Spend my money for me

[admin_exported]

Hello,

I'm looking to replace my 5 year old 17" Dell Inspiron with a new 15" laptop. I will be using it for movies, music and gaming. My budget is around the £1500 mark and I would like it to run BF3 and Deus ex on as high a setting as possible whilst still being portable.

I realise that the higher up the laptop ladder you get, the noisier, heavier and shorter the battery life gets but I would like a good compromise if possible.

Options I have looked at:

Apple - Will the hardware support these games if run through bootcamp?

pcspecialist.com - Seem to be competitive and have a very good rep. Components also appear to be up to date.

Dell - My existing laptop has been really reliable and I also get a discount from them. They're graphics cards don't appear to be the latest so I'm un sure if they will cope.

The root of the problem is that I really don't know what I'm looking at and what graphics cards / processors are capable of.

Any help/recommendations would be appreciated.

 

[caesar44]

I have to agree, Alienware make nice gaming laptops.

 

[Anonymous]

I think you should go for a gaming specific machine to play those games. Alienware do some nice ones, for example:

http://www.dell.com/uk/p/alienware-m17x-r3/pd

I doubt, as you say, Dell could cope and not sure about Apples with no experience of those.

All I can say is avoid Mesh, nightmare who I had claim money back from after 6 weeks with no machine! |(

Edit: I see Dell bought Alienware - see the link!! I now men standard Dell.....

 

[Anonymous]

I've heard that the alienware stuff can be overpriced. Has anyone got any experience of these machines?

Any more suggestions?

 

[bemaniac]

for that system you'd want to bump it to a gtx580 and that takes price to £1700 if you select no other upgrades. Forget upgrading the processor. an i7 is and i7 is an i7 and you can pretty much choose the speed it operates yourself. Just the 580 will have the vram you need for bf3 because bf3 is going to be a 1536mb monster.

 

[Anonymous]

BF3, on a laptop! jeez.

Id have to suggest a purpose built "gaming laptop. Or to really study the internal parts (of a gaming laptop), then look for a laptop with similiar specs. £1500 is a lot of money to spend, id doubt you would end up spending that much tbh.

Ive just built a purpose built gaming pc (full tower), cost £650 + £150 for lcd monitor, by buying kit that had great reviews and 5 stars on Toms hardware.

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/

 

[Anonymous]

TBH, my advice would be don't buy a laptop if you are serious about gaming. Spend just £1k on a well-spec'ed desktop gaming pc (e.g. 580ti, i7, 8gb ram, F1 drives) and it will run even Crysis 2 smoothly and beat anything you can get with a laptop worth many times more, and you can continually upgrade a desktop. And you can use your tv or get a decent new lcd for < £300. Of course I understand if space is an issue, but IMO it is worth it.

 

[Anonymous]

As long as it has an i5 or higher in it, don't bother too much about the CPU, focus mainly on the GPU.

Just look for the GPU in the laptop, then check this chart: http://www.notebookcheck.net/Computer-Games-on-Laptop-Graphic-Cards.13849.0.html

The last system on this page might be good for you, the specs are good for the price, though you will need to take customs charges into account: http://www.ibuypower.com/IbpPages/Notebook.aspx

 

[Anonymous]

I understand that a desktop is the better and cheaper option however it is out of the question. I serve in the armed forces and hence spend most of my time on the move. A laptop is very important to me; music, movies, internet, pictures the whole lot will be done on it both when I am away and at home.

Gaming is something I do when I'm bored and have run out of films or books on my kindle so it won't need to run it on ultra settings but high would certainly be required.

Cheers for the suggestions.... keep them coming

 

[Anonymous]

By the way I'm not interested in 3D, webcams, card readers, SSD, huge hard drives (500GB max as almost everything is stored on external HD) or any other 'throw away components' that people put in to make their machines look good.

Connectors it needs: HDMI, ethernet, wirless, usb 3.0, headphone, normal monitor connector VGA, bluetooth purly for a remote control. The rest are just a waste of space.

DVD drive doesn't need to be anything too funky, not too fussed about Blu-Ray. I'd probably consider an external drive as I rarely use it.

Speakers don't have to be special, just not appalling!

Hope that helps.

 

[Anonymous]

Bump for OP

 

[Anonymous]

I have an Asus G73 which cost me around £1500. 17" 1920x1080, 640 GB HDD, 6GB RAM (I think they come in 6 or 8 ), i7 , ATi Mobility HD5870 and a backlit Keyboard.

Plays everything, is good looking (imo) and solidly built. You won't get near this spec on Apple hardware for anywhere near the price.

Only negatives, heavy for a laptop, and a sub 2 hour battery life (but I use it as "portable" rather than laptop).

 

[Anonymous]

I have an Asus G73 which cost me around £1500. 17" 1920x1080, 640 GB HDD, 6GB RAM (I think they come in 6 or 8 ), i7 , ATi Mobility HD5870 and a backlit Keyboard.

Plays everything, is good looking (imo) and solidly built. You won't get near this spec on Apple hardware for anywhere near the price.

Only negatives, heavy for a laptop, and a sub 2 hour battery life (but I use it as "portable" rather than laptop).

Sound just what was required for the OP! :cheer:

 

[Anonymous]

Thanks guys for the help. I've looked into the asus laptop but struggling to find someone supplying 15" models at a sensible price; most places seem to be sold out.

It would be so simple if someone would just build a laptop with no 'gumf' on it just to pad out the stats page. I cant help but feel I'm paying for stuff that I will never use whilst getting extra weight, cooling problems and possibly extra power consumption in return.

 

[Anonymous]

Anima, hope you get what you need soon. :cheers:

 

[landzw]

You can dual boot apple with windows and i think the higher end mac book pro's will give you the abillity to play these games you ask for but at a serious price.

The cheaper version would be Alienware laptops, though they look alittle out of place with anyone who is aged 30+

There is another company called ROCK which i have had a gaming computer from which was pretty good though it doesn't match the power of the Alienware though they are alittle cheaper

Asus do a good gaming laptop

I really wouldn't touch many other company's though it would be a good idea to see what PC Pro website to see what they recommend.

If it wasn't for gaming i would say go for any of the apple laptops though i am biased after years of hassel with PC and Windows based laptops ( apart from 1 laptop ) i still have my iMac after 2 years and still love it to bits

 

[Anonymous]

Have you decided yet?

 

[eagle123]

there a another laptop you may be interested its a acer aspire timeline um3, 4gb ram, 256gb ssd, nvidia gt640, 15.6inch screen, it already proved to be impressive to the editors on what laptop, you can play games, and also got good battery life, the other point is that its a ultrabook, so its slim since it new that price is a estimated £1000

 

[VoodooDoctor]

Medion make the excellent and very competitively priced Erazer laptops. Far more bang for buck than Alienware.

 

[v1c]

I've heard that the alienware stuff can be overpriced. Has anyone got any experience of these machines?

Any more suggestions?

My Brother in law went from an Apple macbook (under 1K at the time) to a 2K Alienware as it was Awesome and cool. This was a few years ago mind , he had it for less than 18 months and it was constantly having issues with one thing and another basically he ended up hating it and has informed me it was the worst purchase he has ever made. He reverted back to apple and is now on a mac book air.

I would be very wary of Alienware it may be better now Dell are involved but my analogy of it was a long the lines of buying something from the finest range and finding out it was worse than value , i wish i was joking but that's how bad our Alienware experience was.

 

[v1c]

Ok original post was july 2011 so bit late now but if anyone else looking at Alienware just be cautious.

 

[Anonymous]

samsung brand should be great. i heard they recently dominated sony

if im wrong i apologize

 

[Anonymous]

I would check out PC Specialist: this machine looks quite tasty: http://www.pcspecialist.co.uk/notebooks/vortexIII-LE/

I haven't bought a laptop off them, but I'm very pleased with the budget gaming PC they supplied, and their service was excellent.

 

[Anonymous]

I would check out PC Specialist, this machine looks quite tasty if you specify a better processor and a bit more RAM: http://www.pcspecialist.co.uk/notebooks/vortexIII-LE/

I haven't bought a laptop from them but I'm very pleased with the budget gaming desktop that they supplied, and their service was excellent.