 1920x1080 really a big enough deal to warrant spending at least a grand more? SLI'ed GTX 285M's is foolhardy at a time when DirectX 11 is taking off, and it's slight overkill at that resolution.

You'll get a lot more bang for your buck going down to something like an Asus G73 with a GeForce GTX 460M or (the more preferable) Mobility Radeon HD 5870. I'm sorry, but with that bad boy floating around well under two bills I find the bigger gaming notebooks far harder to justify.

scpulp wrote:

I have to be honest, is the difference between 1920x1200 and 1920x1080 really a big enough deal to warrant spending at least a grand more? SLI'ed GTX 285M's is foolhardy at a time when DirectX 11 is taking off, and it's slight overkill at that resolution.

You'll get a lot more bang for your buck going down to something like an Asus G73 with a GeForce GTX 460M or (the more preferable) Mobility Radeon HD 5870. I'm sorry, but with that bad boy floating around well under two bills I find the bigger gaming notebooks far harder to justify.

It has the option for Crossfire 5870M instead of the SLI 285M.

I opted for the 285M because I don't like ATI's drivers. I own a 4870x2 and it makes me unhappy, so yes, I'm hip to the current driver situation. Not interested in dropping three bills on a laptop that will have a giant cursor for the next six months while ATI tries to find their way out of the Canadian forest.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/3758/avad ... -vs-285m/3

The performance difference is so small as to be irrelevant. Just a matter of if I want DX11 or not. Don't really care about DX11. By the time it really matters - in three years - it'd be time to replace this laptop again. Hell, arguably it'd be feeling pretty weak in about eighteen months and having the 5870s wouldn't change that. They'll be too weak to run anything long before games become DX11 only.

http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey - 5.6% of Steam users are DX11. Long way from critical mass. So long as console ports are a large part of PC gaming, most DX11 you're gonna get is a few tacked on effects. Pointless.

MixedPower wrote:

I'm not sure how mobile you need this to be, but is buying a laptop with a smaller screen plus a large standalone monitor out of the question?

From what I've seen so far, that wouldn't really save much money. It also impedes my abilty to drop it into my backpack and go from point A to B. In that right situation though, that might be more reasonable.

FWIW - I'm not sure I'm gonna buy this. I'm still debating whether I want to do the hand me down thing to my wife or get her something new and tweak my desktop. She's okay with this, but I'm less sanguine about it.

I'm impressed, I've never had my own review cited to me like that before.

Honestly I feel the same way you do about ATI's Crossfire implementation and constant driver issues; I run a single 5870 in my desktop. I could be running two, but the stuttering introduced invariably makes the gameplay worse. I don't deal with cursor enlargement, just random cursor corruption. But that said, I've also had real issues with Nvidia's drivers, too; neither one is anywhere near perfect.

That said, DX11's uptake is coming on a lot faster than DX10's did and I think that kind of layout for DX10-class hardware is foolish. And ultimately my original point still stands: is that notebook really worth paying nearly twice as much as you would for an Asus G73? And please keep in mind I actually get my hands on these things for a living (sidenote: I generally discourage buying Clevo or rebranded Clevo notebooks).

scpulp wrote:

And ultimately my original point still stands: is that notebook really worth paying nearly twice as much as you would for an Asus G73? And please keep in mind I actually get my hands on these things for a living (sidenote: I generally discourage buying Clevo or rebranded Clevo notebooks).

Unfortunately it looks like you can't customize the Asus notebooks to order. The top end G73 models I can find are not apple to apple comparisons, hence the lower price.

Cheaper edition of 7
Cheaper Intel processor
Cheaper LCD
Only one video card (generally a 460M)
Less HD space
No Blu-Ray drive
non-Intel Wireless Adapter
No three year warranty with my mistress went crazy and threw it in the tub coverage.

So it's not especially shocking the price is so much lower, you're getting quite a bit less.