If your house catches on fire you have the Steam cloud to store your save games.

So yeah.

go
desktop

What?

PC
1.it can be cheaper because you buy individual parts and some you can get low prices
2.if it breaks or needs replacing it wont cost you another 1000$
3.some laptops have heat issues, so it may not be able to run a game as long as a PC

Heat issues with laptops can easily be solved with a fan. Not a huge fan...but (I forgot what it's called) the thing you put under your laptop and plug it in your laptop to turn the fan on.

I highly recommend the Zalman line of notebook coolers.

I use the Zalman NC-1000

Are you sure, BootySweat? I always thought RAM governed how many operations and tasks your computer can carry out at a single time. I play Morrowind heavily modded with tons of trees and added buildings and my fps has always been between 5-15. The Gambryo engine renders everything within line-of-sight even though you can't see it, which is one of the reasons why it is such an awful engine.
Those specifications you just listed, would they allow Morrowind to run at 100 fps in exterior cells such as Solstheim? I figure if a laptop can render modded Morrowind at high fps, then it could get Skyrim to run at probably twice that since the Creation engine probably isn't as demanding as the Gambryo engine.

Did you mean http://www.notebookcheck.net/Intel-Core-i7-2920XM-Notebook-Processor.40114.0.html Sandy Bridge model or http://ark.intel.com/Product.aspx?id=52213? The first is an Intel Core i7 2929XM but it says 2.5 Ghz processor. The second one is an i7-2600 at 3.4 GHz processor. I would think as the model numbers went higher, so would everything else about the computer specs. But going from a quadcore 3.4GHz down to a quadcore 2.5GHz is a dramatically huge downgrade!

And yes, I do want to use this laptop for photo editing with Adobe Photoshop and other such art software programs like GIMP, Blender.... I use those for modding and texturing.

If you plan to work with Photoshop CS5 and any other 64-bit graphics apps, then you will certainly benefit from more RAM, the more the better. Also, for certain CS5 apps you can benefit a little bit more from getting a high end NVIDIA laptop card instead of AMD. Photoshop, After Effects and Premiere CS5 can make use of CUDA hardware processing to speed up things like render times.

In my case, I work with large outdoor advertising image files as well as video editing and motion graphics apps and it has been helpful to have large amounts of RAM.

I'm not familiar with Morrowind mods, but in the case of a heavily modded version of Oblivion, even when using the 4GB patch and tweaking the .ini file to allow more use of RAM, it still doesn't seem to use more than 3-4GB RAM. Morrowind and Oblivion are both 32-bit applications, so I don't think there is a way for them to benefit from huge amounts of RAM.

On the other hand, using Qarl's high res textures and other 2048x2048 textures created by modders has massively slowed down my load times. This seems to be alleviated by using an SSD instead of traditional HDD.

I don't know about 100+fps for morrowind, but in my laptop, if I take off vsync, I get over 100 fps for vanilla Oblivion at 1920x1080 resolution, all detail settings maxed and load times are almost zero.

However, after installing 150+ Oblivion mods including FCOM, OOO, MMM, Fran's, Qarl's, OBGEv2, ENBSeries shaders, etc., my frame rate drops to around 40-50fps, and the load times increase to around 10 -20 seconds.

here are the specs in my laptop (also runs Photoshop and other CS5 apps incredibly fast thanks to SSD and RAM) :
Envy 15
i7-820QM 1.73 GHz (max turbo 3.06 GHz)
1GB AMD 5830M (stable overclock is around 550MHz / 1100 MHz)
16GB 1333 MHz DDR3 RAM
Dual Intel X18 G2 SSD (2 x 160 GB)
1920x1080 display

I don't know what your total budget is, but if you want a laptop that is great for Photoshop and gaming, there are not very many options.

You might want to consider one of the http://www.xoticpc.com/sager-np8150-built-clevo-p150hm-custom-gaming-sager-notebook-p-2972.html?wconfigure=yes for example the Sager NP8150, possibly configured with SSD, 8GB RAM+ and i7-2920XM and NVIDIA 485M.

It's going to be really heavy and bulky, but it will be a beast for Photoshop.

If you need excellent color reproduction, then you may want to consider an HP Elitebook with http://i988.photobucket.com/albums/af6/Aikimox/19.jpg, which is the most accurate color reproduction available; however, it's not going to be very good for gaming.

Me and the wife plan on geting Sony Vaio laptop core i3 with ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5650 GC .We do a fair share of traveling,so a laptop works best for us and i know a few ppl with the same laptop that do alot of gaming on them with the same specs and its not to bad. I dont have any worries that it wouldnt be able to handle skyrim oh but to be on the safe side as far as over heating goes ill prob get a laptop fan.Meh most my gaming will be on console tho.it'll just be nice if im out of state to have a backup skyrim. :woot:

Laptops ARE pcs.
But I'd recommend you a desktop over a laptop for two reasons:
1) Desktops are easier to upgrade and customize.
2) When you buy a desktop you usually pay less money for more power.

Only get the laptop if you really need the mobility (i.e. frequent traveler).


If you're not frequently on the move, then just get a desktop.

what is the display resolution of the Vaio you are considering?

you might have to play at a lower resolution than the native display in order to get a decent frame rate with the 5650M.

IMO Vaios are usually overpriced -

Just buy PC it will solve all your problems...though it's cheaper to build it up from the ground

PC for sure, laptops just aren't designe for gaming , plus there is the danger you will drop the laptop and screw up your cd

I think it's worth pointing out that since this game is coming out on the Xbox it should be able to run on hardware that isn't super-top-of-the-range. I myself have a nine-month-old Sony Vaio that runs everything wonderfully- 6 gig RAM, decent nVidia GeForce GT 330m, and a 300gb harddrive, max resolution of 1920 x 1080. It wasn't top of the line and cost about ￡600, but I can easily say it's the best computer I've ever had. It's portable (which is great if you're a freelancer like me) and it does everything I want it to. You can almost certainly get something even better for the same money now.

The Windows 7 performance index is 6.7 / 7.9, which is good enough for me. I usually have to turn some graphics settings down (shadows, anti-aliasing) and run things at 1280 x 720 rather than 1920 x 1080, but who cares? I don't play games to marvel at how accurately the shadow of a crate is being rendered against a terrorist's corpse.

We plan on the geting the Vaio EB model, its cheaper to just order from sony as far as geting a laptop goes was thinkg about geting a dell but they dont offer the ATI 5650 GC anymore
and it wasnt that much cheaper.The resolution wont be set high prob med range as long as i get console graphics or alittle higher im fine with that.

I got a gaming laptop because both my laptop and desktop were out of date and I wanted to replace both. I also wanted to be able to use the gaming laptop in different rooms, most importantly the living room on the big screen TV, and take it to friends houses etc.

The biggest benefit actually has been hooking it up via HDMI to the big screen TV. It's just awesome playing like that! (Incidentally, Oblivion is a favorite). But I also like being able to sit down in front of a display other times, so it is nice to have the versatility. Plus I've ended up using it for various media purposes too (e.g. playing Region 1 DVDs - my Bluray player is region-locked). Software seems to be able to output media on HDMI at native res/frame-rate which is awesome as my TV handles just about any input very well (laptop would have a tougher time converting to 1080p50).

The laptop is a fair bit below what I could have got in a desktop specs for the same money, *but* not so much if I was only looking at pre-built desktops (which I was - I don't have time to monkey around building a system/debugging/possibility of having to deal with multiple vendors in case of warranty, etc.) Looking at prebuilt desktops, here in Europe I would have had desktop only (no accessories/screen) with much the same processor, only a bit better graphics and only €200 or so less in cost.

I think the situation is different in the US where you can probably get a prebuilt gaming desktop pretty cheap whereas laptops are probably almost as expensive as they are here.

a desktop will give u better performance for a smaller price

My budget is nothing over $4000. I live in Los Angeles county and state tax here is ridiculous; higher than New York I believe.

As far as what I want to do with my laptop, playing Morrowind with super intense mods and extreme texture replacers comes first. Adobe Suite Master Collection and playing other games like Oblivion come second.

Have you tried playing Oblivion with the TC mod http://www.nehrim.de/startEV.html? I haven't played it so I don't know how it is on frame rate.
I believe the best test for frame rate handling for Morrowind is the old beta version of http://planetelderscrolls.gamespy.com/View.php?view=Mods.Detail&id=7831. It has over 100 buildings in only four exterior cells. I'd like to know if your fps drops dramatically in Pelagiad exterior cells with the laptop you have. The mod is only 10 MB in size so it shouldn't be too much of an inconvenience to download.

What I want is to be able to reach 100+ fps in any given exterior cell in TESIII while having MGE on maximum settings with all town expansion mods (including Tamriel-Rebuilt) and texture replacers, and be able to jump into the air with my Acrobatics set at 3000 so I can see the entire span of Morrowind & Solstheim without having any significant fps drop. I know the human eye can't tell the difference after about 50 fps. But when I have Fraps running and other programs in the background, it will slow down my performance more. So that's what I want to achieve with my laptop.


BootySweat, how does your laptop handle Morrowind with MGE, infinite view distance and all the grass & animal mods and 4096x4096 texture replacers?

Is that Sager NP8150 the best model to get for what I want to do? I don't care if my laptop is bulky. It could weigh 100 lbs and that wouldn't bother me. But I visited the Sager website and found that http://www.sagernotebook.com/index.php?page=product_info&model_name=NP5175 was the newest arrival. But does newer necessarily mean better, faster and more efficient? I can't tell how good the laptop will be just by reading the specifications on the webpage. I don't understand a lot of that stuff.

What are each of these lines below?


Envy 15 <--That's the model number?
i7-820QM 1.73 GHz (max turbo 3.06 GHz) <--That's the processor?
1GB AMD 5830M (stable overclock is around 550MHz / 1100 MHz) <---Don't know what this is.
16GB 1333 MHz DDR3 RAM <---Don't know what this is. Graphics card?
Dual Intel X18 G2 SSD (2 x 160 GB) <---Don't know what this is.

I'm not sure about Morrowind with MGE - I have only played vanilla Morrowind so far. Also, I'm not exactly sure, but I believe extreme high res textures like 4096x4096 are only good when used with extreme high resolution displays - multiple monitor setups, etc. My display is 1920x1080 and I have not installed any Oblivion textures higher than 2048x2048.

In my experience with Oblivion, to be perfectly honest my human eyes cannot really tell the difference between, say, 50 fps and 100 fps. The only way I can tell is by using FRAPS. Anything over 40 fps, looks very smooth to me and plays fine IMHO. I understand you want to run some other programs in the background, however, I imagine getting an SSD and more RAM would be more helpful for that than your video card.

For much less than $4000 you should be able to get the absolute top of the line laptop for Photoshop, modeling and gaming. If you buy it online from California, you are on the "honor system" with regard to the state tax. It's still not going to compare to a desktop you build yourself, but it will be very fast.

BootySweat, is DreamColor 2 just a screen? If so, why can't I customize my Sager laptop to have that type of screen? I don't see why it would be isolated to only HP computers.

I found http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/228276/maingear_announces_3d_laptop_with_48ghz_processor.html which talks about a 4.8 GHz processor for laptops.

I was looking at what graphics cards are the best/newest for laptops and found http://www.notebookcheck.net/Comparison-of-Laptop-Graphics-Cards.130.0.html. I'm guessing the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 485M SLI is the best graphics card money can buy for gaming laptops. It mentions that you need a big laptop, which is good, since I'm wanting a screen around 20". I could always just buy an external monitor to plug into the laptop. What are your thoughts? http://www.maingear.com/boutique/pc/configurePrd.asp?idproduct=797 is that laptop, which looks like it won't be released until next month in June. Although, I could care less about 3D gaming. I just want top of the line SSD, as much RAM as I can get, and very fast over-clocked processors in my laptop.

Bought a 700$ laptop last week, it run oblivion just nice, main downside with it is the 1350*740 or something resolution, a more expensive laptop would have a better screen.
Main benefit of desktop is expandability; just add more hard drives or a new graphic card.
If you buy a laptop just capable of running Skyrim it will get problem with later games. With a pc you just change the graphic card.
Main benefit of a laptop is portability, if you need to move it around a laptop is obviously better and you can just as well get one able to run Skyrim as one who is not.

PC's the cheaper choice in the long run I think.
Laptops are very hard or at least very difficult to upgrade the hardware, not to mention expensive if the latter applies at all. And then they have some issues like overheating. Only gain is mobility.

I don't like laptops... because:

1) You use them more often because of... they're obviously easier to bring with you. This is bad I think, because I don't wanna be on the comp too often. It's not good (lose focus on other things that you should focus on, and it's simply bad physically to be on the computer too much).

2) Far worse gaming experience imo. Really bad sound compared to what you can get otherwise, and if you wear headphones, it's worse for your ears and you risk getting tinnitus. Also smaller (and worse) screen.

3) Uncomfortable and bad ways of controlling things. Keyboard is smaller and the buttons aren't "up" so it's harder to sense where they are. Mouse... there is no mouse. Mouse is almost essential for me on first person view games, like TES. I can't stand joystick or w/e. Sure you can plug in a mouse, and that's cool then. Still, keyboard is bad though, if you can even call it keyboard.

4) Stationary PCs have more power, I think? Not sure, but I guess... more space --> more room for more power?

Frankly the only reason you should buy a gaming purpose laptop is if you either:

1. Game on the go

OR

2. Use programs that gaming hardware can handle extremely well...on the go.

I work with AutoCAD on a daily basis and my Alienware laptop is massively useful for this. It isn't near as powerful as one of my desktops but on the other hand it runs the programs so well that as long as I'm not rendering anything too agressive or dealing with a massive file my laptop can take care of whatever I might need it for.

And when I was in college it was also massively useful for much the same reasons, with the added perks of being able to boot up a game if I wanted to.

If you follow the link to the Maingear site, the fastest processor they offer is the Core i7 2920XM, which has a stock clock speed of 2.5 GHz. They require that processor in order to overclock it, and while they say they'll overclock it, they don't promise anything about 4.8 GHz. If it has a fully unlocked multiplier, they might be able to push it to near 4 GHz without using any more power than the video card does. Of course, that's because that comparison is to the hottest laptop video card ever. And I mean "hottest" in the bad sense of the word.

They'd have to use a different motherboard from normal, in order to be able to feed more power to the processor. They'd also need a strong cooling system. But if you make the laptop thick and heavy enough and the fans noisy enough, they can more or less keep it adequately cooled.

For some halo products like this, the real point of the product is to get some publicity, from news stories and forum threads like this one. If you hadn't previously thought of Maingear today, then you have now.

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It also depends on your budget. For a gaming laptop on a $2000 budget, you should definitely get a Radeon HD 6970M. Ideally, you'd like a Core i7 2720QM, but may need to accept a lower bin Core i7 2630QM for budget reasons. The higher bins above 2720QM are too much more expensive for not enough more performance. It would also be nice to get an SSD instead of a hard drive, but that may be impractical if you need a lot of storage space.

If you need long battery life, then you're really in a bind. Gaming video cards use quite a bit of power at idle, which zaps the battery pretty fast. In a desktop, it's no big deal for a video card to use 10-15 W at idle, but in a laptop, that's a problem. Both AMD and Nvidia have switchable graphics to turn off the video card and use the Intel integrated graphics, but that doesn't seem to get implemented with higher end video cards.

If you want a gaming laptop and also need long battery life in the same laptop, then you should wait to see what AMD's upcoming Llano APU offers. It might be possible to pair a Radeon HD 6970M with the top bin of Llano, and switch between the discrete video card and integrated graphics very smoothly, so that you can power down the video card entirely when it isn't needed for gaming. I'm sure AMD would love to have that sort of switchable graphics; it's really just a question of whether they can. But it should be a lot easier to make it work right when the same driver controls both the integrated graphics and the discrete card than when the discrete card has to decide whether to take over without having the slightest clue what the integrated graphics chip is doing internally.

Hopefully AMD would be able to offer more aggressive CPU clock speeds while turning off the integrated graphics. If the entire APU has a TDP of 45 W, then without the graphics, that should be able to handle four Llano cores at 3 GHz or so. That won't catch a Core i7 2720QM in performance, in spite of the higher clock speed, but it would be in the same ballpark. If a lot of the TDP is reserved for the graphics, so that with the graphics off, the chip can't use more than 25 W, then Llano could be rather bad for higher end gaming laptops.

Sager, Eurocom, and Alienware all sell the hardware that I describe in the first paragraph of this post. Asus and MSI don't yet, so I'm not sure if they're just taking their time, or if they think it will make more sense to pair parts with Llano rather than Sandy Bridge for a higher end gaming laptop. They surely know a lot about Llano performance that we don't.
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My recommendation:

Don't get a gaming laptop. Even if you need a laptop and also need a gaming machine, it's often better to buy both a cheap laptop and a gaming desktop than a gaming laptop. In fact, that's what you should do unless the whole point is to have a gaming machine that you can take with you when you travel, and play games on it when you travel.

Not to mention desktops offer more "bang for the buck", don't have the heating issues, MUCH easier to upgrade, etc.