Help With Buying A New Laptop

[FrangaR33]

You really want to spend 4k on a laptop?

Either way stay away from HP, their laptops are far to bloated with rubbish.

Asus & Toshiba would be my choice...

What are the min system requirements for your design programs?

Is weight an issue?

Battery life requirements?

Screen size requirements?

With these we can then get an idea of what you need as IMO spending 4k on a laptop is madness.

+1

I've worked on many a HP,Compaq, Dell laptop and they are all absolute crap. Asus and Toshiba I have never had any problems with them, they are very well put together.

I agree with Ash 4k for a laptop is nuts, my gf bought a Toshiba mid range laptop with a good graphics card that can play most new games on medium settings and that was only $1400 with the 3 year extended warranty. I think something like that would more than do the job for you, my gf uses hers for photoshop, video editing and compressing. It does the job quite well.

[GUN_METAL_GTR32]

You really want to spend 4k on a laptop?

Either way stay away from HP, their laptops are far to bloated with rubbish.

Asus & Toshiba would be my choice...

What are the min system requirements for your design programs?

Is weight an issue?

Battery life requirements?

Screen size requirements?

With these we can then get an idea of what you need as IMO spending 4k on a laptop is madness.

1- nothin special just a good graphics card

2- no im a big boy carting around a lappy should be sweet

3- as much as possible i guess

4- as big as i can find really - 17+

answer requirements above or we start shooting

sorry been out of the office all day dont shoot lol

[R31Nismoid]

What are MIN system requirements for your software?

I CBF'd looking, you gotta do some work here -

Seems largely like you don't even know what you want lol.

So give sys req's and then we point you best value for performance. Battery life is KEY IMO as a juicy laptop will mince a battery in no-time, so you might even need extended battery options

[GUN_METAL_GTR32]

i have them in my other office ill be there on monday or tuesday and give the details

thanks

julz

[bozodos]

you'll want either a RAID or SSD and SLI video cards too

[Mayuri Krab]

why buy a macbook for $4k when you can get a better spec'd Alienware for $4k and you're using Windows anyway!!!

+1 the excess $$$ you pay for a Mac is mainly for their fancy OSX software anyway IMO.

I got a Asus G73 gaming laptop for ~$2.3k, spec should be fast enough to run your design softwares.

It came with 2 500Gb SATA HDDs, but you can swap one for a SSD.

As far as I can see all the fastest laptops in the $3k+ range from Asus, Dell, Alienware etc etc are all aimed at gaming, besides a couple of fancy show off laptops with fancy $1k badges on them.

[bozodos]

haha OSX is hardly fancy, it's a hipster front end for Linux IMO

[DivHunter]

haha OSX is hardly fancy, it's a hipster front end for Linux IMO

Unix

You could go with a Dell Precision M4500 - $4052.91 should get it under $4k pretty easy with an account manager. Small and decent and will actually accelerate CAD.

Processor Intel® Core i7-720QM Processor (6M Cache, 1.60 GHz) With Turbo Boost Tech

Operating System Genuine Windows® 7 Professional 64bit (English)

Memory 4GB (2x2GB) 1333MHz Dual Channel DDR3 SDRAM

LCD Panel 15.6" Widescreen HD+ (1600X900) Anti Glare WLED LCD Panel

LCD Bezel No Integrated Camere with Microphone

Optical Drive 8X DVD+/-RW Drive

Hard Drive Mobility Solid State Disk 128GB SATA Hard Drive, 2.5"

Video Card NVIDIA® Quadro FX 1800M Graphics with 1GB memory

Primary Battery 9-cell (90HWr) Primary Battery

Power Option 130W AC ADAPTER

Wireless Card Dell Wireless 1520 (802.11 a/b/g/n) Mini Card

Palm rest Standard Palmrest

Internal Keypad Internal Backlit Keyboard (English)

[GUN_METAL_GTR32]

Unix

You could go with a Dell Precision M4500 - $4052.91 should get it under $4k pretty easy with an account manager. Small and decent and will actually accelerate CAD.

Processor Intel® Core i7-720QM Processor (6M Cache, 1.60 GHz) With Turbo Boost Tech

Operating System Genuine Windows® 7 Professional 64bit (English)

Memory 4GB (2x2GB) 1333MHz Dual Channel DDR3 SDRAM

LCD Panel 15.6" Widescreen HD+ (1600X900) Anti Glare WLED LCD Panel

LCD Bezel No Integrated Camere with Microphone

Optical Drive 8X DVD+/-RW Drive

Hard Drive Mobility Solid State Disk 128GB SATA Hard Drive, 2.5"

Video Card NVIDIA® Quadro FX 1800M Graphics with 1GB memory

Primary Battery 9-cell (90HWr) Primary Battery

Power Option 130W AC ADAPTER

Wireless Card Dell Wireless 1520 (802.11 a/b/g/n) Mini Card

Palm rest Standard Palmrest

Internal Keypad Internal Backlit Keyboard (English)

screen is too small.

[Mayuri Krab]

haha OSX is hardly fancy, it's a hipster front end for Linux IMO

Tell that to all the apple fanboys (& fangirls?) they all think OSX is the best thing ever & windows is total sh*t.

[bozodos]

yeah we have them here, they are all also coincidentally, artfags.

Nice OS that needs third party software to work in a domain LOL. I've yet to see any real reason to choose it over Windows 7 (given that all Adobe programs are in fact more stable in a Windows environment. and there's nothing really mac exclusive that's worth getting one for!)

Yeah to be technical, you're right divvy!

[DivHunter]

screen is too small.

Resolution or physically?

Edited July 25, 2010 by DivHunter

[Beer Baron]

for your needs and budget the sony Z is the way to go. it's a kick ass laptop. I have one. the quad SSDs means your stuff will run super fast. seriously they are a serious piece of gear.

I also have the big boy http://www.sony.com.au/product/vpcf127hg

If the Z is too small then look at the F series above. it's under budget at $3K and is still a kick ass machine with HD display, HDMI out etc. very good laptop if you need full size, full featured.

but if you want portable, fast, stylish then the Z is hard to beat. and it would want to be at $4K.

[SoFreshSoClean]

All the Mac haters have NFI to be honest..

I have a MacBook Pro 15", the new one with i5 core and SSD.

I am not any sort of Mac fanboy, I bought the MacBook kinda out of the blue and I've gotta say, as a laptop, and doing the things I want to do, its effin fantastic. A different experience to Windows and all the better for it. The hi-res screen(an option) is absolutely gorgeous, the response from the SSD is epic, the touchpad with gestures and kinetic scrolling is so inituitive you will wonder how you ever went without it. Battery life is far superior to any other laptop.

Now I know its not the best for games.. but thats why I have a desktop PC

Bit pricey though I'll agree there.

[bozodos]

you're still paying a premium for the hardware...

I hate Macs for a number of very legitimate reasons. The OS is the main thing though.

The Macbooks aren't an inherently bad package, but it's kind of pointless to buy one with the sole intent of putting Windows on it, unless you're getting it cheap.

[R31Nismoid]

for your needs and budget the sony Z is the way to go. it's a kick ass laptop. I have one. the quad SSDs means your stuff will run super fast. seriously they are a serious piece of gear.

I also have the big boy http://www.sony.com.au/product/vpcf127hg

If the Z is too small then look at the F series above. it's under budget at $3K and is still a kick ass machine with HD display, HDMI out etc. very good laptop if you need full size, full featured.

but if you want portable, fast, stylish then the Z is hard to beat. and it would want to be at $4K.

That link does not have a SSD for 3k

It has 3x 640GB 5400rpm spinners.

[GTScotT]

Qualified advice:

Buy what you want, but most of the recommendations in this thread are unrelated and unnecessary. An alienware laptop is the Maserati of the laptop world. It looks weapons grade but realistically for all intended purposes its still just a high powered sedan.

Toshiba satellite's are good value.

End.

[bozodos]

4x SSD's = too much money to throw around LOL.

Not really GTScotT, he WANTS the Maserati of laptops, Alienware is up there, though apparently Asus etc have some true pimp daddy 'desktop stuffed into a shell' laptops!

[Mayuri Krab]

4x SSD's = too much money to throw around LOL.

Not really GTScotT, he WANTS the Maserati of laptops, Alienware is up there, though apparently Asus etc have some true pimp daddy 'desktop stuffed into a shell' laptops!

I have one of those

The Asus G73: Intel i7, 8Gb DDR 3 Ram, ATI 5870m video chip, 2x500Gb SATAs. I got mine for ~$2.3k which makes it one of the 'better value' desknotes around for the performance.

Only weakness would be the lack of SDDs in the Asus but it comes with 2 HDD bays & swapping HDDs is one of the few upgrades you can do to a laptop yourself.

The Alienware is like a Veryon gaming laptop as you can config it to have the fastest video card configuration (dual 5870ms) while the Asus is more like a performance Jap import, not the fastest but good performance for the price.

[D_C]

dont get an alienware, theyre shit.

get an asus G73.

this is coming from an ex-dell service engineer