Sager NP9170 good for dabbling in game dev?

I hope this is in the right section.

Anywho, I will be ordering the Sager NP9170 and I will mostly be using it for lots and lots of gaming. However I wouldn't mind dabbling in game dev and I was wondering if the confguration I have in mind would be good for both.

Just going to list the internal stuff to discuss, the rest is not that important IMO.

3rd Generation Intel® Ivy Bridge Core™ i7-3610QM (2.3GHz - 3.3GHz, 6MB Intel® Smart Cache, 45W Max TDP)
AMD Radeon HD 7970M (2048MB) GDDR5 DX11
8GB - DDR3 1333MHz Dual Channel Memory (2 SODIMMS)
256gb Crucial M4 Series Solid State Drive (SSD2 Serial-ATA III)
750gb 7200rpm (Serial-ATA II 300 - 16MB Cache)

I will probably OC my system after I get it so with all this in mind, will I be able to dabble in some game dev? Or do I need to change anything?

 

The 3610 doesn't support virtualization, only the 3720 & up does. Get the cheapest ram from whichever reseller you're planning to buy from then upgrade it to 1600/1866 later.

 

So I would need get the 3620 CPU to do something like that huh? Well that will cost me a bit more. not sure if it is worth it. Will it change anything else like gaming experience or anything like that? is it worth the money to upgrade it outside of game dev?

 

The i7-3610QM supports VT-x, but not VT-d. Virtualization in general only requires VT-x, VT-d allows you to pass physical hardware directly to a VM.

Note that according to intel, the HM77 chipset does NOT support VT-d. So even if you upgrade the CPU, you'd need to replace the motherboard (ie: buy a different laptop) with a Qx77 chipset to use it anyway. So there's no point upgrading to the 3720 for "better" virtualisation on the Clevo.

Anyway, development is usually a matter of software, rather than hardware. A faster CPU is nice if you're compiling a lot of stuff (games tend to be large), as is more RAM, but it's far from necessary.

 

Cool first post.