Solved! Best gaming laptop after summer?

Madcut

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Feb 26, 2010
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I'm looking to buy a laptop by September 1st as I need one for school. But I would also like it to be a good gaming system as well that can play games for the next couple years on good settings. From my research, I see that the 460, 480, and 485m are good cards (especially sli). Still, the non sli settings seem to only reach decent results on games like crysis. I know that laptops won't be able to reach the performance of desktop computers but I would still like to get close.

If I am buying after the summer, what technology will have changed? Will there be a 585m card out there that surpasses the 485m? Will any of the mobile cards surpass the performance of the gtx 480 desktop gpu any time soon?

My price range will be around $1500. I do need to have a laptop by September but i could possibly wait until the holidays if it would be smarter to buy one then.

Any advice?
 

AntiZig

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I don't know if you only want to limit your choices to nVidia, but look at AMD as well, the latest Mobility HD 6970 is pretty close to 485M and is about half the price.
I'm planning to buy a laptop in a few weeks myself and here's what I've gathered up:
Currently the best CPUs are i7-2000 series (2720, 2820 and 2920)
GPU: 485M, HD6970M close behind it, then all the others

Also, a very good reference website: http://www.notebookcheck.net

As far as getting a system after the summer. The 500M series is supposed to come out in the summer, but I'm not sure if 585M will be out. There might also be newer CPUs out.

Do you have any preference on the company you wish to go with? I'd recommend just picking out the components you wish to get and then searching all possible venues of obtaining a laptop with said hardware. It could be possible to get a cheaper laptop from boutique laptop vendors as opposed to dell/sony/etc.

Also, just to give you an idea, this is what I'm looking to buy in a few weeks:
http://www.xoticpc.com/sager-np8150-clevo-p150hm-p-2972.html?wconfigure=yes&change_view=rbm
 

Madcut

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Thanks for the reply. I've used Nvidia mostly in the past but I'm fine with using ATI if the components are good quality and don't have buggy drivers. I've looked at the 6970 which looks really good and a lot cheaper than the 485m (which is $1,000 for one I believe). If I could do 2x the 6970, that would be awesome but I don't have the money for that plus the laptop would be nearly as heavy as a desktop itself.

Thanks for the link. They seem to be a little cheaper than some other websites I've browsed, plus they offer the 6970.

I'll keep researching this summer and see what parts come out.
 
Hello Madcut;

It's too early to be shopping for laptops for an August order. Right now there isn't much competition for the Sandy Bridge notebooks.

AMD is now shipping 32nm A-series quad-core chips, codenamed Llano, for laptops and desktops so they'll be some competition finally, starting this summer.

Why AMD's New Llano Processor is a Big Deal
http://www.pcworld.com/article/224424/why_amds_new_llano_processor_is_a_big_deal.html
 
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Madcut

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Good news for AMD. Do you think the 32nm chips will be able to compete against Intel's chips outside of just energy efficiency and mobility? I would hope that the chips will still be able to meet the performance level of the i7 chips. I haven't used AMD for seven years or so now or back when the first 64 bit chips were released.

Will this also lead to some price drops for the laptop market?
 
I think price drops are almost certain for both desktops and laptops.
How much the drops will be depends on how close the performance gets to the SB chips.
We should start seeing leaked performance results before too much longer. And I think we'll have performance reviews out sometime in June, would be my guess.