Well, I finally broke down and ordered the m15x

After 4 grueling months of researching what laptop to buy with my tax refund, I finally decided on the m15x. I'm a huge Flight Sim enthusiast (FS2004) that needs to be portable (lots of business travel) and at the time had a Dell Inspiron 1520 with a 8600M GT with a T7500 Core 2. It was OK. As always, the weather and clouds killed FPS performance. Since I had to turn that laptop back in, this gave me a chance to buy one for myself.

It's been a while since I searched for laptops myself. But Dell revamped their choices to include only the highest video cards on their 17" laptops. A bit too big for me to be portable. And other manufactors skimped on the video cards as well in their 15" and even larger laptops. So I found the m15x to be exactly what I wanted. I suppose though I hope I'm not an unfortunate one to have the dreaded hinge problems.

I did skip the extreme processor but went with the next highest (T9500). I got the 9800M GT and the 8Gb of RAM with Vista 64-bit. I also put the SSD in and put an extra 250Gb HD with it.

Bottom line, I'm stoked to see what it can do with my FS2004 setup. I just couldn't find another 15" laptop with the kind of features I wanted without stepping up to the 17". I knew I was gonna spend some money but I figured it'll be worth it since maybe it'll help future proof it a little bit.

So any of you FS fans have a similiar rig and can comment on performance with this card?

 

I have both FS2004 and FSX. On my 7 year old desktop with new memory and GPU, FS2004 runs at maximum, but on my 1 year old laptop (Acer Aspire 5920G), I have FSX.

Flight Simulator mostly uses the CPU instead of the GPU, so if you play only FS, you should have got the X9000 and a lower-end GPU instead, Like the 8700M GT.

FS benefits only from the Core Clock and VRAM on the GPU.

Edit: Oh, and FS2004 isn't meant to work on Vista, so it might not.

 

Awesome.
Have fun with your new machine!

 

Oh, I forgot, if FS2004 works on Vista, then you don't need to worry about the CPU, since it is an old game, and will run excellent. However, if you're planning to get FSX, then you should try to change the CPU.

 

The difference between your processor (2.6) and the etreme (2.8) is sooooo minimal that it is hard to distinguish them except in benchmarks (even then its minimal). The 9800m gt will help you a lot more than the x9000.

 

Yeah, I was thinking of sticking with FS2004. There are a couple things about FSX I have seen that make me drool (such as wet looking surfaces). But shoot, if I can run FS2004 at 1024x768 (4x AA) with heavy weather/heavy scenery/heavy traffic and not have it drop to single digit FPS I will be THRILLED. I'm excited to give 64-bit windows a shot. I figured it was either going to be 32-bit XP or 64-bit Vista. It sounds as though many kinks have been worked out in 64-bit land and many of the software that I'll be running for work have 64-bit versions. So I'm bouncing off the walls to get my hands on it.

And oh and a little brown nosing here...this forum has been indispensable while I've been shopping.

 

Congrats on the purchase. Don't sweat the hinges.

Did you know you can get an empty HD smart bay for less than $20?

They also have black ones, but I think they're for the m17x and not the vaporware black m15x...