Best Sager 2090 customization around $1300?

I've been playing around with the customizations at xoticpc and I'm not sure which upgrades would help my notebook the best and which won't make much of a difference. I want to play some games, but not a hardcore gamer, so it doesn't need to handle spec heavy games.

 

Do you care which resolution you get?
If not, I'd recommend WXGA, T7300, 2GB RAM, 120GB HDD, XP Home for $1314.80

 

If you can, you can cut costs by going to WXGA, skipping out on a gig of RAM (to get later if you get the money for it), the hard drive in default to cut costs and maybe the OS if you have a legitimate copy around.

 

I'll second this...

 

Well I did exactly the same thing...
My specs are

WXGA
Core 2 Duo 2.0
1 Gb RAM
80Gb Hard Drive (I don't need more than that as I never play more than two games at a time)
XP Professional(though I'm doubtful,d'you think Home is better?)

@ Anyone

For the extra cash, is it worth taking the notebook cooler that XoticPc gives?
Because that would throw my budget off by about $100....so if its not needed I won't go for it....
Oh,and can someone please post a link to what the Arctic Silver fluid thingy is and what purpose it has? I gather that it reduces the heat inside the CPU,but how is one supposed to use it?

 

I don't even know what notebook cooler they provide, but I know that I'm getting the zalman nc1000

 

Yeah....I should call them...Where are you getting the Zalman from and how much are you paying for it?

 

You don't have to do anythng with the Artic Silver, it's a thermal goo that they put on the CPU to help with cooling. Possibly applied to other things.

 

Yeah, I got one of those off of ZipZoomFly, and from all the reviews I've read, it's a great looking, well built, and effective laptop cooler.

 

Cheapest used to be at buy.com $44 -10 for first buy w/ google checkout but they sold out and price went up. Now the best place is at newegg @ 56 shipped to your door...

 

Shouldn't I want to get Vista? It looks a lot nicer and most laptops I see have Vista and I'm going to have to upgrade sooner or later?

And how important is hard drive speed?

 

alright just a quick question, at xoticpc.com, I chose the G5 gaming mouse, now does this come with all the stuff that's supposed to come with it? like the weight cartridges, box, manual, etc.?

 

Vista depends. I've run it since January and it works well with business applications. You'll need it for support of DirectX 10 and turbo memory.

XP performs better with games that don't use Direct X 10, which is most games on the market.

 

I thought XP supported dx10 also =/.

 

nope, dx10 is vista only so far

 

Yep, DX10 is Vista-only so far. Some people have cracked games that were Vista-only and were able to make them run on XP. See this article. Note that these games did not use DX10 but were coded to bail out if they detected any other Windows version than Vista. Still, as pointed out in this thread the same people are working on getting DX10 on XP.

 

Yeah, however preliminary tests show that DX10 doesn't help right now, most games that have patches for it run slower in DX10, so that you can't turn the settings up as high, so that the game doesn't look as good anyway. I'd stick with XP right now unless you have a bunch of money to spare for vista.

 

Yeah,I think I'll get a decent notebook cooler at Newegg instead of shelling out the extra cash with the notebook...

And I thought that some guys made an application that makes XP run DX10 games really well...(much better then Vista),though I'm not sure whether its true...(the running better thing I mean)

www.technospot.net/blogs/download-directx-10-for-windows-xp-from-alky-project/

Apparently they have this download that allows DX10 run on XP....I just googled it out of interest a few days ago...


And here's a conflicting view...

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,1931918,00.asp

 

I am not really sure the notebook cooler will be that important to you. After all, you won't be overclocking the machine or have too many heat producing parts in your computer, so it seems quite useless because you will be using the laptop "normally." Also, as stated before the Artic Silver 5 (free) should keep the CPU quite cool, so hopefully you can have a more flexible budget.