260m vs 280m?

so i see that you can get SLI 260m or 280m and i was just wondering at the minimum i would get SLI 260m but is the 280m that much better for the price? is it worth it?

as im looking at getting a new laptop - i have been looking at the Sager 18incher but i think that might be a bit too big so i would prefer staying with 17inch so Alienware seems perfect, except for the price

would this be a good setup? i mainly play games but i do the occasional bit of coursework - be it Video rendering and 3d work

Q9000 - what would be better this or the T9600 for what i need?
SLI 260m
1900 x 1200
4gb RAM
1TB hard drive (2 x 500gb)
BluRay reader

£2,369.00

is this a good price? anything you would change
i could save £70.00 if i change to the T9600

Once i have decided what i want i will be putting my Laptop backup for sale
im hoping to get a decent about to put towards this and then just saving up the rest, which wouldnt take long as i have a good £1000 saved already towards my new laptop

 

The performance difference wont be that huge honestly , I got the 280s simply because i want the most performance and i also dont want to regret not having ordered them after the fact. CPUs RAM Harddrives all can be upgraded very easily and so can GPUs but those usually dont drop in price over time like the rest of the stuff mentioned so i figured everything else can suffer for the moment except the graphics cards and thats how i justified to myself .

Is the performance difference between the 2 worth 300 dollar premium ? no probably not .

I would just work within your budget and make sure you atleast get SLI of some sort unless your waiting to see if they release ATI cards which a few others on here are doing and just bought a single card solution and the upgrade when that time comes.

 

yeah im already setting up with SLI 260m, but at £710 the climb to SLI 280m from the SLI 260m compared to the $300 increase (about £200 at most) is a J O K E compared to the US costs of it, it annoys me ALOT that the UK seem to screwed on everything

what do you think of the set up i made? do you think i should change anything?

i guess i could reduce the HDs as going for the 1TB increases the price by £190. i could go for a single 500gb hd and that would still save £100 and just add the extra 2 myself?

 

the 280Ms will give you about 10%-15% better performance over 260Ms. Depends if you want to pay the money for that.

For video editing and 3D work, the Q9000 will perform best, and I haven't met any games yet that are bottlenecked by the 2.0GHz clock. However you may want to go for the duo, depending on what games you play.

You almost definetely won't need 1TB of storage, you could save quite a bit by going for the 500GB RAID instead. However you may use up the 1TB, I just don't find it necessary to have any more than 500GB.

Unless you really find blu-rays much better than DVDs you could save money by going for a DVD drive instead.

 

well i have alot of stuff - and my current HD setup (2 x 320 1 x 120) only has about 200gb memory left so i need a lot space, i guess i could get a single drive (230 or 500) and add a second later and at a cheaper price.

i guess the BluRay aint REQUIRED but it would still be nice to have just in case. but that could also be added at a later date so that should save me about £100

 

youll have to ask for the second hdd caddy... dont forget about that

 

Hi,
I'm not sure if this has been pointed out already, but 260s are just flawed 280s. There's only a marginal difference performance wise (assuming you don't push the limit). 260s would probably be a good investment, and if the new ati cards become available, you can upgrade into those.

Thanks,
Gabe

 

Remember that in theory if you get GTX260m SLI and overclock to GTX280m clocks it will be the exactly same performance for $300 less .

I would get 1 500GB and pick a SSD later.

 

Nice setup, looks European, I wonder why...**caugh**prices**caugh**

The proc can be downgraded to P8600, if you call Dell to order. (Note it isn't available on the European Websites). This could save you some money, and if needed, and can be replaced with a more powerful proc from e-bay. But the q9000 seems to be a good proc according to some on NBR.

Personaly I choose the Dual 260M SLI config because it would be stupid not to have Duals in this Rig. But too expensive to spend €500 on dual 280m's which IMO are overpriced (in Europe) for the bang they deliver.

I took the 2 HDD direct and maybe switch to a SSD and HDD config afterwards. I did this because they are probably going to charge the brackets in the future, (although nobody confirmed this yet). And I don't want the hussle about something what is supposed to be in there anyway.

The Blue Ray... I don't know if it's needed.

 

yep the price does give it away, its Europe alright - screwed over at every opportunity.

i wouldnt be able to try haggling to try and get the price dropped i NEVER talk to anyone on the phone, i refuse all calls from numbers i dont know. i never have been able to talk to people on the phone that i dont know

i could go for the SSD for the OS and 500gb for the other stuff
yeah im thinking of sticking with the SLI 260m over the HUGELY overpriced SLI 280m.

due to some of the work i do video rendering, 3d rendering ect i think a good powerful CPU is needed, what would be better for what i do (other then gaming) the q9000 or the P8600? all other CPUs above that are pretty expensive

 

Q9000... get the 500gb through dell, not the ssd, it will save a lot of money.

 

okay thanx - is it possible for me to get them NOT to install the OS
coz if i am going to get a SSD i would prefer it to go straight onto that

wheres best place to get the SSD?

 

TBH the dell's ssd looks a pretty good deal for me.

 

Sadly, WRONG. It would be the same for the most part, however the 280M has 128 shaders where the 260M has 112. No amount of overclocking is going to give your card an extra 16 shaders...

 

Shaders doesn't work the way u think...

Doesn't matters if you have 200 or 300 if the game just use 100 shaders.

And ATM no game use more than 100 (100-120 at least).

224 is enough for sometime so IN SLI shaders are not going to be a performance penalty for 1-2 years or so.

EDIT: Oh and i forget to say... SP is basically a SMP system so it stack 100% in SLI.

 

@ armegeddon Get a ES chip off ebay

 

Exactly what I was thinking, if you want to safe money.
(I only took the base config Q9000 because it could do the trick for me. If this is not the case, I would buy a QX9300 from ebay).

 

or you could overclock the q9000