The Best Value M17x Configuration Thread

Alright all,

I challenge you to come up with the best value M17x configuration. I'm talking about something that has the best performance/value ratio.

Since most of you are yanks, let's base this off the US Dell website.

This is my initial submission:

Processor: T9800 2.93Ghz -- As others have pointed out, most games are not optimised for 4 cores, therefore the higher clock speed of the dual core gives best bang for buck.
Graphics: Dual GTX 260M -- Can just overclock to 280m levels I believe.
Ram: 4GB Dual Channel at 1066 Mhz -- Who seriously needs more than 4GB of ram? Also, please correct me on this, but I do not see the point in getting ram that has a greater bandwidth than the CPU (i.e. 1333 Mhz for a 1066Mhz CPU).
Hard Drive: 256GB SSD -- I believe Alienware uses Toshiba SSD's (again correct if wrong), they seem to perform quite well - Review
Screen:1920x1200p -- This one is obvious
Optical Drive: Blu Ray Combo -- Why have HD screen with no blu ray?
Operating System: Windows Vista Home Premium 64 bit -- *cough* Vista Ultimate Service Crack 2 *cough*
Warranty: 1 Year Warranty -- This can be extended later, right?

Price: $3,249

What do you all think?

Here are some Submissions by other people from the US store in the same format as above:

 

T9800, SSD, and Blu Ray in a value config? Take the base cpu, 7200 rpm hdd, and dvd drive.

 

drop the SSD and BR drive - so not worth the money. also, no one needs Ultimate.

and yes, warranty can be extended.

 

the base model is the best value.

 

It's meant to be value and you've got an SSD in there and a blu-ray drive? I put in my own opinions using the same format you have. And I've cut down the price by $750 just by having a DVD drive, hard drive instead of an SSD, and a 0.13GHz slower processor. That extra 0.13GHz is honestly not worth it for $275.

Processor: T9600 2.8GHz-- I personally think that THIS processor is the best bang for your buck, it'll play pretty much nearly every game out there without problems and is decently priced.
Graphics: Dual GTX 260M -- Worth the $300 over a single one as graphics boost is 50% or more. However, not worth the extra $600 for 280Ms as those are only about %10 faster and the 260Ms should be easily overclocked anyway.
Ram: 4GB Dual Channel at 1066 Mhz -- Who seriously needs more than 4GB of ram? Also, please correct me on this, but I do not see the point in getting ram that has a greater bandwidth than the CPU (i.e. 1333 Mhz for a 1066Mhz CPU).
Hard Drive: 500GB 7200RPM -- It's reasonably cheap to upgrade to this and 500GB is plenty for most people, and considering it's meant to be value, an SSD is still too expensive.
Screen:1920x1200p -- Gives a lot of extra work space on your screen and from what I've heard games look great at the higher resolutions as well.
Optical Drive: DVD Burner -- A blu-ray drive is still too expensive an upgrade for budget gamers. There's nothing wrong with DVDs.
Operating System: Windows Vista Home Premium 64 bit -- I really don't see the point in anything more than Home Premium.
Warranty: 1 Year Warranty -- Easily extended later, and it's expensive to do it initially.

Price: $2,499

 

not in your wildest dreams.

 

Yeah i agree with corsair, Basicly the same thing i did minus i got 2 x 320s in raid 0 cause i wanted a large hard drive. Just like corsair said. T9600-1920 reso-dvd-dual 260s. The T9800 is way too expensive for what its worth. Just as he said.

EDIT: for bang for buck...wish i could have had the extra 300 for dual 280s cause that would have been a bit more muscle.

 

Your getting it a lot cheaper in the US than what we have to pay in the UK for the same spec.

This costs uk £2,170.11, thats after a 10% discount, that = $3,582.01 USD

COLOUR CHOICE Alienware M17x Gaming Laptop - Space Black edit
PROCESSOR Intel® Core™ 2 Duo T9600 (2.80GHz,1066MHz FSB,6MB L2 Cache) edit
OPERATING SYSTEM Genuine Windows Vista® Home Premium SP1 (64 BIT) - English edit
GRAPHICS CARD SLI™ Dual 1GB GDDR3 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 260M edit
HARDWARE SUPPORT 1Year Premium Warranty Support edit
LCD 17-inch Wide UXGA 1920 x 1200 - Beyond HD (1200p) Display edit
MEMORY 4096MB 1333MHz Dual Channel DDR3 SDRAM [2x2048] edit
HARD DRIVE 640GB (7200 RPM) Free Fall Sensor Raid 0 "Stripe" Dual HDD - (2x320GB) edit
OPTICAL DRIVE DVD+/-RW (DVD, CD read and write) Optical Drive edit
PRIMARY BATTERY 9-cell 85Whr Lithium Ion battery

 

BEST VALUE:

Base model w/ 260's SLI

You can always add the other components later (and sometimes cheaper).

 

T9600 is a better buy than the T9800. This even applies to the UK now since they changed the prices.

 

Updated my original post... Will stick up other suggestions that people come up with in first post, if they are done in the US store (I am an aussie, so this sucks for me, but meh), and are in a similar format to mine...

 

I'm actually from the UK store but I went to the US store for comparison against yours.

Yes that is the 280M but presumably as the 260M is very similar, it'd be the same performance boost in SLI, maybe not 50%, but 40% for games that use it well is still worth the $300. It could well be the difference between Medium and High in games like Crysis.

 

does the phrase "bell curve", umm, ring a bell? (see what i did there? )

 

Nope, it doesn't.

 

figured as much.



that's the bell curve for normal distribution. there's a whole lot of theoretical mathematics behind it, but basically, it describes how data clusters around a certain mean or average. in this case, the two axes are "performance gain through SLI" horizontally and "number of games" vertically - e.g. you will only find one or two games that show a 40% increase with SLI, and also, only a very small number that barely profits at all from SLI (0% increase). so if 0% and 40% are the two extremes, then the average, that is to say, the performance gain you will see from most games, is a nice round 20%. so, are you willing to pay 300$ for 20% performance increase?

 

Are you trying to insinuate that I'm stupid?

Ahhh, I see what you mean now. That can be a big consideration then in whether or not to get an upgrade. But for those that aren't on a very tight budget, I would recommend it, as it will make game experiences better in the games that DO use it well.

Still, for those on a tight budget, it might be wiser to go for the single card option in that case.

 

the flaw to the argument is that games are being programmed to optimize multiple CPU and GPU solutions. the very small portion of games you're referring to that take advantage of these technologies are exactly what gamers buy.

the math behind the bell shape curve deals with variance and standard deviation (not just the mean), however, in this case, we're taking in account all of the video games made, and the performance gains will be from 0% to 100+%. there is a possibility that some games get higher than double the performance with two cards. so it's difficult to suggest a good bell shape for a standard deviation that is so broad. if i can get 70% increase for scalability, and then 20% for another, and 50% for one game, and then nothing for the final game, what is the set pattern for my standard deviation? i don't feel there is a good enough number to roughly say 67% of all games fall in this category of 20% performance increase, because i feel the standard deviation would be about 20% increase, and if the 'average' is 20%, then 67% of all games would fall within 0-40% of performance increase, and 1/3 of all games would be higher than 40% increase which is a significant amount of games. this is why i feel the average would be much higher than say 20%

the bell shape curve basically works for like 99.7% of all data, leaving out .3% of data for outliers and extremities. you can't take the two extremities and average them out together. it's more likely that the curve we will see will either be bimodal or skewed, rather than binomial. this is because with new programming at hand and the developmental abilities of SLI technology, we will see an increase in SLI scalable games. also, with the use of patching, SLI still grants itself better usage over time, thus, skewing the data. i suggested a bimodal distribution because there are games that take optimization better, and then there games that don't. the chance that there are mostly middle ground games that have an average effect on SLI scaling is probably lower than there are games which scale poorly and games which scale greatly.

40% increase in playability is an estimated number. there are games where i have 90% performance increase, and there are games where i see 10%. again, 300 bucks spent will moreso increase performance roughly 40% than 20%.

 

I think I would agree this statement^^ Even one 260M GTX can paly moste games on 1440x900 or am I wrong?

Greetings
Julian

 

Now I think about it, this is probably the better case. Just because it ranges from 0% to 40% doesn't mean that the average is going to be in the middle, and just because the quote I gave stated 0-40% doesn't make it true, and it doesn't mean the average is in the middle. In fact, it'd probably be more accurate to put '0%' and '100%' at the two ends of the scale.

The thing is, you see, it's the older games that tend to have poorer compatibility with SLI. Newer games are taking better and better advantage of multi-GPU solutions. We will see that curve change over time to shift towards the '100%' end of the scale.

Okay this I really do disagree with. It doesn't seem physically possible to gain over twice the performance gain from only twice the power. I guess I could compare that to saying that in a game that uses quad cores well, by upgrading from a 2.4GHz duo to a 2.4GHz quad, I'd increase my performance by more than 100%...it just doesn't seem possible.

 

Crysis benchmarked on 1024x768 on high on the site that I looked at with a single GTX 260M and a Q9100 gave out an average of 37fps. That probably means that you'll get a nice 30fps average at 1440x900 on it.

And if it can play Crysis fairly well on high, it'll play nearly anything I can think of.

 

i've had cases with the source engine where on one card i would run at 50 fps, and with two cards i would more than double it to 130 fps.

also, games are more GPU dependent than CPU. a quad core processor will see better performance for RTS games over arena shooter games (generally), however, the performance gain might be nil in comparison to a newer GPU.

again, these performance gains are situational and specific. however, there are cases where my performance worsens with SLI, and it's better to turn it off. this is why there are possibilities from below 0% and beyond 100% gains.

 

Hm now I am interested in a Crysis maxed out on 1440x900, I could belive because of the 1GB videoram it may performe nearly similar

Greetings
Julian

 

the base model is a very good bang for the buck. the resolution might not be as crisp as 1920 x 1200, but than again, your native resolution will be able to run games at higher quality and quicker, and will retain its crisp detail versus reducing the resolution like you would need to at 1920 x 1200. this means the screen will most likely help in the long run for ensuring playability at native resolution... but God, i love my 1920 x 1200!

i mean, you can always upgrade your notebook later when new GPU series come out, and the prices drop.

 

You are right I have the 1440x900 screen on my m17 and I am so happy I hove it, I even can play (playable) Crysis maxed out

What do I want more? Ah ok 1200p but that would destroy: "I can max out Crysis"

Greetings
Julian