Gaming laptop - any advice appreciated!

G

Grimble

Member
Hi All,

I'm planning on getting the below spec, intend to use it for mainly gaming (I'm abroad for the next 3 months, and want to get in my fix :)) with the occasional bit of HD video editing.

Any advice would be appreciated, particularly on the SSD side - people have said that the Kingston is less reliable than the Intel, how much less are we talking here? Are there any actual stats? I was considering a 120GB Intel 510 SSD and a second HDD, but the gf's lappy is a macbook air, so it'd be nice to have a DVD drive in at least one machine, without having to carry around an external one as well, and I've already got an external 3TB USB3 drive for bulk storage... Any advice on the rest of the setup would be much appreciated, I'll hopefully be ordering tomorrow. :)

Chassis & Display - Vortex II: 15.6" Matte 95% Gamut LED Widescreen (1920x1080) (£79)
Processor (CPU) - Intel® Core™i7 Quad Core Mobile Processor i7-2860QM (2.50GHz) 8MB
Memory (RAM) - 16GB SAMSUNG 1333MHz SODIMM DDR3 MEMORY (4 x 4GB)
Graphics Card - 2GB AMD® Radeon® HD 6990M - DirectX® 11 (15.6" Vortex II)
Memory - Hard Disk - 240GB KINGSTON HYPERX SSD, SATA 6 Gb/s (upto 555MB/sR | 510MB/sW)
DVD/BLU-RAY Drive 8x SATA DVD±R/RW/Dual Layer (+ 24x CD-RW)
Thermal Paste - ARCTIC MX-4 EXTREME THERMAL CONDUCTIVITY COMPOUND (£9)
Bluetooth & Wireless - GIGABIT LAN & WIRELESS INTEL® ADVANCED-N 6230 (300Mbps) + BLUETOOTH
Operating System - Genuine Windows 7 Ultimate 64 Bit - inc DVD & Licence (£146)

Thanks!
 
Music Guy123

Music Guy123

Prolific Poster
If I were you, I would upgrade that gpu for a start. To afford this you can drop the cpu at least one notch, possibly two and then you can probably drop the os to home premium unless you need a specific feature. What is your budget and what is your max screen size?
 
mantadog

mantadog

Superhero Level Poster
Well for a spot of light gaming it should be perfect and will handle a bit of editing no bother.

I would however say it is slightly over specced, and unless you want to throw money away i would advise a few downgrades.

The premium on that CPU is CRAZY, it work out about £150 for a 0.1Ghz speed boost over the next step, and over £250 over the lowst clocked i7 on offer. The speed differance between the 2.5Ghz and the 2.2Ghz versions is about 10% or so and £250 for a 10% speed boost is a fair load of money. I would just stick with the 2.2Ghz version unless you really want the performance then get the 2.4Ghz version but in all honesty the 2.5Ghz version is a bit pointless.

8GB of RAM is more than enough unless you have some crazy multi tasking habbits, unless you know for sure you will need 16GB i would get 8GB.

The failure rate on the kingston drives must be fairly low as i am on the forums quite a bit and am yet to see any reports of failures, the OCZ drives that PCS sold before they switched to kingston were always failing. If your thinking about a 120GB drive then the kingston is probably good enough, the intel is bulletproof reliabilty wise but the premium is again quite high. My vote goes to the kingston.

Unless you have a specific need for the Ultimate version then i would get the home premium but thats up to yourself.
 
Last edited:
G

Grimble

Member
My budget is about £2k. Screen size, 15.6 is a good fit for me, anything bigger is going to be a pain to move around, and I figure when I'm back in the UK I can plug it into a monitor.

I've dropped to Windows 7 Home Premium (thought the max RAM was 8G for that, my bad, don't need any other features) swapped i7-2860QM or i72760QM and swapped the 6990M for a 580M, do you think this GPU is a big step up in performance for the price difference? Including the drop from 2860QM to 2760QM?

New spec below.

Chassis & Display - Vortex II: 15.6" Matte 95% Gamut LED Widescreen (1920x1080) (£79)
Processor (CPU) - Intel® Core™i7 Quad Core Mobile Processor i7-2760QM (2.40GHz) 6MB
Memory (RAM) - 16GB SAMSUNG 1333MHz SODIMM DDR3 MEMORY (4 x 4GB)
Graphics Card - 2.0GB nVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 580M - DirectX® 11 (15.6" Vortex II)
Memory - Hard Disk - 240GB KINGSTON HYPERX SSD, SATA 6 Gb/s (upto 555MB/sR | 510MB/sW)
DVD/BLU-RAY Drive - 8x SATA DVD±R/RW/Dual Layer (+ 24x CD-RW)
Memory Card Reader - Internal 9 in 1 Card Reader (MMC/RSMMC/SD: Mini, XC & HC/MS: Pro & Duo)
Thermal Paste - ARCTIC MX-4 EXTREME THERMAL CONDUCTIVITY COMPOUND (£9)
Sound Card - Intel 2 Channel High Definition Audio + MIC/Headphone Jack
Bluetooth & Wireless - GIGABIT LAN & WIRELESS INTEL® ADVANCED-N 6230 (300Mbps) + BLUETOOTH
Operating System - Genuine Windows 7 Home Premium 64 Bit - inc DVD & Licence (£79)

Thanks!
 
mantadog

mantadog

Superhero Level Poster
The 580m is a much stronger card no doubt about that, so if you want the best gaming experiance then go for that. Do you have a specific need for 16GB? Thats alot fo RAM but windows home premium will support that if you need it.

The drop in the processor will have no effect on your gaming, the upgrade in GPU will give you a better experiance as it's doing most of the work.

If thats the spec you go for it will handle just about anything you want it to.
 
G

Grimble

Member
Mantadog, was hoping for more than a spot of light gaming! not quite up to 8 hour WoW sessions, but 3-4 hours at a go isn't unknown...

I've taken advice and dropped the CPU for sure, some more reading around suggests there's not a lot in it between 2860 and 2760.

The difference in price between 8GB and 16GB is like £40, I figure that's worth it, I figure if I want to run some VM's or something (I'm a unix admin by trade, so probably Linux VM's etc) extra memory is always good.

I've also had bad experiences with an OCZ SSD, so was a bit cautious about Kingston, but if there's no reports of failures, that's cool. As mentioned, dropped the Windows to Home Premium.

Thanks again guys!
 
mantadog

mantadog

Superhero Level Poster
Well when i said 'light' i was meaning more along the lines of slightly lower graphics settings than you might find on a hight end gaming desktop rig. That spec will blast away at WoW all day every day for you no problems, even more modern games will play perfectly well. Wrong choice of words from me i think.

The premium on the CPU's is madness for the performance gain you get from 0.1Ghz speed boost so you are doing the right thing by dropping down a level on that front. I would go for the 2.2 myself, but i can see why you want the 2.4 and you have the budget so get it so go for it.

As i said if you have a need for then RAM then by all means get, i was just going on the gaming and video editing front from your OP.

Yeah PCS swapped out the OCZ drives after a few failures so i presume they researched a bit deeper into what 'budget' brand of SSD they went for this time, so i would say the kingston would be fine.
 
Music Guy123

Music Guy123

Prolific Poster
Yeah, your spec is solid, a recommendation would be to upgrade the wifi card to the 6300 for extra range. Otherwise, unless you want to upgrade screen size which you don't, it looks like you have got yourself one very nice laptop! Enjoy it!
 
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