Finalizing P170HM

Hi all i'm probably going to order my build from Malibal later this week. Below i've listed the changes i've made from stock. If you have any suggestions please let me know. Thanks!

CPU: i7 2760
RAM: 12gig 1600
GPU: 6990m
Wireless: Intel 6230
Cooling: IC Diamond 7
Warranty: Upgraded it to 2 years

All comes out to $1850.76 which is an amazing price for what im getting.

 

Looks good from what I can tell. What hard drive did you decide on? If you have any extra wiggle room, an SSD will make a vast improvement to overall system responsiveness. You can always add one yourself once you have the machine as well, but it's definitely a worthy upgrade part. Boot times and application load times will be almost instantaneous compared to a mechanical hard drive.

 

Great build, I agree with Malibal. In my opinion i'd downgrade the CPU and put the money saved to an SSD option. Just my 2 cents.

 

Im looking at the same specs but on the p150HM.

The 6990m looks like the best value for my budget, I'm just worried about heating and driver issues.

 

I stuck with the 500GB 7200 rpm drive. I was thinking about adding an SSD down the road when I have more funds. But if I were to take the 2630 and added the "80GB Intel® (320) SATA II 3Gb/s SSD2 Drive" how much of a performance hit would i take compared to the 2760 with an SSD added later on?

 

The 2760 is ~25% faster overall in benchmarks. It has stock clocks of 2.4Ghz with turbo to 3.5, while the 2630 is only 2.0Ghz with a turbo to 2.9Ghz.

Mobile Processors - Benchmarklist - Notebookcheck.net Tech

If you plan to do more than gaming (Virtual machines, encoding, encryption) you'll definitely notice the speed loss. If you're just gaming though, it won't even be noticeable as you'll be GPU bound well before that.

That said, since you can always add the SSD yourself and a CPU upgrade down the road is much more expensive, you may be better off doing as you originally thought and adding your own SSD.

 

Sorry to jump in, but curious about the 'CPU upgrade down the road much more expensive'. I was thinking I'd buy a laptop with the better-but-not-best GPU (6990) and lower-but-not-worst (2760) CPU with the intent of upgrading the CPU in a year or two before the technology changes, but once it isn't bleeding edge. Wrong idea? I thought part of the advantage to these units was that we could upgrade them - but if they are priced such that it's not worth it....that's less of a perk. How much more expensive is it to buy a new CPU outright compared to the price for upgrading to a bleeding edge model today?

 

I second the notion to downgrade the cpu and save the money to invest in an SSD after you receive your laptop. I got a Samsung 128gb for $150 from a cool local computer shop with a trade in of 320gb hdd. I do some encoding and write stuff for Android and haven't noticed any bumps with the 2630qm, but I'm sure the 2760qm would be pretty sweet.

But like MALIBAL and others have said, if you just game, the 2630qm is more than enough. It's not a weak one

From making configs online, I find that GPU and CPU upgrades are about 35-50% cheaper when going with the retailer at the beginning. A manual upgrade later can cost about $400 for a 2760qm right now, and in a year or two I can't see it going lower than $200....so for about the same price you might as well get it now. Nut you can also consider selling the old 2630 when you upgrade. So that's another factor, but not worth it imo.