searching for a laptop

[shifty157]

Ok. Ive been looking at laptops recently. I want to go for pretty top of the line. Ive looked at every different company I can think of and Alienware so far seems the best. Does anyone have any suggestions over Alienware?

Also when can we expect conroe/merom to hit the market?
When can we expect nvidia's G80 GPU series to hit the market?
I cant seem to find anything on this and I need to order my laptop by mid july or so.

Is a two harddrive RAID noticeably faster than a single harddrive? What i mean by that is is it worth the extra money?

[Papewaio]

If it is a RAID array made for speed then the speed is essentially a multiple of the number of drives minus a small amount of overhead.

So 2 drives and it will be twice as fast minus a small amount.

[orangat]

Ok. Ive been looking at laptops recently. I want to go for pretty top of the line. Ive looked at every different company I can think of and Alienware so far seems the best. Does anyone have any suggestions over Alienware?

Also when can we expect conroe/merom to hit the market?
When can we expect nvidia's G80 GPU series to hit the market?
I cant seem to find anything on this and I need to order my laptop by mid july or so.

Is a two harddrive RAID noticeably faster than a single harddrive? What i mean by that is is it worth the extra money?

Conroe - late July 06
G80 - q3-q4 06

I assume you are refering to raid0 which is plain striping. And the answer is no. In single user scenarios and setups, raid0 is not worth the effort. The performance increase is very minimal (2%) and the probability of disk failure is doubled.

The combination of internet sheeple and clever marketing has led to the persistant myth that raid is always better.

[_Martyr_]

hmmm. depends very much on the setup orangat. As you say, raid0 is not ALWAYS better, but at the same time, its not ALWAYS worse either. In a setup where there is relatively little RAM present, then having a faster paging file can indeed be a good performance boost. Also, for quite a few situations in gaming and large media editing, faster drive speed is a great bonus. But as you point out, its often used as a marketing tool rather than a benificial feature. And drive failure is no joke either, so you have to factor in that a raid0 setup will likely have a signifigantly reduced lifespan compared with two independent drives. Believe me, its NOT fun. Your data is pretty much 100% gone, and its a real pain in the arse! SO unless you really are going to be doing a good bit of heavy duty video editing or hardcore gaming, then I wouldnt bother either. If anything spend the money on RAM or beer instead! ;)

[shifty157]

Thanks for the advice on a RAID.

My only other question is if Alienware is my best choice or is there some other company that I havent heard of?

[Uesugi Kenshin]

Sager is pretty good from what I've heard and much less expensive.

[x-dANGEr]

But as I heard, Raid 2 is quite efficient, but maybe too efficient for a personal user.. ?!

[drone]

Sager is pretty good from what I've heard and much less expensive.
A friend of mine has gotten several Sagers over the years. Pretty good machines, he's always been happy with them.

[shifty157]

Yeah I just checked Sagre out (I hadnt heard of them before) and they are cheaper although dont offer a smany options. At the moment I geuss im leaning toward them. I assume that I can manually upgrade the hardware later on right if i get a new graphics card or something? How many slots do they include for RAM (it would seem like only two)?

Is there any advantage to two smaller independant harddrives rather than one big one?

[Uesugi Kenshin]

A friend of mine has gotten several Sagers over the years. Pretty good machines, he's always been happy with them.


YAY!!!

I hadn't heard anything from anyone who had actually bought one that I know of, so that makes me feel a lot better about the Sager that I'll probably be buying very soon.

[drone]

He is an avid gamer, and always wants the latest equipment. Late last year, he bought a fairly high-end model from Sager so he could game on the road. His desktop died shortly after he got it (some disk problem I think), so he just hooked up his desktop monitors/keyboard/mouse to the laptop, and just ran like that. It was faster than his old desktop anyway. :2thumbsup:

He just now got a new desktop, so I would say he ran it like a desktop for 8-9 months, probably on at least 10 hours a day (gaming/surfing/working). No problems that I know of.

[orangat]

hmmm. depends very much on the setup orangat. As you say, raid0 is not ALWAYS better, but at the same time, its not ALWAYS worse either. In a setup where there is relatively little RAM present, then having a faster paging file can indeed be a good performance boost. Also, for quite a few situations in gaming and large media editing, faster drive speed is a great bonus. But as you point out, its often used as a marketing tool rather than a benificial feature. And drive failure is no joke either, so you have to factor in that a raid0 setup will likely have a signifigantly reduced lifespan compared with two independent drives. Believe me, its NOT fun. Your data is pretty much 100% gone, and its a real pain in the arse! SO unless you really are going to be doing a good bit of heavy duty video editing or hardcore gaming, then I wouldnt bother either. If anything spend the money on RAM or beer instead! ;)

Raid0 is not justified for improving paging performance or gaming and current harddrives are more than sufficient for typical home video editing.
http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=2101&p=10

Even the slowest ram is much faster than paging in and out to disk. Money would be better spent on more memory instead. Raid has no practical benefit for the gamer since games are cpu/gpu bound. AT's raid/non-raid comparison benchmarks showed no improvement for raid in long level loads which is not surprising giving the anecdotal evidence that raid is overrated for gamers. HDV/DV streams only require 4MB/s which is miniscule compared to the 40-70MB/s sustained bandwidth of ordinary harddrives.

Current consumer harddrives are fast enough even for real time editing because they have the transfer rate of what raid0 used to offer in the preATA5 days. Also onboard raid and cheap add-on cards were total crap a few years ago because of high cpu utilization and most probably still implement software raid today.

[_Martyr_]

Well, if you read my post dear orangat, you will see that I came to pretty much exactly the same conclusion as you did... dont buy raid0...:idea2:

[orangat]

Well, if you read my post dear orangat, you will see that I came to pretty much exactly the same conclusion as you did... dont buy raid0...:idea2:

And you spoke of 3 advantages which generally do not apply to home users which shows that you are still somewhat ignorant of how raid works.

Instead of empty temporizing about how raid can be 'not always better' or 'not always worse', the rule of the thumb is that raid is not justified if there is no REAL proof of need.

[_Martyr_]

Dont make ridiculous assumptions, I know full well how raid0 works. I dont really want to get in another argument with you, I dont have the time. But Ill just say this, I have a bit of experience with raid0 arrays and for very specific tasks it does improve performance. In my particular personal experience it was with loading times in BF1942 and for some operations in video editing. That being said, like I said before the overall lack of a gain in day to day people for most people in most situations combined with the dramatic reduction in reliability make it a bad choice.

Peace out.

[shifty157]

Well thank you both but Ive decided against a RAID0 following your advice.

Whats the general turnaround rate for new hardware to show up in laptops? I want to wait for the new Conroe CPU which is supposedly coming in mid-july or so and I know it takes some time for laptops to adopt a new hardware model because they need to be redesigned to take into acount the new heat-output, size, etc. I need to order my laptop by the end of July and Im wondering if the new laptop models will be out featuring the new CPU by then. If not I guess I can always switch it out manually.

[orangat]

The mobile version is the Merom. Not sure when it will be released. Q4 possibly.
The Merom/Conroe is not pin compatible with the current P4's.

[shifty157]

The mobile version is the Merom. Not sure when it will be released. Q4 possibly.
The Merom/Conroe is not pin compatible with the current P4's.

Not compatible? Well that certainly sucks. Yeah I figured I wouldnt be able to get the merom CPU but i thought that conroe might come out soon enough to get one.

If i cant get the Conroe then Ill probably get the latest AMD chip. The 64 bit Dual Core one. Ive never gotten an AMD chip before so im not at all familiar with the numbering scheme they use. How are they in comparison to the P4?

It seems that the G80 series wont be out in time for me to get one. If I got a 7000 series GPU could I replace it with a 8000 series (or perhaps another future series) later on?

[orangat]

AMDs dual core version for laptops is the TurionX2. Laptops are not the ideal platform for gaming or upgrades. I don't know if upgrades are available or even possible. If you are thinking about raid, high end cpu/gpu, get or build a desktop.

[shifty157]

Yeah I would get a desktop but ill be living in a dorm this fall so i wont have any room for one. Ill have to survive with my laptop for probably the next five or six years.

[Sigurd]

I just got a new Laptop.

It is a Dell Precision M-65 …
15, 4“screen (1680x1050)
Yonah (T2500) 2.0 GHz Processor (centrino dual core technology)
2GB DDR2 SDRAM (667 MHz)
7200 rpm 80 GB HDD
256 MB (using 512 MB) NVIDIA Quadro FX 350M Graphic card
Etc…

I am quite happy with it as it can run all the games I am interested in and that it is a real work horse(laptop vise).
It is not top of the line but more than enough for my needs. Any better specifications and it would use too much power (it is meant to be mobile, not just sit in a docking station all day).

I chose Dell because my company gets great prices, services and warranties. The Initial Next Business Day and Complete Care are priceless.

[Cebei]

I have been looking for a good gaming laptop too. I am willing to pay around 2000 pounds (won a scholarship recently :2thumbsup: ) and I am considering buying a laptop in the UK (US prices are cheaper but I am a bit concerned about power conversion for machines of this complexity)

I checked Sager, Dell and Alienware and Alienware seems to be the less expensive one. What should I expect from a laptop around 2000 quid?

[Cebei]

I am taking back my words :oops: Alienware appears to be the most expensive, but they are the only laptop builder that has 2 x 512MB SLI Geforces. 1GB of graphics should be nice :2thumbsup: What do you think about the new Core 2 Duo processors when compared to AMD Athlon?

[Geezer57]

HardOCP's conclusion is that the new Intel chips are slightly ahead of the AMD ones, but that the amount was negligible. See here: http://enthusiast.hardocp.com/article.html?art=MTEwOCwxLCxoZW50aHVzaWFzdA==

I'll be watching the price reductions closely before making any moves, as I don't believe it's worth being on the "bleeding edge" of technology. Too little return for the investment...:no:

[shifty157]

Ive looked at quite a few reviews testing the Core 2 and all of the reviews place intels new CPUs soundly over literally everyhting else on the market. Not to mention that the mid range Core 2 is cheaper and at least as powerful than the the higher end AMD CPUs.