WANTED lappy info, thoughts and desires

my lad wants a laptop, his budget will be what it costs to get a real machine rather than some emperor's new clothes thing.

his interests are;

very large music collection.

gaming.

photography and video.

music is easily dealt with by simply having a large hard drive, this would then be played through an external DAC > then HiFi.

SSD for OS ? worth the extra ?

screen and GPU, there seems to be a HUGE price hike when you want to upgrade to either a larger screen/more res, why is this ? i've looked today at rough price guides and it seems to be 15" @ 760 upto £750 anything better £1100 +, i mean what gives ? is there nothing in between ?

any way, your thoughts please and what would you have if you had the money (but please no £3000+ machines, you know what i mean)

thanx

speeeeed

ref screen size, what about having a 15" for portable normal use then a small reasonable tv/monitor for normal/static/home use - a lot of guys at uni do that cos it ends up cheaper, get a decent size screen plus means can use any extras (xbox, dvd etc)

As for personal opinion I have always been a bit of a fan of the alienware laptops - the M17X (17") - can be customised quite nicely for sub £1300/£1400 - (then again £1400 will buy you a much better PC plus a decent tablet...)

also this isnt bad

i think he likes the idea of an all in one solution that a lappy can provide as he will probably be moving here there and everywhere over the next 4 years (in small rooms and sometimes no doubt in a rush), a laptop can easily be packed up and locked away along with a boombox to provide all of his needs.

alienware is Dell right ? wasn't their laptops called xps in the past ?

yeah fair enough, afaik alienware were a brand in their own right, dell used to have a gaming series called XPS then either 'acquired' or did a deal with alienware to sell their stuff.

EDIT: wiki tells us:

Starting in 2002, Dell considered buying Alienware, but did not take any action until March 22, 2006, when it agreed to purchase the company. The new subsidiary maintained its autonomy in terms of design and marketing. However, Alienware's access to Dell's supply chain, purchasing power, and economies of scale would lower its operating costs. Initially, Dell maintained its competing XPS line of gaming PCs, often selling computers with the same specifications. The XPS line may have hurt Alienware's market share within its market segment. Due to corporate restructuring in the spring of 2008, the XPS brand was scaled down. Product development of gaming PCs was consolidated with Dell's gaming division, with Alienware becoming Dell's premier gaming brand. On June 2, 2009, The M17x was introduced as the First Alienware/Dell branded system. Alienware now represents the premium performance space in Dell’s consumer family of products.

Speed if he has to do photography, size and resolution isnt that important. A colour correct screen is way more important. Some of Lenovos has colour correction build-in so that you do not need to buy an external one.

my mate just bought a DELL alienware laptop i7 with mutts nutts graphics and 12gb ram. The thing runs so hot the CPU down clocks so it hardly does owt.

On the ugine Heaven becnchmark he got a very low score and my 2 year old i5 with mid range graphics card PC pissed all over it. 2500 laptop v £500 PC, he wasnt happy.

When I get in later ill have a look, unless Nixy gets here first. Hes is alot more upto date on this than me.

Id personally look at i5 if you can find one around £800, post links of what you find and we will give an opinion.

Screen size is econemy of scale more 15" are made than 17".

the 17" ones here http://www.novatech.co.uk/laptop/gaming/ look quite well spec'd y/n ?

also looking at http://www.acerdirect.co.uk/Acer_Aspire_Timeline_Ultra_M3_Core_i7_Windows_7_Ultrabook__NX.RYKEK.002/version.asp

but the acer has a 760 screen for quite a lot of money imo.

heads spinnin'

Well as far as laptops go, I have a little knowledge now as I had to get one myself a month ago.

My observations:
Most 13, 14, 15 and 17 inch laptops come with a 1366*768 resolution screen which is pathetic (imo). Getting more than that usually ends up in the full 1920*1080 pixels as there seems to be nothing in between (1680*1050 is very rare, and so is 1440*900). --- Is it worth getting an 1080p screen? Hells yes. I got a 17" laptop myself now with that resolution (coming from 1280*800) and it's a complete blessing.

Why does this screen real-estate cost so much? I blame the so called Ultrabooks. They have caused quite the surge in price for notebooks in the 'enthusiast' levels (~900-1100 pounds) due to their lower weight and long battery life. People started buying them and manufacturers realised people will actually spend that kind of money --> regular laptop prices go higher and higher as well.

So making a short list of his wishes and the requirements for these:
1. Very large music collection.

Is an external 2TB harddrive an option, or would an internal drive be preferred? Laptop harddisks (2.5") are physically limited to 1TB at the moment.. so you can't have more storage than this unless you have multiple harddisks in your laptop.
If you want a 1TB harddisk and an SSD, this will effectively limit your choices of the laptop. Most 15" and smaller laptops only have room for one harddisk, unless you take the DvD player out and replace it with a caddy to place another harddisk/SSD in. There are a few (more expensive) notebooks that have a so called mSATA port/header, which will allow you to keep a regular sized (2.5") harddrive and install an mSATA SSD which are significantly smaller.


2. Photography and video.

Is this editing or just viewing? If it is editing you're going to have to look at an i7 quadcore with hyperthreading. If viewing, a regular dualcore i5 will suffice.


3. Gaming.

Which kind of games and with which settings? Gaming on a laptop with a 1080p screen is hard, because good graphics cards for laptops are hard to come by, not to mention -very- expensive. Example: a GTX680m (the best performing laptop graphics card as of now) will cost you a whopping 430 pounds EXTRA!!! in an Alienware M17x.. that is on top of the 350ish pounds they are already charging you for the standard GTX660m! The performance of this card? Around 40-45% of the regular PC version of the GTX680, which will cost you about 430 pounds in total.


Things you need to ask yourself / your son:

1. Is a laptop a 100% requirement, or can you do with a regular PC? The latter would be much cheaper to build.
2. How much gaming is he going to do? Is it a high priority that there are lots of high quality graphics on his screen, or will low/medium quality be enough?
3. Is an external harddrive acceptable for music storage?
4. If it is to be a laptop, is 15" the largest you're willing to consider, or is 17" good as well? Think of the weight and portability here though. Will it be a 'desktop replacement' (so not a lot of moving) or does it have to be carried around a lot?


Some laptops to consider:

Lenovo Ideapad Y580
- 15" and weighs 2.8 kilo's
- Quadcore i7
- 1080p screen (glare!)
- Powerful graphics card (GTX660m = one of the better mainstream gaming cards at this time. Will be able to play games such as CS:GO with 60-80 FPS on max settings for example)
- Room for a 2.5" harddisk (these are still physically limited to 1TB as of now)
- Has an mSATA header for an SSD
- Very -very- good battery (72Wh and about 5-6 hours of runtime when browsing the interwebs)

Asus N56 (15") and N76 (17") series
This one is harder to describe, mainly because there are just dozens of versions which all are just a tiny bit different.
- If gaming is important, try to find a version with a GT650m, NOT the GT630m.
- Find one with the 1080p screen (matte).
- If an SSD is required, find one with an mSATA port.. this also differs per model
- Reasonable battery. About 3-4 hours of runtime when browsing.
- Said to have the best quality casings of this price range, if you get one without tiny errors (trackpads that aren't completely flat, keyboards sometimes bend a little or alt-keys stick.. those kind of things).

Note: These laptops use a GDDR3 variant of their respective graphics cards. There are also GT650m cards with GDDR5 memory (sadly not on these laptops) which are simply put: better (15%).


Dell laptops:
There's a few choices here.
1. Inspiron 15r Special Edition (15")
2. Inspiron 17r Special Edition (17")
3. Alienware M17x (17")

What can I say? The Alienware probably has the best build quality of all multimedia/gaming laptops in this price range. It is very solid, has a good screen but weighs a metric fuckton. It has also the best gaming cards, if you are willing to dish out that kind of money. It is however quite expensive all together and you need to like the looks..

About the Inspirons:
The 15R SE has a decent graphics card (AMD HD7730m with 2GB GDDR5 Video RAM) and can be configured with an 1080p screen. The quality of this screen (matte) is quite good and bright. It can either be picked with a dualcore i5 or quadcore i7. There is also the option of an mSATA port HOWEVER!! Dell does not install the header unless you order the laptop with their shitty 32GB caching SSD installed.

The 17R SE is the laptop I bought last month. The reason was quite simple.. it was the cheapest for the hardware you get. Now I must say that I had 17% discount from Dell at the time, which you won't have now (5% max I do believe). What it can offer you compared to the 15R SE: a GT650m with GDDR5 Video RAM (this is exactly the same chip as the GTX660m from the Lenovo Y580, but clocked lower. This can be rectified with a tool called Nvidia Inspector if you so desire to get a free upgrade ), two physical harddrive bays AND an mSATA port (which is installed regardless of you buying a version with 32GB caching SSD), and you get to keep your dvd player (of course, you can replace that for a third harddisk ).

Battery life of both the 15R SE and the 17R SE is average at best. I manage to squeeze about 3,5-4 hours of life out of the battery when browsing. 2ish hours when watching a video in the train..

Closing tips:
Do not buy extra RAM, HDD's and SSD's from the Dell website. In almost all cases you can get those items much and much cheaper from a separate retailer (such as overclockers.co.uk), and can be installed very easily by yourself. This does not void warranties, as long as you remember to put the original parts back in before you send it away for repairs (if you're unlucky like that)


---

I know this is a bit of a wall of text, but it's the only way to get information like this across. Laptops are hard to pick from because you can't really customize things yourself. Do ask any questions you have and let us know which things are more important than others (such as size and games/graphics). That'll help a lot to determine a good laptop in the end.

As for the requirement of an SSD - It will really make the laptop fly, compared to the crawling it can achieve with a regular 5400RPM 2.5" harddisk. My lappy boots from a complete off-state to Google Chrome open and ready to browse in under 10 seconds. If I awake it from sleep mode that is a mere 3 seconds. I press the button and the screen comes on: ready. If this is something you want, it is a good investment.

speedhound1-WYD- wrote:i think he likes the idea of an all in one solution that a lappy can provide as he will probably be moving here there and everywhere over the next 4 years (in small rooms and sometimes no doubt in a rush), a laptop can easily be packed up and locked away along with a boombox to provide all of his needs.

alienware is Dell right ? wasn't their laptops called xps in the past ?

Alienware is a company that has been bought by Dell a few years back. The Dell XPS is just one of their product lines.. the latest versions are pretty crap though. Expensive and old-generation hardware.. the Inspirons is where it is at now for price/performance.

my only problems with the novatech ones are A the price is minus windows/whatever os you want and all models before the N1709 don't have any type of video out which isn't major but is quite useful, esp for photography/video

also (dont know how relevant this is - nixy?) afaik laptops with thunderbolt port(s) will potentially allow the use of external graphics cards in the future although once again dont know how much of this is hearsay/technically what could happen compared to something that probably will happen (also thuinderbolt will also take a fair ammount of time before it is used)

Thunderbolt is expensive right now.. very expensive. Yes, it has high bandwidth capabilities that effectively allow you to run graphics cards through them, but this is going to be a completely joke cost wise.

Then there is the issue of there only being 10 laptops in existence that I know of, that have a thunderbolt connector.. and they are all Apple MacBooks..

http://www.microdirect.co.uk/home/product/52711/asus-laptop-g53sw-ix097z-3d-vision-intel

?

560 gpu ?

MSI and ASUS make some nice gaming laptops, may want to take a look at some of those.

Aye, they do. They are however all worse than the Alienware laptops quality and cooling wise.

That G53 Speed linked is the older version, the G55 is the new one. The GT560 is a decent gaming card. Take a look at this sheet, it shows you nicely how well a card performs compared to most of the other mobile graphics cards. I suggest you filter for "single GPU only" at the top. This removes SLI setups from the list.

The GTX560 performs slightly less than the GT650m.

Edit: I just don't know how much you should focus on the graphics card here. It all depends on how important gaming is, and how important the graphics quality is.

gaming will become more important as he doesn't want to have a TV x-box set up to haul around in prison cell sized barrack block rooms.
he has always been into games (in fact it was him that got me into bf2 in '06) but when he got an x-box and because of the friends facilities on x-box he gradually moved away from pc but he happy to return.

this machine will also likely be used a lot for watching movies and downloaded TV.

he will probably use this laptop for about 3-4 years at a guess and whilst everyday portability isn't so much of an issue ultimate portability will be.

ps thx for that wall of text i'm definitely less in the dark now although laptop specs are a pain in the backside, you can easily spend hours trawling through them only to find a deal breaker at the last minute.....

edit, that lenovo Y580 (higher spec HD and SSD version) does look like a fantastic bit of kit (£999 in UK)

http://shop.lenovo.com/SEUILibrary/controller/e/gbweb/LenovoPortal/en_GB/catalog.workflow:category.details?current-catalog-id=FD6DB49790C7411D933567FC361231FB¤t-category-id=99B5C6173DE70D28B91F9B176A8E365F&action=init

The Lenovo Y580 is a brilliant laptop, yes. I wanted to get it myself, but the price of 1100 euro's vs the 746,50 I managed to pay for the Dell Inspiron was a bit too much for what I'd get in comparison For another 200 I put in some extra RAM and a 256GB SSD.. and it was still 150 euro's cheaper.

The beauty of the GT650m and the GTX660m is that they are new chips, just like the GTX680m is. The GTX670m and GTX675m are old-generation cards that are just renamed (the 670 is the old 480 which was renamed to 575 and then to 670 and is TWO!! generations old, while the 675 is the old 580).. They require a lot of power for very little performance, compared to the new cards anyway. They also run a lot hotter and throttle back earlier, making them sometimes worse than the 660 is.

I just don't know if Lenovo uses the 64GB mSATA SSD as a caching disk by default. If they do you can't install Windows on it unless you fiddle with some BIOS settings.

Hey Speed,

I've got a basic Acer 5560G lap. It runs all normal apps, multipl sound (4 programs interlayerd) easily and the graphs can do even flightsim clouds on veryhigh.

What I picked up from ur 1st post was that he wants a hugh library of music. Then the storage size is what counts, as u know. Might he consider gettin a usb-xtrastorage? They come 500G at a very low prize. Then he can take the music with him when he goes to see friends with out risking the loosing of the mainframe=lap. Also if he gets a mobile internet connection he might looking into renting some cloud for himself. There he can store as much music as he wants and he can access it on any net connected device, eg. mobilephone, lap, tap.. around the world. And it doesnt need to b his own, so if he meets with friends, he can use their device to access it and play it.

Remember, if he wants to play the music on a loudspeaker system that is larger than the one at home, it is important to have stereo outputs on the lap. Best way to do this atm on "cheap" devices is to get a usb outbox that has stereo jacks eg. to connect to a mixer.

mac