Please help me decide which proc and GPX cards with which ram for best benchmarks?

Definitely, the D900f will be the best video editing notebook out there. Also, the gpu and cpu will continue to be upgradable (at least until the next form of technology comes out). Once the quadro comes out you can even opt to replace your 280m with it for better video editing quality.
The i7 core itself is more than enough to smoke Crysis. The 280m will have great OC capabilities and if done right should be able to run Crysis at extremely high settings (the highest of any Single GPU system to date).

The 2nd choice would not be good for video editing imo and is greatly overpriced, as is the alienware. the 3870 is an older video card, is not designed for any type of video editing, and has faulty driver support.
Also, I've never seen any alienware with 3d06 marks of 17k, unless it's running on an iceblock and is overclocked to hell.

I agree with ichlime that the only other real choice is the m980, because it has the most powerful and stable gpu settup to date, just not the power of the i7. I would not recommend ATI for anything other than pure gaming, and even then not until the get some solid driver support.

 

looks like a .50 cal, if I'm not mistaken.

 

I expected to do some basic changes as time goes by, but I'd like to run this out of the box the first month so if they're are any issues then it'll be easier to deal with the RMA process. SSD are absolutely in the near future though ...

 

I didn't even know what to select for a processor here ... with the Xeons in there my brain started to fog up.

http://web.eurocom.com/EC/ec_model_config1(1,188,0)

 

Can't get the link to work, which model is it? Also I wouldn't suggest eurocom as they're usually overpriced compared to related EU resellers (i.e. Kobalt)

 

I just googled the D900f to see who else sold them ... they were who came up.

I'll look at cobalt, but WOW the choices of processors was confusing.

 

My bad .... left of a bracket on the end when i pasted it in there. It works now. What time is it for you right now?
I have 10:am

 

Your are in Europe correct? If not I wouldn't go through a European vendor because, well they charge more. I recommend Kobalt if you are though, and Neil from Kobalt is their representative here on NBR. I believe their version is the commanche.
If you're in the US I suggest going through Sager, powernotebooks or xotic PC. The later 2 also have NBR representatives. Their models will be renamed the Sager 9280 though.

- Display: 17" Wide Viewing Angles WUXGA LCD with Super Glossy Surface (1920 x 1200)
- Processor: Intel® Core™ i7-965 Processor Extreme Edition ( 8MB L3 Cache, 3.20GHz, 6.4GT/sec QPI )[+$785.00]
- Video & Graphics Card: Nvidia GeForce GTX 280M Graphics with 1GB DDR3 Video Memory
- Operating System: Genuine MS Windows® VISTA Home Premium 32/64-Bit Edition
- Memory: 6GB Triple Channel DDR3 SDRAM at 1066MHz - 3 X 2GB[+$75.00]
- Promotion Offer: Free copy of Crazy Machines 2+ PC Game Software- Game Bundle sponsored by nVIDIA
- RAID Storage Options: RAID-1 Storage ( Data Mirror - Requires 2nd Hard Disk Drive )
- Primary Hard Disk Drive: 320GB 7200rpm SATA 300 Hard Drive[+$45.00]
- 2nd Hard Disk Drive: 320GB 7200rpm SATA 300 Secondary Hard Disk Drive in RAID configuration[+$100.00]
- Optical Drive: 8X DVD±R/RW/4X +DL Super-Multi Drive & Software
- Wireless Network Card: Intel Wi-Fi Link 5300AGN - 802.11A/B/G/N Wireless LAN Module
- Bluetooth: Internal Bluetooth V2.0 + EDR Module
- Primary Battery: Smart Li-ION Battery Pack (12 Cells)
- Microsoft Office: Microsoft Office Ready with Free 60-Day Trial
- Warranty: Sager 1 Year Limited Parts and Labor Warranty with Three-Day Shipping Both Ways Paid
- Carrying Bag: Standard Carrying Bag

Those are the specs I'd go with. Best processor out there, 6gb of ram is enough. 2x Hdds in raid, leaves a slot open for a future SSD.

Sub-Total:$3,354.00

 

Who'se hating on Alienware? ZAP!

Anyways, I'm not hating on ATI (I own AMD stock haha)
but for anything that has to do with legit video editing, go with Nvidia. This shouldn't be just me saying this, it's pretty well known.

Even if your priority is gaming performance, you won't be able to touch Avid among other things if you get stuck with ATI. And it's not like ATI will develop the same kind of compatibility as Nvidia has with CUDA for CS4 etc. any time soon :/

edit: ACU's on top of it, except you wanted two SSDs and a Giant HD right?

 

Killer. Not in Europe. Texas is home, but I'm not there & won't be for another 6 months.

 

and about battery, though you may not care about it now, your laptop may have an option for an extended battery slice, and you'd double your short battery life to a not so short battery life..

just throwing it out there

xeons btw, are optimized for workstations, which may not appeal to your gaming goal, but it will definetly be better for editing. 8 are better than 4...

 

Thanks, I'll probably order it today and, when I do, I'll ask the rep during the beatdown process ...

 

powernotebooks.com comes in at $3579

 

That's very low... what were you configurations?

When I chose the 965, 12GB, 2 SSD, and 1 7k HD, that alone came to $6,000!

The way I see it, you might as well buy the whitebook of this sager, and throw in the proc, ram, and ssh/hds yourself and it will dip somewhere far below $5,000 (like a bit over $2,000, considering you somehow configed it to be $3,500 from the company).

I'm guessing you're already going to install your own ram, since you somehow made it under $4,000, but I maxed it out just to see what you meant by screwing the budget - and it seems that if you completely screw your budget, you'll end up near $7,000 there!

something else I noticed was that the HDs are extremely cheap if you buy them with your laptop at power, less than a third of the lowest price I could find them individually online, but other options like the ram are inflated.

 

He selected HDDs, not SSDs. That saves a ton of money there.

 

I did that same thing at first to see where it would lead and wound up at like $8K.

So started to cut back to what had been suggested here and wound up under budget. SSD's are so new the prices are still out of line. In six months the prices will drop, or for the same money the capacity will increase. I also saved on the ram. again ... prices on that ram will come down too. The processor and the video card seem to be where I should spend the most so I did and saved on the rest.

I'll wait for a little more input from you fellas and do the research on what has already been discussed, but most likely I'll order this tomorrow. i think I'll run a journal of my experiences, but should I just keep it in this thread for others to follow from the start of this conversation to whereever it leads? Or should I start another thread somewhere?

 

Well if you plan to stick with the Clevo, you should take your journal/thoughts to the Sager/Clevo discussion room.

 

That Sager NP9262 | 17" WUXGA | Q9650 3.0GHz | 4GB DDR2 800mhz |Dual 9800M GTX 1GB SLI | 320GB HDD 7200 RPM | 64 bit Vista rig in your sig ... how long ago did you buy that? With the dual 9800m's it's looking kinda interesting.

If you made the choice I'm making right now ... lol ... same rig (3.0ghz Quad processor w/dual9800M's) or this NP9280?

I'm also surprised that the 9280 doesn't have integrated biometrics ... not sniveling just surprised.

 

fingerprint readers are more of a gimmick now, most people do not even use it on their notebooks.

as for the Clevo D901C (NP9262) you are referring to... it is getting phased out.

but a number of vendors (Clevo Guide) are still selling it since its still in top of the highest end notebooks list.

There are a few people that sell it here on NBR or ebay sometimes.... like this one that just came up:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=377170

 

Hahahaha... I'm not laughing at you, more like evil laugh inside my head.

I pretty much got the last NP9262 that Sager had in stock. I bought it about 3 weeks ago, it went off the market (at least with 9800m gtx's in sli) about a month ago. According to Gophn there are still some vendors that sell it, but I haven't seen it on any of the big name resellers (kobalt, sager, powernotebooks, xotic pc), but you might be able to find it at a secondary one somewhere.

It was exactly what I was looking for, desktop cpu, high end gpu's in sli, and in a 17" chasis. I'm personally glad I picked this up because it fit my needs perfectly, the only downside is that this is the end of the line for this laptop, and the cpu isn't able to be OC'd (not that it needs it).

It's possible that it might support the 280m's in the future, but as far as everyone else is concerned the 9800m gtx's are the final gpu that the bios will support.

In the end the 9280 will probably be more powerful with a single gpu sometime next year, when nvidia releases the next gen video cards, but until then it's still no slouch.

If I had to pick between the 9262, 9280, and m980, my order would go:
9262, m980, 9280, but this machine is strictly for gaming for me, I don't do any editing or video rendering or programming...yet.

 

Gophn thanks for all the input. I'm surprised by the number of people that have kicked in here. This help from everyone has absolutely taken the stress out of the situation, and turned it into something I can enjoy as I go.

 

This also looks good for the turbo memory. Is that another gimmick or something that actually works?

If I knock off the extra 2gb's of ram it goes back down to $3709. This is with 1333 ram instead of 1066 AND a third HDD, whereas the system from xoticpc was only a two drive rig running on 1066 ram. No cool looking skin options though.

 

gimmick, only increase performance on machines with less than 2gb of ram, and gives like 5 extra minutes of battery life.

 

agreed, I'd still go with 6gb of ram, best bang for the buck, as gophn puts it. You definitely won't notice $400 worth of performance from 6 to 8 gbs (probably like $10 difference, lol).

 

If you opt out on the Turbo, you can always throw it in later. For now, Turbo speeds up boot up time and loads up your specified apps faster for some computers. I like it because I'm impatient when I have work to do, but I don't know if it would make a difference on this rig.

Anyone know what else Turbo does?

 

if you have an ssd, everything loads up pretty much instantly so it doesn't matter. do you have any benchmarks for load times?

 

agreed. Turbo Memory helps (if anything) if you use conventional Hard Disks.

 

I can't believe that you guys are still advocating a $5000 'solution' to a $2000- problem.

 

What would be the choice you'd make newsposter? Help me out here ... video editing and at least 35 FPS on Crysis at max settings are the requirements I've set for this laptop. Is there a way to do this for $2000?

Thanks in advance for your help ...

 

... which is what I'll do for the first little while until I can get raid 0 on at least 320 gb's of storage without paying $1500 for the privilege. The turbo is only $80 so it's in the config' along with the spare battery as a less expensive utility item.

I'll run some benchmarks with and without the turbo module enabled and post them for fun.

 

You mean 320gb of total storage? If so, two 256gb G.Skill Titan SSDs would cost around $1k which would take up 1/5th of a $5000 budget.

I don't know of any notebook right now that can max out Crysis at 35fps (we're talking 1920x1080 with due respect to the resolutions of the M980NU and the W90 at Very High). The Asus scores a bit less than 30fps at those settings and the Clevo would score around the same according to a simulated run. If you lower the resolution a bit, the Clevo would perform better because the ATi cards don't scale as well in that game at lower resolutions.

Video editing we discussed earlier with CUDA (for nVidia cards) and STREAM (for ATi cards). Most major video editing programs like CyberLink Power Director support both platforms though more independent video editing programs support CUDA as of now, giving the advantage to nVidia. However, STREAM has the advantage in faster transcoding and via more formats (although some of the formats produce artifacts as seen during AVIVO's beta stages).

So technically your problems can be solved by using less than $5000, but you'd definitely need a bit more than $2000, unlike what the other guy seemed to suggest.

 

It's been awhile since I've gone to math class, but I'm pretty sure ~$3500 < $5000.

 

I'll probably be running Edius 4 as my primary editing suite if that helps any.

As far as FPS it looks like you're right on there. I've got my numbers all backasswards at 35FPS. Overclocked I'll do well to get even 30FPS. Still, at 1440 x 900 I'll be happy. As people play with this config the tweaks will come out and we'll all be able to get more out of it. Meanwhile it looks like the best I can do at the moment. The M980NU is an ATI GPX powered system, so as much as I'm loving that unit the thing just worries me too much not to mention we have no real delivery date yet, but plenty of speculation.

 

The M980NU isn't ATI powered. It uses Nvidia 280m's in SLI. the Asus W90 is the one that uses ATI.

 

Good luck on not frying your mainboard and GPU on trying to do such a feat on a cramped form factor. I would go with what K-Tron mentioned which is get a notebook with a mid-range (max) GPU and spend the rest of that cash on a full blown desktop.

 

Hi Yes
But In1Ose , he want high-end top laptop only for top benchmarks and that's iit
Be happy that: I have top number of benchmarks huraaa

 

http://www.nordichardware.com/news,9238.html

New contender?!

 

This is also aimed at Evoss-X

You people obviously don't read, or don't take anything from the OP. He wants a powerful notebook because he needs the mobility so that he can do HD Video editing, as well as max out fps in games.

A mid level notebook won't meet his specifications, and a desktop isn't an option for him. He doesn't want the specs for benchmarks, he wants them for high FPS in games, and to produce high quality videos... you ignorant people are really starting to get on my nerves.

 

Seems to be almost identical to the 9280, did you find a price anywhere?

 

because it is just another re-brand of the same Clevo D900F.

 

I was joking man ..
but stevezachtech is right if he really want this mega high-end nobo
I think he will need PROPER cooler under machine..
I recommend plug some copper pipe and another end stick right in to the freezer ...

 

Does it have to be an either or situation, really? I mean, can one not do both?

Lol ... I'll get this straight eventually. It's the i7 not being in the M980NU that's keeping it off the top spot on my the list, and the fact that there's no clear shipping date, around July is the scuttlebutt, that I can put money on as well. The pre-order on that system so far I've only seen from Eurocom and they are charging around 40% higher then the American companies on the various components such as HDD, OS and so on.

 

The Clevo 900 series has been known for it's high end cooling systems. They generally don't require a cooler unless put under extreme stress and OCing for extended periods of time. Even then they have a safety feature to where they'll turn off before causing any physical damage to themselves.

As far as preording goes, it doesn't matter who puts it on their website first, they'll all be released at the same time, so only time will tell.

Also, if you really want to spend that entire $5000, you can get both a high end notebook and a high end desktop and still come within budget.

 

I had a system built last October that I'll update later this year, so the budget can all go on a laptop. I'd order right now if I could get a delivery date of less than four or five weeks. This dang waiting is killing me. The D900F and M980NU are both not something I can order today. Seems like the OCZ Whitebook is the only option I can go with at that level right now. Probably just as well so that I avoid the 1st run issues of a newly released system, and I can upgrade in Q2 of 2010 after the dust settles and the tech guys have dug into the newer systems a bit. This review of the whitebook shows it will run Crysis well, and it'll do fine for editing HD as well.