Ereon Member Posts: 1018 From: Ohio, United States Registered: 04-12-2005 |
Well, it's time for an upgrade. I'm thinking about buying a new laptop soon to replace the piece of junk/clunker of an HP that I was stupid enough to purchase in my ignorant youth  . However, I've only ever owned one computer in my life, and I can safely say that I've never owned a "good" one. On top of that, with the advent of dual core systems and such I'm completely lost as to what is reasonable and what I really need. So, I'm turning to you guys for some advice on brand, types, and specs that I should be considering. I'm trying to stay within a $2000-$2500 price range, and within the next few years I intend to do alot of 3D game design work with it. I'd love to tinker with alot of shader work and such, and high end graphics if the opportunity becomes available. I do 2D (digitally generated texture) and 3D artwork often, and I love to play games when I can, so it needs to be a good performer (I'm just not sure how good of one though). I'm also interested in cross-platform development, so I'm not sure what that would require either. I'm also considering the possibility of purchasing a Mac, if anyone has any thoughts on that.P.S. The reason I'm buying a laptop is primarily for portability. I want to be able to haul it back and forth between class and the dorm and such, and work on stuff on the fly. I'm also interested in buying a desktop, but I see the laptop as being much more useful since I'm going to be doing alot of moving around at college more than likely (and also because I somehow managed to pull the second smallest sized dorm in the entire school, go figure Anyway, thanks in advance, I look forward to your thoughts. ------------------ |
HanClinto Administrator Posts: 1828 From: Indiana Registered: 10-11-2004 |
My wife and I have been extremely happy with the 15" Macbook Pro -- we each have one, and it's an extremely nice laptop that fits squarely in the price range that you specified. As far as gaming on it goes, I use BootCamp to boot natively into Windows, though my wife emulates Windows 2003 Server via VMWare Fusion -- she doesn't play as many Windows games as I do. We've been extremely happy with them, and we'd recommend the same to anyone who asked. --clint |
samw3 Member Posts: 542 From: Toccoa, GA, USA Registered: 08-15-2006 |
I don't do much gaming and only a little 3d stuff, but here are some general things to think about when getting a laptop. Think RAM and battery. I had a friend who loaded up the processor and skimped on the ram and battery and his machine only runs for about an hour and a half before recharge is needed. I learned a lesson from that and got the lowest processor they would configure it with, but loaded up the ram, and I also got the additional battery that fits in the cd/dvd bay. With those two things, if I turn down the brightness of the screen it'll go, kid you not, for almost six hours. Now, I use my laptop primarily for coding (its my development station), and productivity/net stuff, and I'm very happy with it. Its a dell, about 2 yrs old now, and cost me ~$1400 total. On a side note, I think everyone should get laptops these days. Upgradability is not really the issue it used to be. And there are so many benefits: I think no matter which way you go. Your price range should get you a good piece of machinery. Just keep in mind where the bottlenecks are. i.e. cpu is faster than ram is faster than cards is faster than hd. And then balance the costs for what you can afford. Oh, there was one more thing I bought (included in that price) a really GOOD warranty (3yr). So far I haven't had to use it. It's been a great machine. God Bless! ------------------ |
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Ereon Member Posts: 1018 From: Ohio, United States Registered: 04-12-2005 |
What memory specs do you guys have on yours Clint? I was looking at the 15" models, but I wasn't sure about going with 2.2 GHz on the processors as opposed to 2.4, the 128MB graphics card instead of 256 and such. I was also wondering how much of a difference the memory makes, because that's the other big ticket item that I can see being useful, but I'm just not sure how useful. I've never had memory about 512 in my life, and I've never upgraded it on my laptop so I'm not sure how important it actually is. ------------------ [This message has been edited by ereon (edited August 02, 2007).] |
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HanClinto Administrator Posts: 1828 From: Indiana Registered: 10-11-2004 |
quote: We splurged a bit and have the 2.4 Ghz model with 2 gig of RAM and the 256MB gfx card. It also helps a bit that I got a small discount because of my employer. Memory upgrades are generally understood to be some of the biggest bang for your buck as far as performance. Especially if you plan to run a virtual machine, having at least a gig of RAM can be *very* nice. I haven't noticed a huge difference from the graphics card or the faster processor -- I doubt I push my machine so much that it's a terribly noticeable difference. --clint |
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samw3 Member Posts: 542 From: Toccoa, GA, USA Registered: 08-15-2006 |
More memory means (generally) less hard drive access. Memory is transistors. Hard drive is motors and moving parts. Its more of a power consumption issue. Mine has 2GB.. that was a lot for 2yrs ago. It only has a 1.something processor and honestly its quite peppy. Warm boot from hibernation, 12secs. Cold boot to windows(login).. something like 60 secs. You might want to weigh if having a long battery life is important to you. I do a fair amount of traveling and its nice to not have to recharge that often. ------------------ |
CPUFreak91 Member Posts: 2337 From: Registered: 02-01-2005 |
quote: I bought a 15" Macbook Pro in May of this year and I've been really happy with it. I'm not going to be using it for graphics so the default 2GB of RAM that comes with the current models is fine for everything I do (what I needed was portability and computing power plus all the OS options). If you need more RAM later on you can buy it and install it yourself if you don't want to wait for it to come back from the shop (you just unscrew a cover next to the battery, pop out the 2 1 gig sticks of RAM, and insert 2 2GB sticks to get 4GB or whatever you bought). The best thing about Macs is that you can get the best of all three worlds: Windows XP/Vista, OS X, and Linux/Solaris/*BSD so cross-platform development is amazingly convenient even without virtual machines. The second best is that they don't depreciate very fast. You can get about 60-70% of your money back if you sell it in 3-4 years. If you go to a college/highscool you can get a student discount too. That'll bring the stock 128MB graphics card model to around $1800-$1900 and the 256mb model to around $2100-$2200, if I'm not mistaken. The newest 15" models use an LCD backlight to power the screen, so your battery life will be about 3-3.5 hours while watching a DVD (I don't have the newest model with the LCD backlight so I can only watch about 2.5-3 hours of DVD on battery). The newest model also has a fairly good nVidia graphics card, which isn't underclocked (or underclocked as much) like the ATI card on the previous 2006 Macbook Pro model (which I have). ------------------ "Oh, bother," said the Borg. "We've assimilated Pooh." "Socialism works great... if there are no people involved." -- Pastor David Ginter, Union Church of Guatemala. My Programming and Hacker/Geek related Blog [This message has been edited by CPUFreak91 (edited August 02, 2007).] |
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Ereon Member Posts: 1018 From: Ohio, United States Registered: 04-12-2005 |
Hmm. What would be the difference between 2 gigs of RAM and 4 gigs be? Would it likely be significant? How would the difference in graphics card RAM effect the system? I think that I could probably live with the 2.2 processor, because there are two of them, so that 4.4 total, which is probably about as much as I'll need. The only thing I'm aprehensive about is the lesser graphics card memory. If I did go with the 2.2 though that would mean I could get than with a full 4 gigs of RAM using my school discount for $2,500. But once again, I'm going for a gaming degree, so I'm not sure how the graphics card differences would effect the computer when it came to gaming and working with graphics. ------------------ |
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Ereon Member Posts: 1018 From: Ohio, United States Registered: 04-12-2005 |
Oh yeah, btw, how good is the graphics card on those laptops really, as far as compared to a desktop's graphics card? Are they fairly decent as far as being able to play newer games and such? ------------------ |
Lazarus Member Posts: 1668 From: USA Registered: 06-06-2006 |
Get an 8800GTS, Ereon. You won't be disappointed.  |
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CPUFreak91 Member Posts: 2337 From: Registered: 02-01-2005 |
quote: I have a friend who bought a Mac desktop a while ago with only 1GB of RAM. He does a lot of heavy modeling and in Maya and other work with 3D programs... his system ran really slowly. When he upgraded to 5, he noticed about a %80 speed increase. This means that if you're doing a ton of 3D heavy stuff 4GB will give you around a 50% increase in speed over 2GB. It will be especially usefull in the future as programs require more and more memory. The difference is the video ram. The more video ram the more polygons, textures, and other things can be stored in the Vram for faster loading times. Unless you're planning to do a game like Halo 3 or Gears of War 2, 256MB won't make that much of a noticeable difference. Ask yourself this question: How so do I want to/need to get a new laptop after this one? When I bought my laptop I bought the cheapest version I could get (other than an extra gig of RAM) because I plan to get a new Macbook Pro in 2-3 years. The reason being: The hardware will have changed enough then that I could get the highest end Macbook Pro for (most likely) less than what I paid for the lowest end. The other thing to take into consideration is that the parts that you don't think about, mother board, CPU capabilities not speed, graphics card capabilities not the amount of memory, hard drive speed, etc will have changed, giving the computer an overall performance boost compared to the models from 2-3 years before it. What I'd suggest in your case, is get the 256MB video card model (just to be safe) and 2GB of RAM. If you need more RAM you can upgrade it later for less than what you'd be paying for it now. You can 1) Either do it yourself easily or 2) Pay a few bucks and have some computer hardware guy upgrade it for you. I've upgraded the ram on a laptop before and it's really not that hard. Apple is so restrictive on their hardware (ie not letting people make clones) that you can go out and buy Apple Macbook Pro ram in 1 year (specifying your model) and it will work. For example, in the normal PC world you would have to make sure you're getting DDR3 instead of DDR2. ------------------ "Oh, bother," said the Borg. "We've assimilated Pooh." "Socialism works great... if there are no people involved." -- Pastor David Ginter, Union Church of Guatemala. |
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CPUFreak91 Member Posts: 2337 From: Registered: 02-01-2005 |
quote: They're not as fast, but you can turn the settings up all the way on almost any DirectX 9.0c game and not have any performance issues. If you want to get a good gaming laptop, you can probably find a DirectX 10 one in the range of $3500-$4000. ------------------ "Oh, bother," said the Borg. "We've assimilated Pooh." "Socialism works great... if there are no people involved." -- Pastor David Ginter, Union Church of Guatemala. |
