Good time to buy a gaming laptop?

Again, 2048 shaders @ 1100MHz vs 1536 shaders @ 1100MHz
Here google this and see what you come up with: "(2048*1100)/(1536*1100)="
Thats the upcoming 980MX over 980M. Then add 15-20% faster Skylake CPU. Then add DDR4. Then add PCIe SSD. An entirely different beast than current notebooks.
For 1080p thats gonna carry you a year or two. Then you buy the refresh of Pascal in 2017, that way you get maxed out architectures. Much better imo

hehe I know the feeling. Ive abandoned them ever since Dell discontinued Alienware 18. All other notebooks are crap for me. I got spoiled by the wonderful AW18 :/

So i7 6700K + 390X/980Ti Water Cooled + DDR4 + 27" 144Hz 1440P IPS display + silent build for me right after Skylake launch. Yummy

 

First of all, the 980MX isn't confirmed, and neither is the 980Ti. Again, for the fourth time now: We will know more at Computex in June. I don't think we should be swaying purchases based on nothing but shear hope and wishful thinking.

Second, don't you think waiting 5-7 months for a CPU is illogical when in 9-12 months an entirely new graphics architecture will be released? You're better off waiting until Q1 2016, as it is expected - based on actual evidence - that Pascal will perform about twice that of Maxwell. I know you'll want to upgrade that 980Ti.

I wanted to wait, and tried to wait, but just couldn't take it anymore... I'm betting Pascal will be MXM 3.0b - the last of its kind - and I plan to grab a 1080M.

 

Also Skylake is boring, games are not CPU dependent at ALL recently. DDR4 is just more efficient, and 980MX, another boring upgrade. Good time to buy a PC imo.

 

I will keep that in my mind, thanks

 

Agreed on all points.

 

If you have the money, go for it. But if not, think twice, or however many times it takes to understand there's always something better.

 

Exactly. Wait for something better? Good luck waiting forever as there will always be something better while I enjoy current tech and upgrade when I need to.

 

"GTX 980MX not confirmed"
Well duh, its not confirmed until it is out. Nvidia ALWAYS refresh GPUs and when there is a huge room for more cores, they increase core count.

"Skylake is boring"
For the first time in many years we get +15-25% boost instead of the usual 5% boost and its bpring? OK

"Games are not CPU dependant at all recenty"
Im too lazy to go and look but many games earlier scale with CPU. If not the last 2-3 games, chances are big some will in the future.

"Wait 5-7 months for a CPU"
No I said August. Thats 3 months...
Maxwell refresh could also be around the same period. Pascal could be released in June next year if you must buy a notebook now and want to buy the first card with SMMs disabled.

"980MX boring upgrade"
You didnt google my estimations I see. 33% performance boost over 980M is not boring. Thats how much potential there is left in GM204. Only 7% less than what 980M was over 880M. Which was not a boring card looking at the sales it gave.

"Pascal will give 2x the performance of Maxwell. Based om actual evidence"
No. You are referring to computation/watt which Nvidia show on stage many months ago.
Computation got nothing to do with gaming performance. And second, Nvidia could just as well do another heavy diabled Pascal core for mobile. Then you are looking at even less performance because they are not using the available power envelope they have available.

 

Well Haswell to Skylake is a tick-tock so I'd expect better than the measly 10% IPC improvement (counterbalanced by a decrease in OC headroom by the same amount) we've been getting every generation since Sandy Bridge. If you consider that Sandy Bridge to Haswell was a 20% improvement, if Broadwell is +10% over Haswell and Skylake is +20% over Haswell, that's still keeping status quo. Yawn.

 

Here we go...

• May, June, July, August, September = 5 months. Windows 10 is expected in September as well.
  
• CPU's are definitely not as important for gaming as GPU's. (You know this...) The 4790k doesn't even bottleneck Titan X SLI.

Let's just assume, for argument's sake, that the 980Ti is real (because at this time nobody knows):

1. We know for a FACT that Pascal will be much better than whatever Maxwell or the 980Ti could possibly be. The last architecture jump from 580M was a miracle, and that was Kepler. We literally saw a single 680M perform like 580M SLI. This next architecture shrink should be even greater considering the die size.
2. Best case scenario (the God's intervene): The 980Ti is a re-branded Titan X for $799~.

You would be making a big mistake in waiting (at least) 5 months specifically for a new CPU and to purchase the 980Ti, assuming it will even be launched, given that you are definitely one who loves to upgrade components, and Pascal will hit around this time next year (approximately 9-12 months from now). So, telling people to "wait until a new CPU comes out" is not solid advice. Minimal benefits for gaming, at best. Maybe one could justify waiting if they need improvements in battery life.

 

Dude can you stop giving those baseless "facts", you can't say that Pascal will launch 9-12 months from now, chances are it will be 12+ months later, even 15. Don't say based on actual "evidence" it will perform twice as fast, there is no evidence whatsoever, that's just a bs efficiency improvement claim made by nVidia just like what they said about Maxwell. Where is GM200 being 2X faster than GK110, that's right it's nonexistent. As of today 980Ti is as good as confirmed (the specs aren't but that's a different story).
With Windows 10 expected to launch in July and Skylake only about a month later we are looking at 3-5 months for new systems to arrive, and while desktop Skylake is at best only 15% faster than 4790K, mobile variants will most likely end up even faster considering desktops will get 35W quad cores so it's better to wait a bit longer than to buy now. Pascal is too far away at this point to say anything about it, in fact all we know is most of it's performance improvement will come from a smaller process node and most likely it will lose a lot of the Maxwell efficiency since it's actually supposed to have DP compute. Heck AMD's 14nm Arctic Islands might even beat it in efficiency considering they are being built with efficiency in mind.

 

Anyone else forgetting DX12 is supposed to make our GPU's run even better? 980M should be a monster on DX12.

Your money, your time. Wait another year for Pascal. And then you can wait another year for a Pascal refresh. Then wait another year for whatever is next. Have fun waiting.

 

I wouldn't expect Pascal for another year... let's take that out of the equation.

I can tell you this much. I'm going to get the "Batman" refresh. I just hope the 980m refresh isn't an abomination like the 880m was.

 

Well, PAscal is too far away (ref : Madonna) and we have enough CPU power for single GPU's on mobile, you can go for it and enjoy a year and the half with a decent laptop OR waiting for Next gen cpu/gpu and spend the time between work and TV shows !

 

Back to op, i would wait till mid year 3rd quarter if at all possible.
Good luck and ps what machine you looking at?

 

2 pages of bickering deleted. J. Dre and Cloudfire, you know better. At least you should.

 

Well, if Skylake is getting a release before years end in ULV varients, I am still curious to see how Broadwell Quad-Core mobile CPUs will perform.


I want to see a space where quad-core CPUs can be so energy effective at idle you do basic web and office tasks and get ultrabook level of battery power. When you take your gaming notebook into power saving mode, it still burns through the battery massively. even when the 3 other cores are shut off and the last core is running at such low frequency. There is a lot to be gained here, and we are seeing a massive rift between performance class notebooks (workstation, multimedia, gaming) and ultrabooks which are now cracking into the 13-15 hour battery runtime.


9-10 hours is the maximum I feel even a power user would use in a day. You can only charge through that on a good Android or iOS tablet if you use intensive apps all day. It would be great if quad-cores could get to that energy reservation. 4K displays have really put a damper on the lifespan, and now once again, like when TN emerged we are seeing manufactureres cutting corners with low quality IPS at 4k!!

 

Any further bickering in this thread will result in a 7 day reply ban for all parties involved. I am not going to lock threads for this nonsense anymore. If you can not have an adult conversation, you will be removed from the conversation.

 

Depends entirely on the laptop OEM. Many gaming laptops with quad cores and all the extra storage drives, RAM, high performance GPU, all the extra circuits, can get 5-6 hours of battery life in power save mode.

 

Actually some notebooks with an unlocked BIOS can disable cores, HT, TB, undervolt, and underclock. Basically crippling your quad-core into a ULV or slower. That along with Optimus can easily get Ultrabook levels of battery life at low load out of a high performance system. It's just that most OEMs lock the BIOS down tighter than a nun wearing a straitjacket and chastity belt, and it's only getting worse with UEFI and Secure Flash.

Another thing is that Ultrabooks in general seem to have much higher capacity batteries than gaming and workstation notebooks. High performance systems also typically have more drives and RAM DIMMs to power, although affect on battery life is minor in the grand scheme of things and can be helped by swapping HDDs out for SSDs. On the other hand Ultrabooks increasingly are coming with 3K and 4K screens which require stronger backlights, so I guess it balances out.

 

Really? I've only seen a couple.

Most that I have seen, even those powered with powerful 92 Watt batteries sometimes don't last more than 3,5 hours. Like the Razer Blade 14 2014 edition! Msi, Asus, Gigabyte.. it seems to be a general trend.

 

It's all about the OEM. Case in point, the Clevo W230ST only had about 3.5 hours battery life. Users complained, the next revision (W230SS) which kept pretty much all the same components except the 860m replaced the 765m, but that's basically irrelevent in Windows desktop use because of Optimus. It ended up running about 5.5 hours on battery.

 

do clevo's let you disable the intel GPU or is it only a few alienware models?

 

Clevos do not. A few Alienware models and I believe some MSI. Clevos usually offer either Optimus or no Intel GPU access at all.

 

Is there a reason as to why Clevo cannot offer both options in a laptop? Being able to have iGPU access on battery is obviously better than using the dGPU so long as you aren't gaming or doing some heavy graphical stuff (I don't know what would fall into that category).

 

I believe the ability to switch between iGPU and dGPU in BIOS is the best solution for gaming notebook, much better than Optimus. Too bad they didn't include it in P75xZMs.

 

I assume it has a powerful battery?

At any rate, many thin-and-light notebooks that I have seen, don't have the battery life. It's a weird situation because I don't know any gamer who doesn't game when plugged in, but I know many people who hate their performance notebooks when they have to do everything else besides gaming.

But I guess dissatisfaction with battery life is a major thing in other industries like tablets, smartphones and even handheld gaming consoles and controllers! The world is also just begging for self charging laptops to kill the need to plug in!

 

Optimus is the option, allowing you to use Intel GPU all the time except when you play games, then it switches to the dGPU. It just doesn't have a hard switch where it either uses Intel or Nvidia, but requires a reboot.

62Whr.

 

The intel gpu is always on, Optimus simply copies the frambuffer from the dGPU to the iGPU

You can't switch to the dGPU in clevo simply because the Screen is only connected to the iGPU. And ofcourse the other way around, some laptops like older Alienware machine's had both the iGPU and dGPU connected to the screen with muxing the signals

 

Clevo doesn't offer a manual switch , because as usual they are running way behind the times.

 

Tell me I'm wrong though. I've owned as many Clevos as anyone.

 

Clevo is behind the times yet they are the only company producing machines with desktop processors... And they actually work. Okay.

Muxers add another layer of complexity for users to deal with. I see nothing wrong with the current Optimus or dGPU model. While switchable graphics were nice in my M17xR1, I never used that machine on battery as I bought it for high-performance usage. The battery was a handy UPS back up in my mind and that's all.

Of course if you mean they're behind the times in the sense that they haven't done the head first dive into embracing "thin and light and throttling" then I say they need to stay behind the times.

 

But have you owned one in the last few years or any of the current gen models. I see you had a GT70 before this.

If Clevo is behind the times, I don't want to get with the times. Clevo is the last true enthusiast brand left standing in the laptop world.

 

Clevo has always been ahead of the curve, when talking about internals, that is indisputable.

I should have thought to clarify that I was specifically referring to the advancement of their chassis' features and amenities. Keyboard, touchpad, speakers, headphone output, display quality, etc; all things that were lagging behind for the last 4 to 5 years with the W8xxCU and P1xxM machines (seriously there was zero advancement in that span). I said "were", because the new P6x0Sx and P7x0ZM have improved on a lot of those issues.

But we've been asking Clevo for manual graphics switching since Enduro was a disaster. It's simply time to get rid of Optimus in laptops that are purely gaming desktop replacements.

 

And they have in the P750ZM and SLI notebooks. Those are true desktop replacements. The P1xxEM/SM are not real desktop replacements or meant to be, really. They are portable laptops.

 

The P1xx series aren't really that portable lol... I'd say the P6xx series are portable