Computer Engineering Laptop

[vnderachiever]

Alright... I'm going to school in the fall for computer engineering, hopefully getting into some programming and whatnot. I am thinking of buying a laptop that I can do all my work on, and want it to be able to play WoW as well. Any reccomendations? I'm looking to stay within the $2000 dollar range, but can go a little higher if it seems necessary. Any suggestions as to what laptop or at least what specs I should be looking into?

I have a custom built desktop with a dual core e6600 and dual 8800 GTs's with 4gb ram on a 650i motherboard so I know my way around a computer, but I need something portable.

Thanks for any and all advice.

 

[Maziar]

SAGER NP5793 goes for my vote

 

[frozenlead]

I agree on the NP5793. It can be configed nicely around $2k, but you won't get stunning video performance with the stock 8700m GT. If you need the GPU performance, consider adding the 8800m GTX to the notebook - but that bumps your price to near $2.5k
Do you really need GPU performance, or is all the things you do CPU based? Will you be playing games?

 

[vnderachiever]

Yeah, i'd like to play some games, like WoW. I don't plan on playing anything spectacular, but I might save for a little longer to get that 8800gtx for starcraft 2 and stuff like that. Other than wow it'll be older stuff like warcraft 3. I wont even touch something like crysis, but if the 8800gtx can give me gears of war or halo 2 at a playable framerate i might look into it.
I'm basically looking for something with the computing power, but I don't see why I couldn't spend the extra on a video card so it's well rounded.

what about a dell xps? Is it possible to make one of those cheaper than a sager with similar processing power and graphics?

 

[Maziar]

No,dell only has one laptop which has 2 8800MGTX(It doesnt have a laptop with single one) and its very expensive even more than the mighty
SAGER NP9262

 

[frozenlead]

In my experience, any notebook over the price point of about $1700 should be a Sager. Other manufacturers at this performance level are overpriced. You might be looking at the NP5793 - I own one, and am very, very happy with it. For $2500 it brought me performance that other manufacturers would bring for prices more around $2800-$3500.

If you want to skimp on price, the 8700m GT will do fine, don't get me wrong - but for longevity, i suggest you get the 8800m GTX.

There's very, very little to complain about when you own a Sager.

Just depends on how much you're willing to spend, really.

 

[vnderachiever]

Ok. so I was in best buy yesterday and they had a gateway P series fx or something of the sort. It was a 17 inch screen and had a 8800 gts 4gig of ram vista premium 64bit, full keyboard with a number pad (which im sure will help). The only thing is that it comes with the 1.8ghz dual core (t5550 i think).
What are your thoughts on that? will the slower processor slow me down alot? also, Im pretty sure that I read somewhere that those processors are able to be upgraded.
the computer is like 1200 dollars, which is pretty damn good. If i can spend 1200 on that now, then at the beginning of the school year i can buy a 2.4 ghz dual core for it.

 

[cjl]

That Gateway is the single best deal in gaming laptops on the market. However, if you also want engineering applications, such as Matlab or SolidWorks, they are extremely CPU bound, and so it will be a bit on the slow side for that. Of course, you could always use your desktop for those if you wanted.

 

[Maziar]

GATEWAY P6860FX is a solid choice but as cjl said its CPU wont be very good for engineering tasks,so u can ge this notebook and upgrade the CPU to a T9300 or so

 

[vnderachiever]

Thanks a bunch fellas. I'm gonna go with the gateway laptop for now. Its got the 17 inch screen and all the works for gaming, and i'll eventually upgrade to at least a 2.4 dual core (which is what's in my desktop).

 

[Maziar]

Good luck and enjoy that beast