Heading to Afghanistan in early June

Well as the title says I'm off to Afghanistan for a year to do my duty in the US Army. With that being said I need a laptop!

I have a budget of $3,500 to $4,000. I've been building my own custom PC's for many many years going all the way back to the P1 75MHz o yea good old days. When it comes down to making a gaming PC I have no troubles there SLI Sure thing Ram ... Lets slap in 24GB's of it and roll I really don't care much for how the case looks it goes under my desk its what in it that counts!

So I been looking at the Clevo X7200 from all the diffident places Sager from xoticpc and Malibal's Nine X7200. So I want power lots of it SLI and lots and lots of HDD space.

So here I am asking main drive as SSD help that much in a laptop I know in my PC they are great in Raid 0 with my GTX 480's X 3 in SLI now I know my laptop will not beat my desktop but I do not wish to give up power just to go to Afghanistan for a year.

You folks read and study on the laptop area much more then I have time to do so head me into safe waters. Also a site that gives a Military Discounts. Best new in everything but it can be ready by late May?

Lots of bla bla from me but hey I want to know and give you all a idea what I wish to gain here

 

the various resellers will respond to this and tell you to PM them. which is the best thing to do. talk with each of them, tell them what you want, how much you want to spend, then see what they offer. they shouldn't have a problem gettin one to you by late may if you order in the next few weeks.

there's a list of resellers on a sticky that sell clevos. just a few more that come to mind are Mythlogic, lpc-digital, powernotebooks, avadirect, and PCTorque.

i think all or most offer military and cash discounts. if they dont, they should at least price match with someone who does

good luck

 

First off, I want to say thankyou for your service.

I think an SSD will help as far as a speedier time loading windows. As far as gaming performance an SSD isn't going to make much if any of a difference over your standard 7200rpm hard drive IMO.

If you want SLi then the x7200 is the only way to go. I would however also look at the recently released Alienware m17x rx3 since you can get a really fast SB processor that would work wonders on cpu intensive games like bc2/bc3. Pair that with a 6970m and while it may not give you the "ultimate" GTX485m sli experience, the majority of the games out there will run very smoothly.

I will say that do take note of how huge the power brick is for the X7200, especially if you plan to run GTX485 sli. It's just not practical IMO, you'd be better off making a compact micro-atx lan case with desktop GTX580 SLi and an i7 2600k.

Either way you can't lose.

 

What KipCoo said...Check the Alienware forums, but they are offering pretty large discounts for military (20-30% off) on the M17x R3...With that budget, you can pretty much max out the system...

I don't think you can get a 485 yet in SLI so the 6970 maybe a good option for "newer" tech...

 

Also as a note, a SSD will be MUCH MUCH less likely to suffer damage in travel, if i was headed over seas no way would my main drive have platters, SSD ftw.

 

Well I did find the AAFES site for Alienware and I must say the discount is nice and I did not hold back on any of it at all. Over $600 off not bad might think about it but still I don't like the Radeon card line to much last 3 I've had have all died in a week or less been die hard NVIDIA fan and EVGA to the grave haha here what I found tho

Alienware M17x R3 - 2nd Gen Icore
Price $2,859.00
EPP Discount $636.15 - IE Military Discount
Price $2,222.85

SYSTEM OPTIONS
System Color Alienware M17x, Soft Touch Stealth Black edit
Operating System Genuine Windows® 7 Home Premium, 64bit edit
Processor Intel® Core™ i7 2820QM 2.3GHz (3.4GHz Turbo Mode, 8MB Cache) edit
Memory 16GB Dual Channel DDR3 at 1333MHz (4DIMMS) edit
Display Panel 17.3-inch WideFHD 1920 x 1080 60Hz WLED edit
Video Card 2GB GDDR5 AMD Radeon™ HD 6970M edit
Hard Drive 1.5TB Raid 0 (2x 750GB 7,200RPM)

 

only things i'd suggest is installing the ram yourself (+$350 is a lot to pay to go from 4gb to 16gb lol). paid like $100 on newegg for the 12gb i'm putting in my rig.. also, consider buying an SSD aftermarket and installing it yourself. they charge 1176 for 2x256 gb samsung ssd's. you can buy samsung ssd's for $500 ea w/ free shipping on the egg..

also, the upgrade from the 2720qm to the 2820qm is ~$200. i personally feel $200 is a lot to pay for only .1ghz / 2mb more. you wont see a difference in performance IMO..

little things like this will help you get the most for your money.. if you dont want to put in any of the work yourself, configure the sustem you want on the regular dell site, call them up (try to get a rep based in the US), and give them the info to pull up your online shopping cart. from there tell them you're military. if you work the rep a bit, you should be able to get a few hundred more off. also stress that you're military and that this thing will be boucin around a lot and you can probably get them to up the warranty for free see this thread with pointers on haggling with dell very useful.. few hours out of your day may pay off greatly!

EDIT: there's a guy on the thread i previously mentioned that got the epp discount, then got his dell rep to upgrade him to the 6970m for FREE.. he posted the rep's name and info if anyone's interested..