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Mu Zeta
Oct 17, 2002

Me crush ass to dust

They are certainly better than the default or the 1600x900 screens.

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fookolt
Mar 13, 2012

Where there is power
There is resistance
God drat, the Razer Blade 14 looks amazing. It's a shame about the lovely TN screen :(

Woolwich Bagnet
Apr 27, 2003



Spoiled posted:

Woah, so you can replace the battery now? Insane. Can you upgrade RAM too? That makes it sound kind of bearable, actually, outside of the 30$ adapters.

Battery life isn't that big an issue for me as long as it can last 2-4 hours for meetings. I'm more concerned with weight personally. How heavy is the power supply on the macbook air? What about the adapters?

I guess the new Zenbook (Infinity?) you mentioned is supposed to come out Q3 2013. I'll be waiting for it to come out if I can.

Yeah, replacing the battery is something like 12 screws in the new MBA. The RAM however is still soldered, so what you order is what you're stuck with. The power supply for it is quite light, lighter than for most notebooks, in addition to having lighter cables (and the maglock connector is seriously one of the best things). The adapters I think are typically quite small (I don't have any so I cannot comment exactly, but the ones I've seen are small and light). The SSD will eventually be upgradable when new M.2 standard SSDs become available to consumers.

Oxxidation
Jul 22, 2007
Screwed-in batteries are weird to me. I popped the battery out of my Latitude D820 when it died for good (about eight months after I bought it, hahaha, Dell batteries were not too great), and kept the laptop on AC power for the rest of its lifespan. Reduced weight, too! Though the weight was no longer evenly distributed, which bugged me.

Valithan
Mar 2, 2003
My mom is in the market for a new laptop; she mainly just uses it for web browsing/quickbooks for her business. The only requirement is that it have 13" or bigger screen as she never uses an external monitor/anything smaller she has trouble reading, looking for something $800 or under. I'm really only familiar with Lenovo's offerings, is there anything else she should be looking at?

syzygy86
Feb 1, 2008

Hadlock posted:

i5 3320 and above - same general performance, but with vt-D suport for 50-100% faster VM speeds

VT-x will speed up normal VMs, but VT-d is only useful in certain circumstances. VT-d specifically refers to an IOMMU, which lets you pass through a PCI device such as a RAID card or network adapter to the guest. Unless you're doing PCI passthrough, VT-d does nothing to speed up the VM.

As far as I can tell, all mobile i5 processors support VT-x.

Dangerous Mind
Apr 20, 2011

math is magical
First off, I know this is the wrong thread (maybe someone could direct me to the right thread because I sure as hell can't find it).

I'm kind of interested in getting a touchpad so I can surf the web and take notes on it for school. I saw some people using iPads, HP and Lenovo, but I really don't know which ones are good/best. I also don't know the price ranges on these things and how much I should be paying, aka what are competitive prices. Any help is appreciated.

butt dickus
Jul 7, 2007

top ten juiced up coaches
and the top ten juiced up players

Dangerous Mind posted:

First off, I know this is the wrong thread (maybe someone could direct me to the right thread because I sure as hell can't find it).

I'm kind of interested in getting a touchpad so I can surf the web and take notes on it for school. I saw some people using iPads, HP and Lenovo, but I really don't know which ones are good/best. I also don't know the price ranges on these things and how much I should be paying, aka what are competitive prices. Any help is appreciated.
You mean you want someone to recommend you a tablet?

Dangerous Mind
Apr 20, 2011

math is magical

Ahh OK thank you, I was searching for "touchpad" in the search bar. :negative:

agarjogger
May 16, 2011
Question I should know the answer to, but don't.
They're sending me a new x230 because the rep claimed mSATA card install is not a user-doable operation and they forgot to include my wireless card in my Christmas order. This was apparently the only way to resolve that situation, and I had the damage replacement warranty anyway.

Can I pop my hard drive out of the old one and into the new one? Or do I have a lower chance of tiny errors down the line if I do a new install on the new computer? I'm not totally clear on the relationship between hardware and software. They say the hardware config is identical, but with six months difference, who knows?

Revol
Aug 1, 2003

EHCIARF EMERC...
EHCIARF EMERC...
So the Dell XPS 12 comes highly recommended here? I'm gonna be getting an additional 17% discount through Dell thanks to my job in two weeks, and I'd been toying with the idea of getting something. For years now I've really liked the idea of having a psuedo tablet/laptop that runs Windows. Was happy to see that Microsoft felt the same way and came out with Win8. (Was sorry to see that they force poo poo like the 'Modern' Start menu on ALL users.) I have an Acer W500 that is running Windows 8.1 right now, but it's slow and not fully compatible with Win8. (The smaller resolution prevents use of things like the window split feature, and the accelerometer only works when you're using an old video driver from last year.) The AMD APU has nice graphics acceleration, the 1GHz CPU is just not enough.

I had fallen in love with the Surface Pro when it was first announced, but it looks like the XPS 12 will work best for me, especially thanks to the deal I can potentially get on it.

signalnoise
Mar 7, 2008

i was told my old av was distracting
Hey guys I am selling my current 11.6" because it's got some bullshit but I really like that size, 11-13 inches. I also really really want good battery life. Like, 7 hours or more working basically non-intensive poo poo. I want it snappy doing excel/word processing but I will never use like photoshop on it or use it for gaming. How do I go about evaluating battery life when I'm shopping for a laptop? Is there anything you'd recommend for this purpose in the 300-500 dollar range?

NeoSeeker
Nov 26, 2007

:spergin:ASK ME ABOUT MY TOTALLY REALISTIC ZIPLINE-BASED ZOMBIE SURVIVAL PLAN & HOW THE ZOMBIE SURVIVAL VIDEO GAME GENRE HAS BEEN "RAPED BY THE MAINSTREAM":spergin:
Now I'm looking at the MSI GT Series GT70 2OC-065US. Is this a good laptop? I was looking at the lenovo y500 but I'm put off by the underwhelming graphics and processor.


code:
Screen Size	17.3 inches
Screen Resolution	1920 x 1080
Max Screen Resolution	1920 x 1080 pixels
Processor	3.2 GHz Intel Core i7-4700MQ
RAM	8 GB DDR3
Memory Speed 	1600 MHz
Hard Drive	1 TB SATA
Graphics Coprocessor	NVIDIA Geforce GTX770M
Graphics Card Ram Size	3000 MB
Wireless Type	802.11bgn
Number of USB 2.0 Ports 	2
Number of USB 3.0 Ports 	3

DrDork
Dec 29, 2003
commanding officer of the Army of Dorkness

agarjogger posted:

Can I pop my hard drive out of the old one and into the new one? Or do I have a lower chance of tiny errors down the line if I do a new install on the new computer? I'm not totally clear on the relationship between hardware and software. They say the hardware config is identical, but with six months difference, who knows?
You will be fine: the hardware is identical. For various reasons, "business-class" laptops like the ThinkPad lineup are very interested in keeping their hardware 100% the same. Even if there were minor differences, Windows 7/8 is actually very good at covering for that, and you'd never know the difference in most cases.

InstantInfidel
Jan 9, 2010

BEST :10bux: I EVER SPENT

NeoSeeker posted:

Now I'm looking at the MSI GT Series GT70 2OC-065US. Is this a good laptop? I was looking at the lenovo y500 but I'm put off by the underwhelming graphics and processor.


code:
Screen Size	17.3 inches
Screen Resolution	1920 x 1080
Max Screen Resolution	1920 x 1080 pixels
Processor	3.2 GHz Intel Core i7-4700MQ
RAM	8 GB DDR3
Memory Speed 	1600 MHz
Hard Drive	1 TB SATA
Graphics Coprocessor	NVIDIA Geforce GTX770M
Graphics Card Ram Size	3000 MB
Wireless Type	802.11bgn
Number of USB 2.0 Ports 	2
Number of USB 3.0 Ports 	3

Ok, first you need to understand that any laptop you buy today for $1500 will not play AAA games in two years. New consoles are just coming out, so software is going to take a great leap forward. The only reason games are playable on anything but the very best mobile GPUs today is the fact that 8-year-old tech in the 360 and the PS3 was holding them back. Take a look at benchmarks for Crysis 3, destroyer of texture units, to get a good picture of what I mean. Next: That is a 17.3" laptop. If you ignore every other word I say, do not get a 17.3" laptop for school. They're loving massive and unwieldy. In fact, having very recently been in your position, I'd recommend you forgo serious gaming entirely and get a 13" Macbook Air, that's what I'd do in a heartbeat. Next, as I'm guessing you've seen, you won't find a laptop for $1500 that has an SSD as the primary storage option. On top of that, if you hate me and everything i say, Anandtech universally panned another version of that laptop.

tl;dr my advice to you is to seriously reconsider what you want in a notebook for college and get either a 13" MBA or an ultrabook and just game less. More E/N-esque, I'd also say that you'll have plenty of college poo poo that's a lot more fun than games to do anyway. If you're not dissuaded, at the very least avoid that shitpile and get an Asus G55 or whatever their 15.6" jet-engine exhaust thing is these days.

Hadlock
Nov 9, 2004

InstantInfidel posted:

Next: That is a 17.3" laptop. If you ignore every other word I say, do not get a 17.3" laptop for school. They're loving massive and unwieldy.

This, a thousand times. Unless you just want something to watch netflix on from across the room and are 100% sure it will never leave your desk/dorm room.

7-10" tablet or a 13" laptop is what you want for taking to class for notes. Dragging your 17" gaming laptop with :siren: lights every day to class will not win you any points with your classmates of prof.

QuarkJets
Sep 8, 2008

NeoSeeker posted:

Now I'm looking at the MSI GT Series GT70 2OC-065US. Is this a good laptop? I was looking at the lenovo y500 but I'm put off by the underwhelming graphics and processor.


code:
Screen Size	17.3 inches
Screen Resolution	1920 x 1080
Max Screen Resolution	1920 x 1080 pixels
Processor	3.2 GHz Intel Core i7-4700MQ
RAM	8 GB DDR3
Memory Speed 	1600 MHz
Hard Drive	1 TB SATA
Graphics Coprocessor	NVIDIA Geforce GTX770M
Graphics Card Ram Size	3000 MB
Wireless Type	802.11bgn
Number of USB 2.0 Ports 	2
Number of USB 3.0 Ports 	3

This is not a good laptop; it's huge, heavy, you can't put it on your lap without giving yourself horrible burns, and it has horrible battery life. Don't get a 17" screen, and don't get a dedicated graphics coprocessor. That laptop is going to suck to use and you'll hate owning it unless you're using it as a desktop replacement, in which case you wasted a bunch of money because you should have just bought a desktop.

Get something slim that's easy to use. The Haswell i7 can play the modern gen games just fine, just go with that.

NeoSeeker
Nov 26, 2007

:spergin:ASK ME ABOUT MY TOTALLY REALISTIC ZIPLINE-BASED ZOMBIE SURVIVAL PLAN & HOW THE ZOMBIE SURVIVAL VIDEO GAME GENRE HAS BEEN "RAPED BY THE MAINSTREAM":spergin:
So what is a laptop with basically the same specs that you'd recommend? Kinda want the GTX 770m and the 3ghz dual core (Quad core? All the better).

NeoSeeker fucked around with this message at 08:12 on Jun 29, 2013

fookolt
Mar 13, 2012

Where there is power
There is resistance

NeoSeeker posted:

So what is a laptop with basically the same specs that you'd recommend? Kinda want the GTX 770m and the 3ghz dual core.

It's a 3.2GHz quad core and why do you want these things? What are you planning to do with this laptop?

NeoSeeker
Nov 26, 2007

:spergin:ASK ME ABOUT MY TOTALLY REALISTIC ZIPLINE-BASED ZOMBIE SURVIVAL PLAN & HOW THE ZOMBIE SURVIVAL VIDEO GAME GENRE HAS BEEN "RAPED BY THE MAINSTREAM":spergin:
Game. But I don't want a desktop.

QuarkJets
Sep 8, 2008

NeoSeeker posted:

So what is a laptop with basically the same specs that you'd recommend? Kinda want the GTX 770m and the 3ghz dual core (Quad core? All the better).

I can't recommend a laptop with a GTX 770m because they're all bad laptops. They suffer from the following:

A) Runs too hot to sit on your lap
B) Too big and heavy to use as a laptop
C) Way too expensive for what you're getting

Why don't you want a desktop? If you're absolutely committed to not owning a desktop for some reason and don't mind spending a lot of extra money and receiving an immobile product for the privilege, then just go buy an Alienware.

shrughes
Oct 11, 2008

(call/cc call/cc)

syzygy86 posted:

VT-x will speed up normal VMs, but VT-d is only useful in certain circumstances. VT-d specifically refers to an IOMMU, which lets you pass through a PCI device such as a RAID card or network adapter to the guest. Unless you're doing PCI passthrough, VT-d does nothing to speed up the VM.

VT-d speeds up desktop responsiveness by somewhere between a factor of 1 and a factor of 10000, depending on circumstance and what OS / desktop you're using. Namely, with VT-d desktop responsiveness is almost always identical to native responsiveness, and without it, alt+tabbing and other actions have noticeable lag, as does certain other redraws. This depends on how bad the OS is -- Ubuntu with Unity is atrocious, and while XFCE or OpenBox might still exhibit some sluggishness, at least it doesn't hang for minutes sometimes, or take seconds to alt+tab.

VT-x is necessary for running 64-bit VMs, and in 32-bit VMs it doesn't necessarily speed them up.

shrughes fucked around with this message at 08:56 on Jun 29, 2013

voltron
Nov 26, 2000
Zapf gave me this account because he's a friend of the Indian-American people.
Hey! Those of us seeking larger laptops (for whatever reason!!) would also like advice once in a while. That said, another reason to not choose the GT70 series laptops is that the laptop uses one fan for cooling both the GPU and CPU. During AT's game benchmarks, the system overheated and responded by throttling the CPU, but this was the Dragon version with the 780m: http://www.anandtech.com/show/7076/msi-gt70-dragon-edition-notebook-review-haswell-and-the-gtx-780m. I've read about some people who repasted their laptops and had some success, and others not so much, so there seems to be a mixed bag of responses for this particular model. GentechPC offers a free "upgraded" thermal paste with their laptop sales (as well as 2% student discounts). The Asus G750 has a 765M for 1400. I haven't seen xoticpc/gentechpc offer any other configurations of that laptop yet.

In any event. Try here for a more forgiving forum for advice, reviews, and comments on 17" laptops intended for gaming:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/asus-gaming-notebook-forum/
http://forum.notebookreview.com/msi/

If and when you decide to get a 13" Air, rMBP, or a laptop/tablet convertible thinghy, come on back here, this thread is great for that.

QuarkJets posted:

If you're absolutely committed to not owning a desktop for some reason and don't mind spending a lot of extra money and receiving an immobile product for the privilege, then just go buy an Alienware.
Fair enough, but the last I looked, a $1500 GT70 can cost around $2000 for an Alienware with similar specs.

voltron fucked around with this message at 12:29 on Jun 29, 2013

QuarkJets
Sep 8, 2008

voltron posted:

Fair enough, but the last I looked, a $1500 GT70 can cost around $2000 for an Alienware with similar specs.

But as you say, the GT70 has cooling problems, and a lot of people seem to dislike the layout. Alienware is well-known for making good gaming laptops with good layouts and sufficient cooling. If you're already paying $1500 for a gaming laptop, then you may as well spend a few hundred more for a good one.

If you're willing to upgrade the SSD and RAM yourself, then you can probably reduce the price difference even further

Ceyton
Oct 9, 2004

YOU'RE DEAD ARMITAGE!
YOU'RE DEAD ARMITAGE!
YOU'RE DEAD ARMITAGE!

What do y'all think about the Lenovo X230 tablet convertibles? The stats look good, but the screen being held on by a single plastic hinge scares the poo poo out of me.

voltron
Nov 26, 2000
Zapf gave me this account because he's a friend of the Indian-American people.

QuarkJets posted:

But as you say, the GT70 has cooling problems, and a lot of people seem to dislike the layout. Alienware is well-known for making good gaming laptops with good layouts and sufficient cooling. If you're already paying $1500 for a gaming laptop, then you may as well spend a few hundred more for a good one.

If you're willing to upgrade the SSD and RAM yourself, then you can probably reduce the price difference even further

Sure, I could! But that guy has a limit of $1500 for himself. That's why I mentioned the G750. Apart from that, there's the millions of Sager/Clevo combinations where all he'd have to do is find a chassis he likes and mix and match the innards he wants/can afford.

OXBALLS DOT COM
Sep 11, 2005

by FactsAreUseless
Young Orc

Ceyton posted:

What do y'all think about the Lenovo X230 tablet convertibles? The stats look good, but the screen being held on by a single plastic hinge scares the poo poo out of me.

That hinge has probably the best track record of any of the convertibles out there, since it's been around for so long. I have ones from previous versions that have been pretty badly abused and the hinge is still fine.

SoggyGravy
Jul 14, 2008

MAXIMUM
OVERGOON
out of curiosity and as a benchmark for my own future purchases: I have a ~2 year old refurbed dell xps 15 with 2gb dedicated gpu GTX 435m and q740 i7 cpu with 9 cell battery (that sort of acts like a stand since it angles the laptop when on a flat surface). This thing has performed pretty admirably for me, never had an issue with not being able to run a game I wanted to play on it and the only downside is its a bit heavier and the battery life is not great thanks to the i7 no doubt.

Would you guys have panned this sort of laptop? Also what would today's equivalent be, would it still need the battery sucking i7 to be equivalent in today's software market?

EDIT: this dell xps15 was right before they ended up splitting the line between studio xps and alienware to be more distinct.

Sidenote to the 17.3" laptop guy above:
Why not recommend the 14 razer blade to that guy who wanted the 17.3 inch behemoth, I've heard positive things about it given what it is (storage options aside....128 gig ssd....yeesh)

SoggyGravy fucked around with this message at 14:38 on Jun 29, 2013

InstantInfidel
Jan 9, 2010

BEST :10bux: I EVER SPENT

voltron posted:

Hey! Those of us seeking larger laptops (for whatever reason!!) would also like advice once in a while.

The advice is that unless you're travelling continuously, are in the armed services, or for whatever reason absolutely cannot have a computer in the same place for a period of more than a couple of days, get a desktop. Getting a gaming laptop is a waste of money compared to a cheap tablet and a vastly superior desktop, especially after the novelty of lugging around your "portable" computer wears off in a few weeks.

Proud Christian Mom
Dec 20, 2006
READING COMPREHENSION IS HARD
If you're married to getting a gaming laptop then go here. There are quite a few of us here with Clevo/Sager laptops that will walk you through the pros/cons

syzygy86
Feb 1, 2008

shrughes posted:

VT-d speeds up desktop responsiveness by somewhere between a factor of 1 and a factor of 10000, depending on circumstance and what OS / desktop you're using. Namely, with VT-d desktop responsiveness is almost always identical to native responsiveness, and without it, alt+tabbing and other actions have noticeable lag, as does certain other redraws. This depends on how bad the OS is -- Ubuntu with Unity is atrocious, and while XFCE or OpenBox might still exhibit some sluggishness, at least it doesn't hang for minutes sometimes, or take seconds to alt+tab.

VT-x is necessary for running 64-bit VMs, and in 32-bit VMs it doesn't necessarily speed them up.

Taking minutes to to alt-tab sounds like a different problem. Desktop responsiveness has nothing to do with VT-d (although you can passthrough a video card, its a non-trivial setup). I run VMs on machines without VT-d (and one without VT-x) without any issues like that in Ubuntu (although Unity is slow if you don't have 3D support). VT-d simply allows the VM to have direct access to a physical hardware resource and you have to configure the passthrough manually. It's normally used for RAID cards or network devices: http://academia.edu/833117/Performance_and_Scaling_Impacts_of_Hardware-accelerated_I_O_Virtualization

DrDork
Dec 29, 2003
commanding officer of the Army of Dorkness

voltron posted:

Hey! Those of us seeking larger laptops (for whatever reason!!) would also like advice once in a while.
The problem isn't that we're trying to be jerks, the problem is that there simply isn't anything good to recommend. A lot of people who ask for advice on gaming laptops aren't realistic with either their needs or their wants initially ("I want a laptop that'll play AAA titles next year but is light enough to take to class with good build quality and also under $1000!"--bitch, you're not gonna bother taking that laptop to class for actual educational purposes past the first semester, don't kid yourself). Even for those people who are realistic, there's not a lot we can do to help: virtually every "gaming laptop" out there right now has some crippling draw-back that makes us not want to recommend it. Many of them have crap build quality combined with terrible warranty support, thermal problems that mean they can't be used on your lap and are loud, hot, hideous beasts, or are so expensive that no one is willing to buy them.

I mean, I'd love to be able to recommend the Razer Blade series, as it's one of the only laptops that seems to combine performance, quality, and still keeps it under 7lbs, but it's also $2500 ($2000 for the 14" version), and no one seems to have any actual reviews of it yet.

Hadlock
Nov 9, 2004

17" laptops are mainly marketed at people who don't know what they want and figure "bigger is better!!!" despite the fact that a modern laptop class haswell i5 is roughly four times the power of a top of the line early 1990's supercomputer. The last great 17" class laptop was the 17" macbook pro in 2011. The remaining products in this class are junky poo poo sold to people who want a portable TV or man children who "need" a "gaming laptop" and will overlook any glaring flaws to get it.

WHERE MY HAT IS AT
Jan 7, 2011
Yeah, it's hard to recommend a gaming laptop for someone who needs to be able to take it to class and take notes or carry it anywhere ever. You could spend 1500 on a 10lb behemoth that runs hot and tethers you to plugs everwhere or, you could just as easily get like a $250 chrome book to take notes on and watch youtube videos and spend $1250 and build/buy a gaming desktop that will blow literally any gaming laptop on the market completely out of the water while being easier to upgrade later on down the road and still giving you the best of both worlds. If space is a concern, mini ITX systems these days can be tiny and dead silent. There are exceptions for people who for some reason need that much power coming with them everywhere they go, but for the most part you're just spending a lot more to get what is essentially a bad desktop and an even worse laptop.

WHERE MY HAT IS AT fucked around with this message at 19:37 on Jun 29, 2013

Fina
Feb 27, 2006

Shazbot!
Anyone looking into a 17" laptop needs to go to a store and look at one in person, they are loving huge. You may reconsider what size you want once you see one for yourself.

Hadlock
Nov 9, 2004

WHERE MY HAT IS AT posted:

you could just as easily get like a $250 chrome book to take notes on and watch youtube videos and spend $1250 and build/buy a gaming desktop that will blow literally any gaming laptop on the market completely out of the water

Hell, for note taking you can pick up a 7" android tablet and a $30 bluetooth keyboard for $100 shipped these days. Or if you have a 5" phone just use that.

An 8lb laptop weighs about as much as a newborn baby. And is about as fragile as one.

If you're planning on taking a TV to school, just plug your computer in to that, they both use HDMI. The only remotely fragile thing in a desktop these days is the 3 lb video card + heatsink, and you can pack that separate for the trip. Rotational hard drives are rated to 80 Gs (yes, eighty) when the heads are parked and powered off. Intel CPU sockets have a dynamic load rating of 170lbs.

QuarkJets
Sep 8, 2008

What's worst about gaming laptops is that Haswell's integrated graphics are so good that you could easily get by with just that and claim to have a "gaming" machine in something light and thin. You just don't get to have the pretentious joy of being able to play AAA titles at 60 fps at max quality, you have to scale back a bunch of settings instead.

A real gamer can make do

Hadlock
Nov 9, 2004

QuarkJets posted:

What's worst about gaming laptops is that Haswell's integrated graphics are so good that you could easily get by with just that and claim to have a "gaming" machine in something light and thin. You just don't get to have the pretentious joy of being able to play AAA titles at 60 fps at max quality, you have to scale back a bunch of settings instead.

This is truth, and one very large difference between this thread and Crackbone's desktop thread is that he will swear up and down that you cannot game on anything less than a 700 series GTX desktop card, while this thread will point out that Skyrim and Mass Effect 2 play just fine on an HD4000 @ 1366x768.

Unless your use case is Crysis 3/BF3 all the time on High @ 1080p, you'll find that most games are designed to run just fine @ 720p on medium, and the HD4000 will happily purr along at 30-60fps in most any game at those settings. There are very few games on Steam that won't run @ 30fps on an i5 Sandy Bridge laptop with integrated graphics.

Laptops are mobile and full of compromises to meet this requirement, mainly for battery life and heat. If you want a zero compromise gaming laptop, what you really want is a desktop.

DrDork
Dec 29, 2003
commanding officer of the Army of Dorkness

QuarkJets posted:

What's worst about gaming laptops is that Haswell's integrated graphics are so good that you could easily get by with just that and claim to have a "gaming" machine in something light and thin. You just don't get to have the pretentious joy of being able to play AAA titles at 60 fps at max quality, you have to scale back a bunch of settings instead.

A real gamer can make do
This is true. When I got my T430 w/dGPU (roughly a GF630) I was initially disappointed that a good chunk of the games I wanted to play I couldn't max everything out on at 1600x900. Then I realized that most of the games really didn't look much worse if I knocked the settings down a bit to the point where it would keep the FPS to an acceptable level, and I've been fine ever since. Now, I wouldn't go claiming anything with a HD4X00 in it is a "gaming" machine--it'll still get happily destroyed by most anything with a current dGPU--but outside a few smoke-check games (BF3, I'm looking at you), you can still get a very decent gaming experience out of a non-"gaming" laptop these days. Doubly so if you are getting something that's not 1920x1080. Will a HD4X00 run BF3 at 60FPS maxed out at 1080p? No, it won't. But anything that will is going to be twice the weight, 50% more expensive, and have battery life that won't let you game-on-the-go anyhow.

And, trust me--this coming from someone who spent a year carrying around 30-40lbs packs on a daily basis--if you get an 8lbs+ laptop you will stop carrying it to class after the first few weeks unless you are explicitly required to bring it. 8lbs doesn't sound like a lot, but it turns out to be really loving annoying after awhile. If you want to test this, take a gallon of water (8.33lbs) and carry it around for a few days and see what you think.

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NeoSeeker
Nov 26, 2007

:spergin:ASK ME ABOUT MY TOTALLY REALISTIC ZIPLINE-BASED ZOMBIE SURVIVAL PLAN & HOW THE ZOMBIE SURVIVAL VIDEO GAME GENRE HAS BEEN "RAPED BY THE MAINSTREAM":spergin:
Yeah I really don't care about having to lower settings or anything. And thinking about it more I guess you're right about it being to heavy and unwieldy. Although I do know about traveling weighed down by stuff, 8 pounds ain't poo poo. But I guess I'll just go with the lenovo Y500 and build a new machine before star citizen comes out.


Being able to take it to school is only one part of the mobility factor. I enjoy the idea of being able to set up basically anywhere instantaneously and be able to start gaming right then and there. You can't take your desktop outside on the patio and set it up every time you want to play outside.

NeoSeeker fucked around with this message at 21:06 on Jun 29, 2013

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