Should I wait?

So if i place an order now and there is a promo on black friday... i get back the difference?

 

You have to contact them about it, they aren't going to rummage through all of their receipts and seek everyone out. You have to be proactive and get it. I think if you PM one of the Mailibal reps, they'll give you a promo code for that promotion(or just tell you about it, I forget.)

 

So how big a difference would I see between the i7-2670QM and the 2760?

The latter is 3-4x the price to upgrade, wondering how proportional the difference in performance would be.

 

Mobile Processors - Benchmarklist - Notebookcheck.net Tech

Benchmarks if you're interested in viewing. There's about a 10% increase from each step.

 

Hmm, how much will I really notice the difference? Obviously the 2630 is out, with those marks...

Hmm. So many decisions!

I feel like I have to consult over literally every single aspect I can customize. Screen, HDD, GPU, etc.

I suppose one could call it being thorough(i.e. crazy.)

 

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Thanks

 

You probably won't notice it in everyday usage. It will only be useful if you run heavily threaded apps (encoding, virtual machines, archiving, encryption). The GPU will be your bottleneck in gaming long before even the 2630qm.

 

Yeah I don't plan on going that extreme. So it would probably be better to go with say, the 2670, and up the GPU another step than I planned?

I'll move on to my question about hard drives after this. I told you I had lots of questions!

 

Hi, yes exactly. Here's how it works - if you place an order now and the price decreases anytime up until December 31st, 2011 - we will refund the difference back to you.

 

IMO waiting just means you don't get anything cool and shinny now. SPEND THAT MONEY!

 

Yes if one needs a machine, now can be a good time. As was mentioned many resellers do have price protection.
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Last time I bought a laptop was right before dual and quad cores came out. I have a malibal Lotus P151HM1 in my cart right now, will probably buy today or tomorrow. I'm feeling fairly confident there won't be such a significant jump this time around, and I absolutly need a new laptop now.

 

Okay, so I think I am decided on the screen, processors, GPU, and memory.

Next: Hard drives!

So of course there are benefits and drawbacks to solid state. For me the only real issues are size, and price.

I notice there is a 500GB HDD with 4GB SSD. What is that? I don't really know the significant difference there.

I've started to lean toward the 170HM/NP8170 so multiple drives become an issue. Considering without buying a 2nd or 3rd drive(I can get 'em later) RAID becomes an issue etc etc.

1.)If I have multiple drives and choose to RAID them, Primary and slave need to be identical. What differences will I see with a small SSD combo vs bigger old school drives.

2.) If the price for the bigger SSD's are too much, is getting the hybrid worth it?

3.) If I just get the smaller SSD by itself, then get a 2nd(and third) hard drive, how complicated/easy is it to make those two my primary and RAID 'em. Or is all of that just silly?

 

The hybrid drive learns which data you access most frequently and silently moves it to the SSD portion of the hard drive, so it kind of works like a glorified "cache" but gives you a pretty nice boost in speed. I've got one myself and it rocks.

A single SSD is going to be faster than two HDDs in RAID. Most people go for a smaller 80-120GB primary SSD and a larger 500-750GB secondary, data drive. (Of course, don't put them in RAID as that would defeat the purpose of the setup )

 

Ah, that was precisely what I was thinking, a de facto cache. That is quite helpful info J.P.!

So RAID is probably out. Is there any real advantage to the hybrid if I make it a secondary drive later on(after replacing it with a cheaper-than-now SSD) or just get a bigger, regular drive, then speed everything up with the SSD later.

And yeah, how hard is it to switch it out to being the primary drive(installing the OS on it, etc etc)

 

There's no need or benefit of putting the Hybrid drive in the second slot.

A regular 7200rpm hard drive will be all you need in that slot.

In the bios you can easily select the first and second boot drives

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Sweet! I think that's enough info to decide on a hard drive. Almost decided on everything. NBR is awesome

 

Personally, I think if spec is what you after, then never wait, technology fades out faster than an outdoor fart, the current SSD/quad core/usb3.0 combo should be enough performance wise for a good couple years.

 

I would have waited for when the GTX 6XXM Series come out. Too bad BF3 was released a few weeks ago.

 

There is no release time for the 6XXM at all yet.

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