Two years with my W230SS

Hello everyone -

I just realised it's been exactly two years since I received my W230SS from the wonderful fellows over at Aftershock PC, here in Singapore.

I wanted to say that it's been a great ride - I remember powering on my notebook for the first time and feeling the SSD speed just blistering. It still feels as fast. I ran X-Plane, and was wowed by how much faster it was. To be frank, I think the 860/960M GPUs are great value for money, except for the fact that nVidia gimped out on the amount of memory. 2 GB for a somewhat thickly-modded Skyrim and X-Plane just isn't enough, and I'm feeling the pinch.

All in all - mid-range GPUs are a great value for your money, if you're willing to compromise on settings, like using High instead of Very High, FXAA instead of 2X MSAA, and so on. In the small notebooks that the 860/960M have typically been used in, we don't even need that much AA due to the pixel density.

Here's to the next two years, hopefully I can hold out on purchasing a 14" Clevo with a GTX 1060 in it.

 

That is possible given that I am typing on a 5 year old NP8170 right now

 

There haven't been a lot of models with 4gb 860m/960m cards. They are definitely not common, and usually those models seem to sell well just because of that fact.

It is nice to see people still rocking Clevos that are getting up there in age though. I know I talk to people fairly regularly that are getting 4 or 5 years out from their purchase date, and still running strong, and they just want to upgrade. An 860m is still good enough to play a lot of games on medium settings pretty well on a lot of newer games.

 

My Sager can take up to 680M only though

 

A 680m is still about the same as a 860m in performance, and should still be able to handle most games on about the same settings. Still has some life in it

 

Lots of potential for tweaking the 680M if that's your thing too.

 

I am not sure about upgrading to it though since the announcement of the 1080 in laptop and also the high price of getting that GPU; it felt as though I should go get a new laptop instead (kinda need one anyway due to portability issues)

 

You will he able to get something more compact it's true. If you are looking anyway then no its not worth the upgrade.

 

That's what I thought, so for now I am aiming for that while still holding onto my NP8170; I want to keep options open for now