m17xR3 with 6870

3year basic is 209.30, and 3year advanced is 279.30. Do I need those if amex already gives me +1 year?

 

Right but how does it work with amex?
you can get it later on but 1400 ish is still a good price and the warranty is a plus

 

You make a claim through amex. All I have to do is retain receipt n stuff.

Man, 1:20 left to order... Will bite the bullet for 2720QM + 1080p + 6870 after I find out if HDMI in works with this lappy... (unless you can answer it here).

 

I cant answer that for sure bud sorry, but am sure it will. I would just bite the bullet and get it don't lie that clock wind down to zero debating you never know when that deal will com again.

 

Dang. Such a huge decision to drop 1month of rent into a laptop for grad school (and for fun until school starts in August).

 

I hear ya think about it though, It is an investment and a pretty good one. This comp will be good for a couple years and is upgradeable we are talking GPU, CPU, RAM, and HDDs. I would listen to Nike and just do it! lol your getting a deal.

 

Wont be upgrading anything but possibly the GPU and the RAM. Can you upgrade from a 6870 to an nvidia gpu?

 

You can upgrade to any MXM 3.0b card as long as there is BIOS support for it. So yes no worries. Lol you gonna order it?

 

Ordering now. Trying to decide 6870 or 460m...

EDIT: ORdered. 2720QM + 1080p + 460M. $1311.80 = 30% savings.

 

go 6870 you aren't going to really use the 3d enough to justify it and you dont need cuda so...

 

guys. you two realize the last 3 pages have been just you guys talking to eachother. haha. it's ok. ive done it too.

now where is that prime 95 temp reading

 

I went with viking's advice with 460 cuz of optimus support. Lots of updates from nvidia also. I've also read in the past that nvidia has better support with blizzard games.

 

Congrats bud! Welcome to the club!

Lol man I just remembered this was not his thread and we just did hijack the OP's thread. Sorry Op

 

Too late to tell you now but warranty is cheaper when you buy it with the system than afterward. Congrats on the new purchase.

 

Sorry sorry @ OP lolz.

I'd like to thank everyone for all the useful help though.

I ordered, but have not received a confirmation email yet... I have the receipt and order number though, and it has my email on it and stuff, and it's dated Jan 28 2011, even though it's technically 27th here. Is that why I havent received an email from aafes or dell yet?

 

I have 1+1 cuz of Amex.

 

screen shot of 6870 battery life



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screen shot of IGP battery life



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That is pretty impressive! A lot better than 1:30

 

@dookie11, either way you ordered, you will enjoy your R3. and i believe that 460m without 120 hz screen, it will have optimus avaliable.

and if you get a chance to edit your order, try to upgrade to 2 or 3 year warranty. it will pay off in future should anything goes wrong.

 

The warranty option is so pricey. I think my Amex's +1 year should be fine. I can also order afterward also, which I've read may be cheaper.

 

its actually more expensive to add on warranty. i cant remember where it was i saw it, but it was somewhere on NBR. just to add 1 year extra warranty, the OP had to fork out nearly $300+

 

3 year was 29x.xx on aafes. 1 year was like $100 on aafes. I'm thinking I could call it in afterward though? Should I have gotten the warranty? I can change my order tomorrow maybe.

 

I never buy with the 3 year option, always buy with 1 year, then near the end of that one year (say 2 months left) I will add a 2nd year, and if by chance I keep it to within 2 months of that 2nd year being up, will add a 3rd, really the price of adding a year is insignificant in the grand scheme of things.

 

Guys one year warranty is enough. I haven't really had problems with my laptops and usually I find a problem within the first 6 months. So not having it isn't a problem. The only real issues will be hard drive failure. I've had to replace the screen that's about it. did have to fork out 150$ but it was 3 years later and I dropt it.

 

So whats the WLED screen like, can you compare it to the RGB?

 

i would buy the 3 year just for the possibility of AW exchanging it for the R5 in 3 years time if the R3 breaks. i have seen that more than once. Plus that way you can overclock the heck out of the sucker and not worry about it. overclocking definitely does shorten service life, i think i read somewhere if your CPU is over 90degrees most of time it will half the service life.

 

So I'm fine with my 1 year +1 year from Amex = 2years, right? I don't think I'll overclock it as I'll only be playing SC2 and emulators anyway.

 

its really up to you. how long do you intend to keep the laptop for? do you intend to buy another laptop in 2 years time?

 

I doubt the AmEx year of warranty will come anywhere close to the Dell one in terms of service and convenience......I would not really count it personally.

And adding warranty after purchase cost a FORTUNE. You chose poorly. No clue where you got your information about warranty price but they were DEAD WRONG.

I added a 2nd year to my warranty.....it cost me $400. If I had added it at purchase would have been like $80.

 

Ditto^^^ Complete care at purchase is $69, and extra year of warranty at purchase is about $150-200. After purchase CC is about $2-400 per year and warranty is about $3-500 per year. If you're going to want more than 1 year do it at purchase.

 

yup i personally always get 3-4 yr cc. it also add to resale value if you ever decide to sale it.

 

By keeping your computers more than a year you are making a big mistake. Forget the warranties and just ebay your computer a year later, you recover 80% (or more, in most cases) of your investment and then you can get the latest tech without paying as much out of pocket.

The trick is to buy IMMEDIATELY when a new product gen. comes out (i.e. Sandy Bridge) , never wait a few months to jump on the band wagon or you end up stuck in a rut between product cycles.

Believe me, I have been replacing computers / phones annually for years now by doing this!

 

It is also true that technology evolves much faster than our capacity to use it 100%. The rush to buy the latest it is not wise, simply becouse the previous is still more than valid.

Then it is all about personal needs/wishes

 

What does any of this have to do with usshellfire's r3 w/ 6870.

Y'all need your own thread.

 

did another battery test.
found out that if you are only watching SD quality movies/shows. you can use power saver mode. there were no stutter or choppiness in video or audio. FRAPS showed constant 25FPS for each episode.

i was able to watch 5 episodes of house that i had on my HDD.

this amounts to a battery life of around 215 mins.
43mins * 5 = 215 mins.
thats 3hrs and 35 mins.

and i still had 10% battery life left with an estimation of 18 mins remaining.

video was watched with VLC and at 50% screen brightness and volume at 100%

am quite impressed that such a powerful machine has such a long battery life.

 

I'm very impressed. Something that I was always skeptical about. On this 15' notebook I had only lasted max 3 hours on power saver. Now 4 years later it lasts 40seconds. So anything really is a bonus now.

 

For the first time ever in my life, I've liked Dell and the direction they're heading. Everyone else has gone downhill in quality/features, while Dell made up for it with smarts (battery life)!

 

Yeah last year I'd never thought about Dell. I was a hp fan. But the envy is too pricey and it had problems when I was using it. However Msi does make a nice laptop with features. However they lack in subtle design and quality. I love your battery benchmarks that ms heaps.

 

envy too pricey pffft i think the envy is a great deal but whatevs

 

usshellfire: mate, i might have missed it but did you ever do a prime 95 CPU burn test? Or try to tweak the bios cpu overclock? Really interested in the maximum temperature the new sandy bridge would reach in the R3

 

nope. i have not done any CPU ocing or the prime 95 test that you mention. what does that do?

and i tot that for the 2720 does not support ocing?

 

well we dont know if the 2720 can be overclocked. but if you are not confident then dont worry about it, i dont want yo to burn your system out.

but prime 95 is perfectly safe. It basically puts your cpu at 100% so you can get temp readings.

Download Prime95 26.4 Build 1 / 25.9 Build 4 Free - A program designed to be used to find Mersenne Prime numbers. - Softpedia

I would appreciat it if you would download and run it and record the temps. would also tell us how the CPU throttles under prolonged 100% usage.

 

thanks, but managed to find it after once i googled it. running prime 95 now. will post screenshot on next post and first post once i have completed 15mins of torture test.

and ya, im not that confident on OC my cpu. dont dare to mess around with the bios incase i F something up. rather wait till mandrake or whoever to come out with a step by step guide.

 

just ran prime 95 for 15 mins. here are the results. seems pretty cool to me.

5 mins into run


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difference in current and max speed is due to me inserting 2 tic-tac boxes under the laptop to improve air flow.

15mins into run


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closed hwinfo32 by accident, so max temps are different.

cpu ru an at 33x multipliers for around 30 seconds before temps reached 60.
then it cut down to 25x all the way till the end of test. is that considered throttling

 

Not throttling, just the way that Turbo Boost 2.0 works, you get the max performance for a fixed time frame then it drops back down

 

hey bro; .
can you try the ■AMD Eyefinity multi-display technology1? thanks very much

 

Isn't the turboboost duration supposed to be changable within the bios on the R3 though? I thought I remembered seeing something about TB 2.0 in there and Mandrake confirmed no bios options were grayed out.

 

Does not mean he has changed them though

 

True, I'd imagine those are going to come in very handy for benchmarks if they actually allow you to extend the duration it runs for

 

from what i can see in the bios, there is a maximum time limit that you can set in SECONDS. even if you specify a time limit longer then allowed, it will only boost up to that time limit. i might have read somewhere that the max is 56? so im not too sure about that.