Top performing gaming laptop?

Awesome config. I'm sure you'll be pleased. I just hope you upgraded from the stock screen? I owned an NP8170 for a short while and the stock screen hard horrible viewing angles and washed out visuals.

 

well, i would personally still recommend toning it down to $2500, but it's better to burn about $1000 @3500 than $3000 @5500, so that's good.

In an 18" form factor, you can get dual 6990m graphics and a 2nd gen intel core i7 cpu (not the extreme version, overpriced), but sticking with the SSD for kicks, all for $2522.

This is, within a few percentage points, the fastest gaming laptop money can buy. The extra $1000 investment in a CPU is not nearly as helpful as the extra graphics card.

 

whats up with people buying that i7 2960xm cpu. it makes me wonder if the people buying that cpu have mild retardation

 

this.
mobility is the name of the game. gone are the college days when id go home to the same house and crank up my pc day in and day out. as a farmer/trader, im always going to different places. i sleep in two different locations in a week minimum.
i use my laptop for work and play, and just slik, i dont want any compromises. gaming laptops arent cheap(yet), but personally i feel they are the future of pc gaming- its one thing the consoles will never get to do - mobile gaming ftw

 

I've had that problem for years now.

Can you elaborate?

 

+1 all around. It's the price of being a game nerd that wants a good experience and is willing to pay for being able to go mobile. I'm in different time zones, at my place, my gf's place (that one is key) and at our family ranch business... got to figure out how to BF3/Skyrim/Shogun Total War/you name it.

 

What he meant to say, in a demeaning manor, is that the difference between the cheapest and most expensive CPU won't make more than a couple FPS difference in games (this does matter in some other non-gaming related programs though) and that if this money was put towards a 2nd GPU you would see leaps and bounds performance difference over a faster CPU and single GPU.

 

yeah i also love playing in starbucks with my gf, while i watch others glancing over and looking back at their facebook games lol.

although if you havent ordered yet, maybe you should rethink that xm cpu as others have said. unless youre into video/audio editing, heavy cad or matc\h work, etc. it wont do you much good. the 1000usd you save could go to a worthy gpu upgrade down the road, or get you a new high end system (with your laptop's sale) a year from now .

but if youve ordered it already, no worries. congrats, thats actually the system i wanted

 

or you could just get an SLI system now with the extra money. or save it.

 

The laptop will double as a mobile Cubase workstation, so there was some thought into that.

Good points though... so would a chip, something like a 2680qm, with SLI 580s net better FPS than a 2960xm and a single 580?

 

is that a daw? if it is then you will definitely need processing power. i do video editing myself as a hobby and (before)as part time work. my cpu struggles mightily with 1080p in both premiere and ae. so i usually do stuff in 720p.
from the little i know about audio editing, it is heavily cpu bound, just like video editing. now we understand your choice of an extreme cpu.

but going to your second question, suc an sli system would got you between 50-80% (im not so sure of these stats though) better fps than a single card as long as the said game supports sli. however in my opinion, such gigantic gaming machines severely limits its other non-gaming uses especially in the areas of mobility, battery,space which makes them less appealing to the business side of my needs.

 

oh, also i would never want to be caught with a gaming laptop that looks to gamey. the sagers with their understated, businesslike looks, suit me just fine.

 

look doesn't really matter, its the performance inside that counts

 

We didn't expect you to change the way your mind works. We expected you to stop telling us about it as if we should care.

Try GFSI, or waresphere.com, or companies on Alibaba. They are not too expensive and they wont have power issues - unless of course you are an incredibly dense person who isn't willing to investigate anything at all in which case you should get a mac.

You are hypocritical quite obviously because you are presenting MXM upgrades as if they aren't an option. You aren't presenting people with options, you are presenting people with your opinions on what is best out of these options.

At least when people see that you don't understand even this they might realize that your "advice" is not worth listening to.

 

The thing about the extreme edition processor is (as far as I can tell from comparing the spec sheets) the only difference is a slightly higher TDP and a 200 mhz higher stock clock and a 100mhz higher turbo clock. This will give you negligible performance gains (read: virtually none) in games, and in other applications it may give you a SLIGHT performance gain. However, I personally feel that the gains would NOT be worth the $500 more you would have to spend; you would get maybe 10% better performance at the most I would expect.

 

i think youre missing the point on what an extreme processor is.

sure at stock clocks they dont seem as impressive. but remember that these things are meant to be overclocked. the last genenration i7's before sb could be overclocked to 3.6 from a stock of 2.0. thats on all cores. the higher tdp will also allow it to operate at higher clocks while multithreading whether overclocked or not.
but even at stock a 200mhz difference on all cores can make a significant difference in such things as video editing. not ground breaking, but it could mean submitting that video before your deadline or not.

 

in most cases i would agree. but i dont think id want to bring a flaming red huge a** laptop with stickers and an alien head in a board room meeting.

so as in most things in life, the correct answer to this is - it all depends.

 

that is inappropriate and honestly i don't attend meetings but LAN parties lolz. but anyway its not about showing the what, but it solely depends on the owner what his rig will be look like and perform. otherwise the bottom line is yes, perform...

 

Its really only inappropriate if you are an engineer or if you don't have a different laptop from your work. Think about graphic designers, 3d modelers etc I don't think they would question why you have it.

 

I would think that, if you had a laptop that could support overclocking, the none extreme edition CPU would still overclock almost as well as the EE cpu. However, I would think you would get out of comfortable temperature ranges before you reached the limits of the non EE chip.

Maybe it is just me, but I really wouldn't be comfortable overclocking a quad core i7 that is in a laptop. I am fine with overclocking my desktop 2500k quite a bit, but I have a pretty large heatsink (bigger than anything you could even come close to fitting in a laptop) and a lot more airflow than even the best laptops.

Even if the EE CPU can overclock a moderate amount more than the non EE chip you are still looking at a CPU that costs DOUBLE the price for nowhere near double the performance.

 

i dont think youre aware that in core i cpu's only the extreme edition cpu's are overclockable and only on the hm67 motherboard. both of which are in the specs of unit chosen by the OP.

also as the op mentioned price is not an issue. add to that the fact that the example is used 2-3.6 in the older core i extreme cpu's is a 180% overclock. thats desktop level overclocking in a laptop. the sager laptop he chose can definitely handle this kind of heat and powerload. laptop o/c is only dangerous if you dont know what youre talking about nor doing.

 

P270WM is coming early next year. It has a backlit keyboard too.

 

Depends on how you use Cubase, but it's probably a non-issue. If it is an issue, then the small performance gain for the 50% increase in total cost isn't even close to worth it- you're better off buying a render farm and using networked computers to offload processing. Same applies if the marginal speed difference will result in you finishing your work before a deadline. You either need to be more efficient yourself, or get a render farm.

Overclocking isn't too dangerous to explore if you're familiar with it, but the gaming benefit is so marginal that it probably still isn't worth spending time on. Especially for someone looking at getting a 2nd gen core i7 and highest end GPU

You can also read the wikipedia article to get a decent understanding of the risks and benefits of overclocking.

----

Let me sort of start over. If I were getting a gaming laptop with an undefined but large budget, here is what I would look for in order:

base:

2nd gen core i7 2630qm
AMD 6990m
4 GB memory for gaming, or 8 GB if you know of some specific reason you need 8 GB (you could need this depending on your Cubase behavior, look it up)

next step: dual AMD 6990m (significant benefit)

next step: upgrade processor (no higher than 2860, marginal benefit, marginal benefit / cost)

next step: upgrade to dual Nvidia 580m (marginal benefit, very marginal benefit / cost)

next step: upgrade memory quantity (12 GB max if offered in triple channel, or 16 GB max if offered in dual channel - can be expensive, no performance benefit in games or other applications, unless you run out of memory, which is unlikely)

next step: upgrade to core i7 extreme processor

---

some people may have other ideas about the ordering of these component upgrades, but the idea is that for a gaming computer, you need 4GB of memory, a modern CPU (but not the fastest available) and then as much GPU horsepower as possible.

The GTX 580 is marginally faster than the 6990m, but they are unquestionably in the same performance category, and the 6990m is much cheaper. A smart move is to get 2x of the 6990m in crossfire. If money truly is no object, I would upgrade to the Nvidia 580m before the $1000 upgrade to the extreme edition processor. Both are trivial, but the GPU upgrade is not quite as trivial.

 

My laptop will always be multipurpose therefore I can't be caught with the gaming look either. What would my clients think?



This was one of my considerations in buying my F.

 

To the OP:

I like EVERYTHING you picked, but will overclocking be that integral to work? (ie: even if there is media conversion, wouldn't a 2860qm be enough, and then use the $500 or so towards installing more RAM after the purchase? (IE: 32GB DDR3-1333)


It's enough that you can run pretty much any cad program you want, and for moments you want to game, you can convert the RAM into a RAM-DISK (which is INSANELY fast.... about 30x more throughput / sec than an SSD, with symmetrical R/W IOPS and no wear problems.)


Jason

 

So intel makes you buy their $1k cpu if you want to overclock AT ALL, while the i5 2500K can be bought for $180 and overclocked absurdly? Honestly I thought since intel has decided to get rid of this silly exorbitant pricing scheme for desktop cpus (and make the K series CPUs have unlocked multipliers for only a little bit more) that they would do something similar for laptops, but I guess not.

Guess I will be sticking to desktops for any sort of high performance computing for the near future...


As for the "gaming look" i fall into the "less is more" camp. I think understated but powerful notebooks are a lot neater than obnoxious alienwares with LEDs all over them. I am more concerned about the actual build quality of the laptop body than how many LEDs it has on it; I think the Sagers look pretty nice. Of course, this is coming from a guy with a desktop that has 3 blued LED 120 mm fans, 2 green 120 mm fans, a PSU with a blue LED fan, a CPU cooler with a green LED fan, and a fan controller with LEDs all over it. However I don't have to use it in public, so it doesn't really matter.

 

the cost of the CPU via this reseller is actually more than $1000. The intel recommended price is about $1100, and even here it's a $1000 upgrade from whatever the base CPU is. The base system already has some (significant) cost, part of which goes towards the base CPU. It's probably ~$1200 for the intel extreme in total on this system, or 1/3 of the cost of the whole system.

It would be better to spend 10% or less on the CPU, to dedicate more of the budget to graphics, since this is for gaming.

 

The $500 I was getting from RKcomputers for the upgrade to the EE cpu from the not EE one. I agree that that money is much better spent elsewhere.

 

It's called the law of diminishing returns. Opportunity costs in the top ranges rise far faster than the overall benefits offered as compared to the lower ranges. Still, there are people for whom the costs are still worthwhile - why judge them?

I agree that the 6990m is close to the 580m, but the 580m definitely has some advantages for many users in the technologies that their GPU's can run. As for the cost, the difference is pretty marginal when buying from Alienware now, though Sager's a different story.

 

It should be stated that my own excitability and pride led me to get a 2960xm over the 2680 or even 2860... should definitely have my head examined for minimal performance vs high markup.

It's an expensive toy but I'm _very_ excited about it being able to obtain a DAW music composition station and gaming machine... all in a mobile device.

(If you think this was expensive, just look at Cubase and the cost of pro VSTs)

 

Never considered this! I'll have to educate myself on this...

 

I've never heard of a RAM-DISK, but the benefits of SSD's in gaming are basically limited to faster loading times, so don't expect any better FPS if you end up following this route, just less waiting between levels.

 

Could you use a ram disk with games attached to steam?

Sent from my samsung galaxy s2 using tapatalk

 

This is why I recommended upgrading to the Nvidia 580 SLI over the 6990m CFX before looking at a core extreme.

Power to the OP for getting what he wanted, but I would strongly advise anyone else looking for a high end laptop in the $2500+ ballpark to focus on making sure you get 6990m CFX or Nvidia GTX 580 SLI.

 

I agree if the purpose of the laptop is purely gaming, but if you're also going to be doing computationally-intensive, non-CUDA-enabled work, the extreme processor's overclock capability could be a bigger boon than the dual-card setup. I don't know about Cubase or anything like that, but that's the angle I'm looking at this from.

 

actually and in logic, when you purchase a laptop the top priority is the gpu, you can just leave the ram and hdd in default and if just in case there's a need of an upgrade you can do it yourself

 

For a laptop with 16 or 32GB of RAM, a RAMDISK can be made via software that will take a chunk of available ram and convert it into storage space that functions not unlike a flash SSD with 1:1 R/W IOPS and MB / sec, but goes away as soon as you turn off the computer (since there is no capacitor to provide power to the laptop's RAM after it shuts off). Thus, a program has to tell the computer to take "x amount" of ram and convert it to storage and then load those programs to the RAM storage. Additionally, because RAM doesn't have the same wear problems due to write amplification that a flash SSD has, it can be used as an INSANELY high-speed scratch disk for applications such as photoshop or a movie-making APP where a file can grow to hundreds of MB, and in some cases GB. Just make sure that before you attempt to make a RAMDisk, that you get a gauge of what the maximum amount of RAM used by programs is. You do NOT want to make a RAMDisk if your application use is 10GB RAM and you only have 6GB Free, because you run the risk of running out of storage. This is why 32GB would work better. You can use 12GB RAM for actual RAM and have a 20GB RAMDisk for scratchwork. Then when you're done, you save to the flash SSD. (You can change the RAM for apps and RAM for storage to taste once you've gauged your needs.)

RAMDISK SITE will let you make a 4GB RAMDisk for free, and then for $14.99 will let you make a larger RAMdisk with a full license.

Jason

 

I would have certainly gone the SLI route with 580 SLI had that option been available with the 2980xm but I didn't find any boards that provided other than the Alienware (which I didn't want to overpay for, nor want the design which would draw unnecessary attention, if you know what I mean).

Plenty of 960x-990x with 580 SLI options but the battery life on those is literally 30 minutes, and that's just browsing. The 2980xm rates considerably higher for non-power supply browsing options, and I figured that would be a key frustration point.