Tell me what you think of my build

So I plan on buying a m17x soon. I want it for gaming and for school. Here's what I got.

Software & Services

Genuine Windows® 7 Home Premium, 64bit, English
Intel® Core™ i7 820QM 1.73GHz (3.06GHz Turbo Mode, 8MB Cache)
1GB ATI Radeon™ Mobility HD 5870
17-inch WideUXGA 1920 x 1200 RGB LED (1200p)
4GB Dual Channel Memory (2x 2GB DDR3)
256GB SSD - Samsung Solid State Drive
Slot-Load Dual Layer DVD Burner (DVD+-RW, CD-RW)
Intel® Ultimate N WiFi Link 6300 a/g/n 3x3 MIMO Technology

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1 Year Basic Service Plan


I plan on just overclocking the 820 to the level of the 920 processor. Please tell me what you think of the rest.

 

I think it will do just about anything you want it too very nice

 

BTW, the alienware bios currently doesn't support overclocking for the non-extreme edition procs. You cant overclock the 820qm unless alienware changes that.

 

Increase ram to 6 Gb. Some games actually run slower in 64bit with 4Gb than they do running in 32bit with 4Gb. Buy only what SSD you need now as the price is falling. I would crossfire and even cut back on the SSD to gain the extra GPU.

 

Rly??? I talked to a dell rep. and they said that I cant over clock it :/ But thank you.

Should i keep the processor at 820? and up my ram to 6 gb? or up it to 920 and to 6?

 

Personally, I'd go for Crossfire graphics (dual cards) and get the smallest possible non-SSD drive you can.

The Crossfire graphics will give you a lot better frame rates in the latest lot of games, and will allow you to play future games at higher graphics settings for longer.

I'm suggesting that you ditch the SSD because Dell typically pump up the prices of their drives. There's a good chance that you can do the Crossfire graphics, plus buy an SSD drive from somewhere like NewEgg, for the same price as your current setup.

(If you don't believe me about the drive pricing, Dell NZ recent changed the minimum M17x spec from 2x 320GB drives to 2x 500GB drives. This pushed up the price by $NZ300, which is more than it costs to buy 2x 500GB WD Black drives locally.)

 

I believe you, but I'm not too savvy with replacing laptop parts

 

Ram and HD's are easy upgrades anyone can do. The rest which ever you pick go with Alienware, you do not want to be changing parts every time a warranty issue comes up.
I like all my warranty in one basket so to speak.

 

Prioritise getting Crossfire 5870s. THAT is the MOST important aspect of the M17x. Graphics, then screen, THEN CPU, and THEN RAM/HDD.

Work in that order towards your budget.

If it requires you get an i5 processor to be able to get Crossfire 5870s, so be it. It'll still be far better in games than it would with a single 5870.

I wouldn't upgrade to the 820. IMO it's not worth the price for the small increase over the 720. Either go for the 720, or go all the way and get the 920.

I wouldn't get 6GB of RAM. No games out there today will max out your ram at 4GB even. Hell, I'm still running on 2GB and my entire game library runs fine. If you ever do choose to upgrade in the future you could just buy a 4GB stick and put it in yourself-changing the RAM on a laptop is very easy, but if you're still unsure you could take it to a local computer store to do it.

 

^ Speaks truth.

 

If I could afford it I would have bought the 920 but I had to draw a budget at some point. The sweet spot according to reviews places the 820's as the best bang for the buck. I would rather have 8 Gb of ram than 4Gb with 920's. The 920's are I think are $1000 more and they suck up more power off an already overly tight PSU. If you are going to spend $5000 on a system than you need to evaluate the alternatives as that is a lot of money.

32 bit games use 4Gb of ram. When you use 64 bit games the performance suffers with 4Gb. When you increase your 64 bit OS to 6Gb and you play the same game with 64 bit version and 6Gb of ram you are on par with older 32 bit games running 4Gb. If you play exclusively older games than it really doesn't matter. The main purpose of Windows 7 64 was to unlock the 4GB of RAM. I don't think Microsoft is going to twittle their thumbs. Most modern PC titles like Battlefield Bad Company 2 use 6-8GB. I have a Ram monitor on my logitech keyboard and all games I play (modern releases) use 6-8Gb. Rarely do I see the monitor dip to 4Gb.

Dell has actually discontinued the 4Gb option in some countries. The 720's are also a good choice.

 

I can't believe how much help you all have been, you are really helping me out with my build... ALOT!!! So Thank you all.
Now just a question to all you m17x owners. If you could go back before you purchased your 17x would have you gone down to the 15? or is the 17 perfect for you? Is the who thing too big? Like just unnecessary? Because I love the idea of having a 17in monitor on a lap top, and just having a full desktop experience on my lap.

 

There is a lot of detail on a 17" 1920 x 1200. I think the detail would be lost on a 15" 1920 x 1080. The 15" has only single GPU and case not much different in size than the 17". However if you have to carry this to the library every day than the 17" might be too big and too heavy.

 

For a gaming system on 64-bit Windows 7, 4GB of RAM should be sufficient (assuming you don't have too many other applications running in the background). The core of 64-bit Windows 7 uses around 1GB of RAM (about twice that of 32-bit Windows 7). If you run a 32-bit game (up to 2GB) that leaves around 1GB for anything else that may be running. Unless you've installed a bunch of junk of your system, this 1GB or so should be fine.

What you've said here isn't quite true.

32-bit applications (games or whatever) cannot access more than 4GB (2^32 bytes) of memory address space. Windows (32- or 64-bit) reserves half of this address space for system use, meaning that only 2GB is usable by the application. It doesn't matter how much RAM you have in your system, 2GB is the available usable memory for any single 32-bit application. (There is one exception that allows you to make this 3GB, but this has its own problems and I won't address that here.)

64-bit applications (which only run on 64-bit Windows) can access millions of terabytes (2^64) of address space, which is enough to access all of the RAM on a machine. Half of this is still reserved by the system, but that's not going to be a limitation for many, many years.

Any application that's written in C++ (which includes fairly well all big-name games available today) must be compiled as either 32-bit or 64-bit. A 64-bit application can only use 64-bit DLLs. A 32-bit application can only use 32-bit DLLs, and can only access 2GB of address space.

The vast majority of games available at present are 32-bit only. This is because almost all XP systems, most Vista systems, and half of all Windows 7 systems are 32-bit. If a game can run as 64-bit, the installer will contain both 32-bit and 64-bit copies of the EXE and DLLs. The installer can choose to install one or both sets on your machine, but only the 64-bit version will be able to use more than 2GB of RAM.

From what I can find, BF:BC2 is only a 32-bit game, and will therefore not use more than 2GB of RAM itself. (A Google search didn't find much, and without a copy of the game myself I can't verify, so I may be wrong.) Your Logitech memory monitor may be showing more usage than that, but that's the RAM usage for your entire system (possible including the Windows Pre-Fetch cache).

 

Thanks FalconMachV, I finnaly appreciate a view from somebody that doesn't rly favor either, but says it how it is. I had another post a while ago about this topic. nzgeek you clearly know your stuff and I will be keeping what you've said into consideration.
I think im going to go with 6gbs of ram so I can run other apps in the background, (ventrillo, steam, internet, ect)
Thanks for all your help, if anybody else has anything to say I will more than gladly take your advice.

 

Not a problem, I'm happy to help.

And I think you've made a good choice with 6GB. This gives you a bit more headroom should you decide to play a game with a few other bits running too. When I order mine in a few weeks, I'll be going with 6GB too .

 

Absolute rubbish. I'm playing Bad Company 2 with only 2GB of RAM in my whole system, on a 64 bit OS. Absolutely NO problem. It never rises above 1.2GB of usage for me, leaving plenty of the rest for the OS.

I play a lot of modern games. The Crysis series, Lord of the Rings Online, Bad Company 2, NFS Shift, Modern Warfare 2, Dragon Age Origins...and so the list goes on. The ONLY one that ever causes even a small problem with my RAM is Lord of the Rings Online, where it has to move some of the OS files onto the page file, so it sometimes takes a minute or two to recover coming out of the game.

Honestly, what I would have done is buy 4GB with the system, and then upgrade to 8GB when the 4GB RAM sticks become cheap. I also believe it is quite a bit cheaper to upgrade aftermarket than through Dell.

 

EvilCorsair

I just turned on Left4dead2 and it is loads with 5Gb and runs continuously with 7Gb. Just turned on BBC2 and it runs continuously with 6Gb. So what is your point? Dell doesn't even sell 4Gb in Canada their minimum is now is 6Gb.

Report: 3GB vs 6GB RAM on Core i7 Benched

Nzgeek,

Battlefield Bad Company 2 runs on either 32 bit or 64 bit. How hard would it have been for you to google that or to check with EA games? As I said I have Logitech keyboard model G19 that continuously monitors RAM. Vista 32 bit uses a maximum of 4Gb of ram but actually can only access 3.4. Everything I said was exactly true. Read the link I attatched. If you are planning on playng games designed for 32 bit systems of yesterday than by all means stick with 4Gb.

 

the G19 measures total ram usage, not what the specific program is using.. LFD2 does *not* use 5-7GB of Ram, the OS, all it's services it's running, any background apps *and* LFD2 use 5-7GB of ram. It doesn't have a neat feature to tell you which program is using how much, it's just a percent of total available ram..until someone makes an applet to do that of course. maxed out Napoleon total war uses exactly 1GB of ram on the campaign map and 1.5GB's in the 3d battles. I still manage to have 2.4GB free. Even Metro2033 doesn't use 1GB of ram most times too.

 

That really is strange. Neither L4D2 nor BFBC2 uses more than 1.2GB on my system.

That article does show quite a lot though. I'm already going to upgrade my RAM, but I'm not sure to what yet. Either 4GB of HyperX gaming memory, or 8GB of (higher latency) Corsair Value.

 

This thread is now closed due to too much arguing.