core i7 laptops (and other recent monsters)

[mattleaf]

hey teflon, how is the m11x going for you ?

Still good?

Do you think you could still get some light performance out of it?

Thanks,

Matt

[teflonjf]

Hi, yeah, I was able to get reasonably decent performance and it worked great for doing sketches on an airplane, mostly due to long battery life and small size. However, I ended up selling it and upgrading to an m14x, which has been great overall. I'm getting 1/3 or so performance of a GTX 470, which is fine for the small size. Only issue is battery life, which about 1.5 hours using Touch.

All that said, the newer m11x with an i7 would be a pretty nice system for super small size with great battery life, I ended up mostly being CPU bound on the first gen m11x. As a reference I think that the m11x GPU is about 1/2 the speed of the m14x.

[mattleaf]

Cool. 3 Alienwares huh? So you sold the 15 coz weak battery and was too heavy, then the 11 coz it was too slow... 14 sitting about right? Kellogs Just Right?

[ben]

A number of Asus laptops have been in use at Derivative over the last year. A variety of models but not many complaints thus far.

[massta]

Hey guys, I think this thread is a good one for me to chime in.

Just received a brand new Dell Inspiration 17R with no GPU for Christmas. Going to trade it in and I'm not sure where is the best place to put my money.

Thinking of the Alienware M14x. It has Nvidia 555m with 3GB of GPU memory!
For the same price I could go with their XPS 15 which has the Nvidia 540m with 2GB of memory.
Then there is the business model, Dell Precision M4600 which used the Nvidia Quadro 1000M with 2GB of ram.
All models have the i7 2760QM 2.4GHz CPU
For $200 more I can bump that to 2860QM 2.5GHz, which is probably not worth the money.

All advice is very welcome. Two years ago I went back to school and finally finished and now plan to spend a lot of time working with Touch, Houdini and Resolume on this machine. Might have Touch and Abelton Live running together. My guess is the more memory the better, so get the M14x. Want a SSD but I haven't figured out which brand they put in these models.

Thanks, ~Shawn

[rodberry]

I think that bumping up the RAM will always give you more bang for the buck than adding 0.1GHz to your CPU

Rod.

[massta]

Thanks Rod.

Before I got he Dell as a gift, I was looking at the ASUS G53. I love the design of the airflow and it has the option of 1080 resolution screen. But couldn't understand why it doesn't have the latest GT 555m GPU with 3GB of ram. It's like Nvidia is working exclusively with the Alienware.

Update: Returned laptop for full refund at QVC, have a $800 credit and can use it on an ASUS now. Just wish they had the larger RAM GPU like the M11x. ]

Thinking of waiting until their next model release, should be in Jan/Feb?

[teflonjf]

As a follow up post, I've been very happy with the M14x, it handles much more than I expected, I've used it in quite a few performances and it has never had an issue. And fits on airline trays with room enough to mouse around. And even supports a BlackMagic USB 3.0 external box !

If I was buying another laptop I'd seriously consider this one, http://www.v3gamingpc.com/notebooks/rover.html. A bit bigger and and double the price, but probably close to 2X graphics performance.

[massta]

Went to order the M14x but they were charging me for the backpack, which I didn't select. Not a surprise of Dell. I ordered a small dongle (less that 3" square) and they shipped it in a box large enough for a 24" monitor.

So I withdrew from my order for now. Now I'm not confined to a Dell.
Thinking of the ASUS G53SX:
http://tinyurl.com/86d47oq
Problem is, when customizing to match the M14x specs, the prices goes way over the dell. Pro: Alienware has more GPU memory. Pro ASUS: HD screen, second drive.
Any opinions about this important gpu memory spec?

Thinking of waiting until the CES Expo is over in a couple of weeks to see if any new models come out. Maybe I'll see a price drop. My absolute max I want to spend is $2k. Will be performing with a lot of videos so maybe having the most gpu ram is best? What about computer ram?

I guess it's apples and oranges. Maybe 2GB of gpu memory at GDDR5 is better than 3GB of gpu memory at GDDR3?

[ben]

Hey Massta, if you are going to be using a lot of videos, seriously consider an SSD. An SSD could give you a much larger performance boost than the extra GB of GPU RAM. In fact, I think it would be hard to use all 3GB of GPU RAM on video without the use of SSDs or external drives.

Something to consider...