Optimum config help?

Need a bit more specific help from the Clevo Crew.

What's the best thing to upgrade in a laptop since I'm looking at the NP9170?

(I've got a SSD that'll be added to the machine so the standard HDD will be fine. )

I'm just trying to narrow down what I can put off until later, i.e. best bang for buck. I can get a WIFI card from eBay later on and 8GB of RAM is more than plenty for me.

 

Definitely the GPU Get the ATI 7970M!

 

Really, just the GPU, no need to even explain why!

 

I would so snap on the 7970M but ATI and Linux don't play nice with each other which is a concern for me. Either way, i'm thinking about getting it because of the raw power of the card.

 

Well obviously the GPU.... that was a stupid question on my part... Sorry... XD

Anything else though or am I set with just that?

 

Maybe the high gamut screen?
Make sure you don't forget the HDD caddy.
An external DVD/Blu-ray drive if needed.

 

I know what you mean. The very latest ATI drivers (12.4) aren't compatible with GNOME 3 in Fedora 16, and Fedora 17 is just around the corner (9 days away) .. Fortunately though, I find that the open source Linux drivers for ATI seem to suffice. In any case, anything graphically intense is being run on Windows, so that should be fine!

Besides the GPU, I guess you could go for higher RAM? Everything else would be secondary like the screen, hard drive, accessories, etc. I'd infact consider the CPU upgrade tertiary. Then it all transcends down to your budget.

 

My budget would probably stick around <$1,600 including shipping...

 

And that's more than sufficient..

 

Awesome guys!

 

lol You're welcome!

 

no 9150 with a SSD and the 7970 for <$1500 from any of the resellers. at least i couldn't find one... has anybody else?

 

And why is the SSD so important ?

 

I kind'a am, aren't I?
Just kidding, the guys at NBR are awesome

 

You'd be hard pressed to find anything with a 7970 below $1500..............I had to extend my budget of $1400 by committing myself to 6 months of hard labor washing dishes so my fiance would agree

 

The inhumanity of it all!

 

...obviously because they're more expensive. PLUS, i was reading on this site wikeepedia and it said they have no moving parts!

i saw you decided to go with Larry too. congrats!

 

..... So ?

 

..... stis ? i actually have no idea why SSDs are so important (not like i ever said that in the first place). would you care to explain their importance to me?

 

Squeezing out your wallet...

 

The OP has their own SSD to put in (first post), so it's not in that budget.
The original question has already been answered I think.

 

haha agree to disagree

 

For those arguing about SSDs: I *really* feel the difference when I use HDD-based systems now.

My current, four year old laptop, went from booting in 4 minutes to about 35 seconds. Everything else loads much faster. And I'm not even running the thing at SATA III speeds yet, so it's still bottlenecked.

 

4 minutes doesn't seem normal in the slightest. Most systems today would be a minute to a minute and a half.

 

Is system boot and subsequent startup of the OS the only thing the SSD or m-SATA drives boost? Because then I'd be very satisfied not buying it, since my computers mostly remain on almost all the time, much like personal linux servers..

 

Yes, and Prasad answered that question very nicely AND effectively. I knew there was a reason I was looking at Sager for so long...

You can disagree all you want, but your HDD actually hinders game and task performance due to the lower data transfer/reading rates when up against even a basic solid state drive.

A SATA II SSD is around 5x faster in both reading and writing speeds compared to a standard SATA II 7200RPM HDD. My boot time decreased from a full minute + another two or more just for logging in and loading your items... to an 18-second boot time + 10 seconds for loading all the items after logging in. I was perfectly happy without a SSD, until I had to grab something off the drive... only to be forced to wait for nearly five minutes, at the worst point right before I got the SSD, just waiting for the machine to load everything.

It makes the machine a bit snappier in every regard. The cost of a SSD isn't that bad actually. a $1/1GB ratio is rapidly approaching and that's wonderful for the performance you get out of it. Granted you can achieve equivalent SATA II speeds with a Raid-0 setup that has like... five drives. But with HDD prices as they are, the risk of disk failure, and the fact that this would ONLY achieve SATA II speeds makes this setup rather unlikely. Plus, there's no laptop out there that can handle 5 HDDs in Raid-0.

If it matters, five 500GB Western Digital Scorpio Black HDDs cost about the same, if not more, as one equally large SATA III SSD, which offers literally TWICE the read and write speeds as a SATA II SSD. And for a laptop, speed is everything... The price/performance of a 500GB mechanical drive is unmatched, but it doesn't hurt to keep that drive from slowing down further right? a 128GB SSD is always a perfect addition to any laptop, regardless of age. I've seen laptops with the old Pentium-M CPUs revived and brought back to use just from using a small SSD for daily use.

Trust me on this. Solid state drives are the way to go if you want to game on a laptop.

Aye, this happens to most of us. We're skeptical until we experience it... unless it regards "true love"... and then I punch the person lecturing me.
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To further answer the SSD question, the P150EM only has one HDD drive bay if you want a CD/DVD/Blu-Ray Drive as well. So adding a SSD is the best thing to do in that case. That's all.

 

So if you're saying I get the m-SATA SSD drive, it would increase my gaming speeds? I assume that's if the game was installed on the SSD itself, and not just the OS? Also, what if I wanted to dual boot my laptop with Windows and Linux (finally with GRUB bootloader), can that be achieved with the boot partition on the SSD itself? Or would the dual-boot break my quasi-magical boot time to be?

 

mSATA would do the same thing that an SSD would, it would speed up your game level load times. It wouldn't actually add FPS (or a noticeable amount anyway).

Not sure about your dual-boot. If Grub opens both OSes at the same time then it wouldn't be as fast as a single OS boot, but still much faster than a HDD.

 

It will improve the load times of anything on the ssd. Once whatever program it is, is in the ram, it's the same. I haven't noticed any improvement in fps, but initially loading something, and bits of games when it needs to fetch stuff from the drive, then it's a massive difference.
If you switch between programs a lot, it's massively more responsive.
I personally wouldn't get msata unless you really need the optical. Smaller, slower, and more expensive. If you did use it as a boot drive, yes there is no reason you can't dual boot as long as there is space.

 

Thanks for the input.

 

For a GPU that cannot play a game very well, I.E. something like my 460M, you would actually see a framerate increase. I have World of Tanks installed on my Vertex 2 and I can say I get a more consistent 40-50 FPS average than I did beforehand with it just on my standard drive... vs jumping up and down between 15 and 60 fps... >.>

However for something like the 7970M, I doubt you'd see any increase.

 

Seeing your avatars side by side makes me wonder if you're related...

 

You're late to the party, bro. $1/GB has been passed on crucial 128 and 256GB SSD's, as well as a few OCZ models For a while, 256GB M4's were as low as $200

Also, no matter how many HDD's you put in RAID0 you can't reduce the latency. I got RAID0, but I need the storage space and I don't care about latency, only sustained write times.

 

Holy $HiT! That made me LOL. +rep incoming... soon!

 

i was agreeing to disagree with Prasad that SSDs are only good to "squeeze out your wallet." rep'd for taking the time to explain to him why that simply isn't true. i'm anxiously awaiting my new 9150 w/ SS storage and will probably end up adding another larger SSD in the optical bay down the road.

by the way, my question is still open:

this is what the HDD vs. SSD discussion stemmed from... and that number should really read $1600. has anybody found a reseller that's offering a rig with both SSD and the 7970 for <$1600?