Sager / Clevo / Malibal with Ivybridge? Laptop for gaming and work

Greetings everyone,
I'm in the process of buying a laptop, and I want it to last me a good period of time. I'm a professional creative and artist, and regularly do hi resolution illustration, graphic design, and video (HD) editing. As you can see, I want this to be a beast. I also game a lot but I'm more concerned with the professional capacities of this machine, and I also already own a workstation PC that is pretty capable gaming wise. I mostly work with Adobe CS suite software, with some 3d stuff thrown in for certain projects (Zbrush, Maya, 3dsMax) Having done my research, it has come to my attention that the Sager /Clevo line of laptops offers the best bang for buck, with lots of features. Of these resellers, I'm eying towards Malibal (mainly because they offer spanish keyboards in their configs, which is frankly astounding on their part). Having said enough about my background, I want to ask several questions:

- Do the Malibal/Sager/Clevo laptops offer Ivybridge processors? And if so, which model do you recommend. I want a mix of power and good battery life.
- Which Graphic Card do you recommend? NVIDIA, because I need to take advantage of the Mercury Acceleration feature that exists in Adobe software products. It can be a gaming card, I don't have the need or the budget to afford a Quadro series card.
- I want this laptop to boot up fast, and also have decent storage space (1 tb). So I was thinking of one of these options: 1 SSD + 1HD combo, or 1HD (with NAND) or 1HD(with NAND) + 1 HD (without NAND). As you can see I don't mind going a 2 HD route, but please give me your suggestions on this one. Also, is it worth it to get a laptop without CD drive? I barely use mine in my workstation... but I tend to think that it might be more necessary in a portable machine... what do you guys think?

These are my concerns so far. I'll be looking forward to your replies

Best regards,
GRINGOTE

 

Hey, we also do spanish layouts (and other languages) on request also.
Anyway, Yes we will all have Ivy Bridge on April 29th next monday. I would suggest the model that will be replacing the 2760qm processor, but in Ivy Bridge (it'll have a 3xxxQM name).
For the GPU you can do the 675m that would be a good card for pulling both gaming and professional duty
If you are going 15" then yea a SSD + 1TB HDD would be great, or if you are going 17" then you can go SSD + 1TB HDD AND keep the optical drive too if you wanted (the 15" you would have to swap the optical for the HDD)

thanks!

 

Thanks for the reply Mythologic I was checking out your website and like what I saw, so I'll consider you guys as well. Some more questions to everybody out there: do you recommend keeping a DVD drive inside the laptop? Or is it redundant in todays age...

 

After setup, the optical drive will be rarely used. And even then, it's been a while since I used a disc to install anything lol. It definitely wouldn't be difficult for you to go without one in the laptop. Maybe grab an external one for the off chance you need to read/burn a disc..?

 

barely use the optical drive these days, most of the installation/whatever contains in the cd done through downloading or flash drive =|

 

I think, unless you can honestly say you intend to watch lots of DVD based movies you won't see much use for a drive.

 

Hey guys, thanks for the help! I'm pretty sure my next laptop won't have an internal DVD drive. External ones are so cheap nowadays, I could use the extra space for work and games.

 

That and with the external DVD drive, you can just connect it to another machine if you need to.

 

OK, my advice: buy a P170EM or P150EM. Nobody offers ivy yet because it's not released, but on the 29th you can have it. The 3610QM or 3720QM are the CPU's you want to look at. For GPU, I'd advise 675m, it's currently the best bang for buck mobile gpu on the market (and right now, it's actually the strongest, but that will change soon). P170EM has 2 HDD bays, so you could either keep your optical drive or get 3 HDD's, but P150EM can be configured with a 95% color gamut screen that would be very good for your needs. These both support mSATA SSD's, something you may want to look into. I would personally recommend a P150EM with the 95% gamut screen, a 32GB mSATA caching SSD and a 750GB HDD, and keep your optical drive for now. Both of these models support RAID, so you could just go with 1tb RAID0 and forget the SSD. Just so you know, if you want to keep this for a long time, I reccomend taking a closer look at Mythlogic's lifetime phoenix upgrade plan, it's a deal maker in many cases for no extra cost.

 

Excellent advice E.Blar. The only thing I change is the 1TB RAID 0. 1TB drives are usually 5400rpm with 50MB/s read/write times, double that for RAID 0 so 100MB/s. Having a Intel 520 SSD will get you 550MB/s read, 500Mb/s write so much faster. You can use a 1TB for a second storage device as speeds wont matter too much there.

 

No, when I say 1tb RAID0 I meant 2x500GB. He doesn't really need 2tb of space.

 

I have a similar setup in mind to do HD Video Editing as well. So far I have a NP9130 configured with the 670M, 2x500GB with MSATA 80GB and no DVD drive. I am on a budget so I couldn't afford the 9150 with the 675M. Getting an NVIDIA card is a must as you said to use Adobe CS Mercury Playback Engine (MPE). The way I understand it is any card that has at least 100 CUDA Cores and 1GB RAM will work with MPE.

 

Am I right in thinking that the respective website's will be updated on 29th April? I'll be needing to purchase a laptop for school.

 

Does anyone have an idea on what the price difference will be?

 

Mythlogic has been strongly implying that the price difference is neglible. I think some other resellers mentioned that as well.

 

Hey Xotic, you guys have a similar upgrade plan?
I've been looking into purchasing from you and this does seem like a huge selling point. Thanks!