Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
Quick Links
Need help building gaming laptop
Hello My fellow Mmorpgers,
I ask of some assistance. I am looking to purchase a new laptop probably this year to play Wildstar on. I need a laptop for its all in one portability but i do not want to sacrifice on performance or quality from having to stray away from a desktop.
Budget: $4000-$5000 (more if needed or less if its unecessary)
I live in Canada, so companies like Sager wouldnt work, unless they have upgraded their support i dont want to run the risk of having to pay shipping to california and be without my beloved for a couple months.
I currently have an alienware M18x, that you wonderful people helped me build 3 years ago and it has been a blessing so i thank you all for that. but this machine, like computers needs to be upgraded.
I am looking at playing Wildstar Online and i want to play it at max graphic settings and keep up with the most beastily desktops. I don't want anything compromised from having to play on a desktop.
i also want a laptop thats going to have lasting performance, so no cheap parts! - this is why i am setting my budget so high and keeping it flexible so i can stay on top of the gaming experience for as long as possible
any advice, tips etc would be greatly appreciated, thank you guys so much in advance, you are a wonderful community!
Comments
My advice would be, don't upgrade yet unless there's something wrong with your old laptop. I found your old thread here, and it hasn't even been 29 months:
http://www.mmorpg.com/discussion2.cfm/thread/326335/page/1
Die shrinks have made it possible to fit perhaps 40% more GPU performance into the same TDP. Processor advances have been slower, so maybe you'd get another 20% CPU performance. Is it really worth spending another $4000 on that?
The right time to upgrade will be in about two years, as that's when the really good stuff is coming. Calling it revolutionary would be too strong, but the widespread adoption of FinFETs and EUV lithography together with multiple die shrinks that allow for ample transistor counts to have an enormous GPU cache will bring some major advances.
Of course, if your old laptop died or some such, then we can talk about getting a replacement now. Or if you've just got more money than you know what to do with so that spending $5k is no big deal for you, we could pick something out.
oh thats great news about the advancements. my current laptop is doing good, little slower now. im actually playing ffxiv ARR as we speak so i dont think it will be dying anytime soon (i hope). I will try and wait 2 more years as long as i can still play wildstar on this one
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834231039
That's not really an upgrade over his current laptop unless CrossFire completely fails. It will use less power, at least, but I think he's more looking for higher performance.
If WildStar won't run well on your current laptop, Carbine is going to find an awfully small market for their game. Whether it will run at max settings is just a question of how high Carbine decides to set max settings; any game could, if so inclined, set max settings arbitrarily high so that no hardware on the market can run it at max settings. But you'll probably be able to turn up everything that makes the game look meaningfully better and still run it pretty well.
My advice on hardware upgrades for particular games would be, play the game before you upgrade. If your old hardware can handle the game to your satisfaction, then you don't need to upgrade.
that is really good advice, thank you much. you have been so helpful to me and i really appreciate it.
you mentioned about that chance of crossfire failing, how do i check that?
The way crossfire works is (roughly) it synchronised 2 cards to push out the consecutive frames. If the drivers don't work well, or the game makes them not work well, the synchronisation can get wonky which means that 2 frames come really close together and then there's a large gap.
This is always an issue when running a Dual GPU setup however most dual GPU setups push out enough FPS that it doesn't matter.
I personally wouldn't worry. There's no really easy way to check frame time - if the game doesn't run smoothly despite being above 40 FPS then you might want to investigate.
About your laptop - a better question would be what maintenance you performed. Did you clean the dust out / reinstall the OS / keep drivers up to date?
If WildStar won't run well on your current laptop, Carbine is going to find an awfully small market for their game. Whether it will run at max settings is just a question of how high Carbine decides to set max settings; any game could, if so inclined, set max settings arbitrarily high so that no hardware on the market can run it at max settings. But you'll probably be able to turn up everything that makes the game look meaningfully better and still run it pretty well. My advice on hardware upgrades for particular games would be, play the game before you upgrade. If your old hardware can handle the game to your satisfaction, then you don't need to upgrade.
that is really good advice, thank you much. you have been so helpful to me and i really appreciate it.
you mentioned about that chance of crossfire failing, how do i check that?
You wait until the game is released, and you run it.
If it doesn't use both cards, then it doesn't work. That doesn't mean your hardware is broken, it just means that either (and probably both) Carbine didn't optimize for crossfire and AMD didn't see any reason to optimize it for them in drivers. It could be that it works great on Day 1, or a patch or two after release Carbine patches their game, or AMD patches their driver profiles, and then it works fine, or it never gets patched in at all.
I would definitely wait for 2 reasons.
1) Your current system will only see a minor improvement with a new laptop since the components are only 2 generations old.
2) Neither AMD or Intel are bringing their guns to bare until mid-2014 to 2015.
My Wife and I both have Sagers. I had an MX17 a few years back. While it was a decent laptop. I honestly believe Sagers are way better. Basically, its the same (if not better hardware) for a much lower price then an Alienware.
http://www.sagernotebook.com/
It's not just the sticker on the box that matters, but also the hardware inside. When the original poster bought his current laptop, Alienware offered CrossFire/SLI setups with a mobile Sandy Bridge processor, which at the time was the sensible thing to get in a high end gaming laptop. Sager only offered it with 130 W desktop processors that don't belong anywhere near a laptop.
Lol what? I don't think you know what a Sager notebook is lol. Any quality hardware you might have in a Alienware. I promise you will get it in a Sager for less money. If you disagree, how about a source for that comment? Because, I own 2 Sagers. From my personal experience, you are wrong.
If you want to play that way, then I don't think you know what a PCI Express bus is.
In order for a gaming computer to work properly, you need a lot of bandwidth to connect the CPU and GPU. For about the last decade, that has been handled by PCI Express. Since Lynnfield/Clarksfield launched in 2009, Intel has integrated a PCI Express 2.0 x16 (and more recently 3.0 x16) controller into the same die as the CPU in its laptop-oriented CPUs. That's plenty of bandwidth to connect the CPU to a single video card.
But if you want SLI or CrossFire, you need a lot of bandwidth to each card. In desktops, Intel has offered chipsets that would split the PCI Express x16 connection into two x8 connections, so that you can still have a lot of bandwidth to each video card. They've recently offered that in laptop chipsets, too, but they didn't in the Sandy Bridge generation (2011), which was the high end when the original poster bought his current laptop.
Modern chipsets do have other PCI Express lanes besides the main connection intended for a video card. But those are much lower bandwidth, and intended to allow motherboard manufacturers to add other chips such as extra USB ports. Trying to connect a video card through the PCI Express stuff that originates in a modern Intel chipset would badly bottleneck the card for lack of PCI Express bandwidth.
In 2011, Alienware's solution to this was to buy a separate PCI Express chip that could split the main PCI Express connection into two separate, high-bandwidth connections. I don't know what chip they used, but there's a good chance that it's one that takes in a single PCI Express 2.0 x16 connection from the chipset side and then offers two PCI Express 2.0 x16 connections as output: one to each video card. Naturally, you can't saturate both of the latter simultaneously, but in SLI/CrossFire setups, video cards tend to mostly communicate with one video card at a time: the video card that is rendering the frame that the CPU is currently working on. So that card could get most of the PCI Express bandwidth if appropriate for however many milliseconds until the CPU is done passing it information for that frame.
Clevo didn't do that. Instead, Clevo decided to offer a different, high-end CPU for which Intel did make a chipset with two PCI Express 2.0 x16 connections. The problem is that the Bloomfield and Gulftown CPUs that Clevo used are 130 W chips, as they're very much intended for high end desktops, workstations, and servers where dissipating 130 W isn't that big of a deal. In laptops, however, a 130 W CPU is a problem. Gulftown CPUs started at $560 and went up from there, while Bloomfield offered rather bad energy inefficiency, so that it was only about as fast as a laptop Sandy Bridge chip while using about three times as much power.
Sager, of course, doesn't entirely build their own laptops. Rather, they buy barebones laptop kits from other laptop vendors such as Clevo, add some easily-replaceable parts such as a hard drive and memory, and sell it under their own brand name. Then as now, Sager's top end gaming laptops are rebranded Clevo laptops. Clevo didn't offer anything with a PCI Express MUX chip at the time, so no, Sager didn't offer the same hardware as the Alienware M18x of late 2011.
But you really wanted a reference, so here you go. Intel's mobile chipsets for Sandy Bridge are here:
http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/chipsets/performance-chipsets/mobile-chipset-qm67.html
http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/chipsets/value-chipsets/mobile-chipset-hm65.html
Note that they don't offer anything above x4 bandwidth. For comparison, their top end desktop chipset from the same generation is here:
http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/chipsets/mainstream-chipsets/z68-express-chipset.html
Note the option to have a single x16 connection or two x8 connections. The chipset that Clevo used at the time for their SLI/CrossFire laptops is here:
http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/chipsets/workstation-chipsets/workstation-chipset-x58.html
I'll be buying a gaming laptop in the 2k range soon, any advice Quiz?
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
http://www.xoticpc.com/force-msi-1763-22001-780m-msi-gt70-barebones-p-5815.html?wconfigure=yes
Add your favorite OS, and depending on your storage needs, switch the hard drive to either an SSD alone or both an SSD and a hard drive. On your budget, you can get about 240 GB of SSD space; just pick the cheapest such SSD they offer with about that capacity.
Sager offers nearly the same thing, though they charge a little more for it:
http://www.sagernotebook.com/index.php?page=product_customed&model_name=NP8295
There, you have to switch the video card to a GeForce GTX 780M. The Sager includes an OS in the base price while xoticpc tends not to have an OS in the base price, and that accounts for much of the price difference. The SSD options are different, but you definitely do want an SSD either way.
-----
If you wanted to wait for better hardware, you might be waiting for quite a while. Intel Broadwell chips aren't coming until the latter half of this year. There probably aren't any important new AMD video cards coming before late this year, either. Nvidia Maxwell cards are supposedly coming soonish, but it's not at all clear whether they're coming to laptops soon, how high end the cards will be, or whether they'll be any better than Kepler, since they're probably on the same process node.
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
And the purchase is done, couple of weeks and I'll have a new MSI laptop to play ESO on.
Thanks for all the help Quizzical.
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
I get people need portability. But I couldn't bring myself to spending that much money on a laptop unless I had no other choice. Got screwed with one awhile back, never again.
That being said, do not build a Alienware, dell is a horrible company, do not pay for with cash and especially do not finance through them. They bought the Alienware name but their parts overall, are shit.
If all you care about is portability and or want something extremely light, you could try Razer. Not really a fan of any of their products but heard good things about their laptops.
Could also just go with ibuypower
"What tastes like purple?"
Always forget about MSI.
I think that's because last year, a bitcoin miner friend of mine went on their forums, asking about some MSI card fan issues he was having in his mining rig.
Anyway, they told him Bitcoin and Litecoin farming was illegal, and banned him from the forums. They also claimed they had, connections with the FBI and were going to turn him in.
That mining was helping terrorists.
In any case, that's why I always forget about MSI, and will never buy their products.
"What tastes like purple?"
Razer's business model for laptops is mid-range hardware in a slick form factor at an ultra high end price tag. Razer's pricing is so ridiculous as to make Apple laptops look like a bargain by comparison purely on a price/performance basis.
Funny you should post this, as Maxwell released today. It seems to break from the mold in that it's releasing from the bottom up, rather than from the top down. The 750/750Ti are out now, and given their TDPs, I think mobile versions will be hot on their heals -- although given history with the Kepler release, announcements don't mean a whole lot and availability may be an issue.
Sorry for the delay, i have been busy with work havent had time to get on here.
a few things i would like to address:
For the most part, the problem with Alienware isn't that the hardware is bad; it's that it is overpriced. If Alienware will sell you something for $2000 and you can get basically the same thing for $1500 elsewhere, then I wouldn't buy the Alienware.
This is partially driven by problematic memory and storage options. Right now, in a desktop I checked for reference, they offer three storage configurations: a 1 TB hard drive and no SSD, a 2 TB hard drive and no SSD, or a 1 TB hard drive together with a 256 GB SSD. For most people not on a severe budget (which rules out Alienware anyway), the sensible options are a small SSD together with a big hard drive or else a larger SSD with no hard drive, and Alienware offers neither. If you want the SSD, you're adding $350 to the price tag, even though you can get a 256 GB SSD yourself for under $150.
There have been some things that they sold as gaming systems that weren't really bad hardware so much as that they simply didn't make sense as gaming rigs. The Alienware X51 and the (now discontinued) M11x are examples of this: nice hardware if you're more interested in the form factor than gaming performance, but completely insensible for the overwhelming majority of gamers because they make major sacrifices to fit the form factor.