Getting mine soon too

Within the week

There is a really big price difference between the models... so I have made a list of the games I play


Command and Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars
Day Of Defeat Source
Counter strike source
FEAR
Heroes of might and magic V
Half life 2
And a few others

Now, all those games run good on my cheapo 50 dollar Radeon X300/500.. well FEAR is decent

so I imagine 128MB would be enough, but I want one that is future proof for a long time...There is big difference in price, I can get the money though but it would be a waste if it wasn't worth it.

Here is an image of the prices with student discount



Now, does anyone know if I can buy it with student discount, but under my parents business (For tax purposes), or would I have to buy it through the business without discount.

Prices are $2899 and $3599 without discount, no free stuff either way

Stupid cable internet, my usage meter keeps jumping up on its own even when the modem is off, my ISP charges 150 per GB over the limit LOL.. I hope they will listen to me when I explain it to them..

Well, any tips or advice? anyone here from Australia and has purchased one?

 

Well first off, I can't believe your ISP is so ridiculous that they charge overages like some sort of wireless phone carrier *COUGH* Verizon. I mean, I have a "limit" but there is no overage fee because most people never near the limit. I really hope you get that cleared up. Look for a better broadband carrier if there are any available.

I assume you are choosing among the two 15.4".

Anyway, the games you listed would all run fairly well according to all of the benchmarking I've seen on these forums over the last couple of weeks. I'm sure you are aware that you'll need to run BootCamp. If you really want to be futureproof, of course, the difference between the 128 vram and 256 vram becomes more and more significant.

Personally, I'm going for the 2.4GHz 256 GDDR3 setup because I want extra breathing room in the games I play for larger textures, etc. Considering only the games you listed, as long as you keep Anti Aliasing and Anisotropic Filtering off you shouldn't have a drastic difference in performance. Future games, such as Crysis and the like will probably take much better advantage of the 256 vram version, but that is a ways off and it might not make a difference anyway if midrange cards can't run them at playable frame rates.

In many cases the increase in performance is slight until you start taxing the amount of video ram. When you start activating Anti Aliasing and larger textures, the differences between the 128 and 256 will become drastically more apparent. I'd go for the best setup you can afford, simply because that extra oomph in performance can make the difference between playing games comfortably versus adequately (IE: 30 FPS+ vs 24 FPS).

Vote: 2.4 GHz version.

 

Hmmm yeah, 2.4Ghz IMO is a lot better.

OK thanks, I'll probably end up getting the 2.4... Cant wait.

And yeah, this ISP sucks.. (They are Australia's biggest and MOST expensive, checkout their stupid plans, bigpond.com)

Edit: All ISP's here in Australia SUCK, you can't get good speed for good value, I pay 130 a month for 60GB limit...You can't get better than that in most area's, (Most area's here in AUS don't have ADSL2+ enabled), so I'm stuck on cable.

 

Ahh, that sucks. Do services like DSL Extreme work over there?

It would be tricky to put the payment down as a student through a business, it sort of contradicts the purpose. The computer needs to be some sort of business expense, so get your parents to open up a text file and type in some businessy stuff to justify the loophole.

Hmm, it shouldn't be too difficult. The student discount is through Apple, and the business tax break is through your government...

From what I understand, exchange rates make it cheaper at the moment to buy in America (I think). So if the difference in price is great enough and you have a friend in the States, maybe it would be worthwhile to have it sent to him and then shipped to you?

 

Yeah but then I have to pay 10% tax on it when it gets through customs, making it around the same price as here.

There is DSL extreme..................in a few areas