Pc buying advice please

Post » Tue May 17, 2011 7:03 am

Im now sitting in front of my XPS and i got to say...WHAT A BEAST ;)
Really pleased with it. Worth every penny in my opinion.
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(G-yen)
 
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Post » Tue May 17, 2011 3:56 am

The other option im considering is HP envy models what would you say on those, better?


If you want a slim (1.05"), portable laptop that can handle games well at 1920x1080, there is only laptop on the market that fits the bill
the Envy 15, which has been discontinued but is still available through some resellers and/or refurb models. Make sure to get some kind of return policy if you buy refurb and only buy the 2nd gen models (the ones with HD 5830 gpu). The 1st gen models, with HD4830 had some problems. Also, only buy the model with 1920x1080 display, avoid the 1366x768 display like the plague.

I've had the Envy 15 with dual 1.8" Intel SSDs in Raid0, i7-820QM, 16GB DDR3 RAM, 1GB Mobility HD5830, 1920x1080 display, USB 3.0 and for about 1 year and it is simply amazing, lightning fast. Boot time is 12-14 seconds from off to desktop, shutdown time is a few seconds. Sequential read speed for the raid is 500-550MB/sec. I work with extremely large outdoor advertising files in Photoshop and Creative Suite that would take 20-30 minutes to load on my old laptop. On the Envy 15 they load instantly. I put the laptop through its paces once to see how far I could push it and I was able to load large files in multiple intensive creative suite, pro video editing and disc authoring applications, as well as several recent demanding games simultaneously and alt+tab back and forth without crashing.

Vanilla Oblivion runs at constant 60fps, 1920x1080, all detail settings maxed. after installing 150+ mods including OBGEv2, Qarl's HD texture pack, ENBSeries Shaders, Better Cities, FCOM/MMM/OOO/Fran's/Warcry, AWLS, HGEC Body replacer, Ren's Beauty Pack, Tamriel NPCs Revamped, the frame rate drops to around 40-45 fps.

Other games such as RE5, ME2, DAO run at around 50-60 fps. FO3 and New Vegas run at around 50 fps. (all at 1920x1080 all detail settings maxed).

The drawbacks are
- very poor battery life (around 90 min unless you use the slice battery which can last around 4 - 6 hrs depending on power settings)
- the case is made of a metal alloy and the entire case acts as a sort of heat sink, so the exterior can get very hot when running games or intensive applications while plugged into AC power, especially the underside near the power supply area. Some owners with traditional platter hard drive have complained that the bottom right palm rest becomes hot as well. Perhaps due to the SSDs, I have never felt heat in the area of the drive housing. (I use a Zalman NC-1000 laptop cooler and it works very well to keep the underside cool).
- no internal optical disc drive
- relatively low hard drive space (the dual SSDs provide 320GB total space. I use multiple 64GB and 32GB SD cards to store additional documents that don't require fast read/write access)

If you are willling to consider a bulky laptop that is a bit of a pain to lug around, there are several models that can handle games well at 1920x1080

check www.xoticpc.com and look for a decent laptop with Mobility HD5830/5850/5870 / nVidia equivalent. There are also even bulkier laptops that use desktop video cards.

If you are willing to go with a desktop, you will find a much cheaper solution
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Marnesia Steele
 
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Post » Tue May 17, 2011 2:04 pm

Well, everything but the graphics card looks fine, the 445M is a pretty midrange card, but iirc it's based on the same architecture as the 400 series of desktop cards, so supports all the modern technologies you could want. You will not, however, be playing modern games on high settings. You will most likely be able to play games for 4+ years, though at the tail end of that you'll probably be scraping the barrel. The laptop looks good, but it's not a gaming laptop.

I'd honestly recommend buying a gaming desktop. As prices are, a decent desktop and a decent non-gaming laptop is likely to work out cheaper or at the same price, and you'll get both more power from it, and, crucially, the ability to upgrade for significantly cheaper than buying a whole new PC.


What are you talking about? I ran a fully modded and maxed out OB in my laptop which had a 9500M GS...which is a lot worse than the 445M and only had 512mb...
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Elina
 
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Post » Tue May 17, 2011 7:46 am

If you want it to last 4 + years playing even fairly recently releesed games it's not going to happen with a laptop and would probably be a stretch with a desktop with no upgrades.
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Dagan Wilkin
 
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Post » Tue May 17, 2011 1:41 pm

I recommend,

http://darwinmachine.com/products.htm

All of your friends will drool!
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Melanie Steinberg
 
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Joined: Fri Apr 20, 2007 11:25 pm

Post » Tue May 17, 2011 2:06 am

I recommend,

http://darwinmachine.com/products.htm

All of your friends will drool!

They'd probably be too busy laughing at a $3000 computer with a low-end GPU.
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Killer McCracken
 
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