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My twin bothers (uh half brothers) are graduating from high school this year, so my family wants to buy them matching laptops.  I have little to no experience with laptops so I thought I'd ask you market savvy folks for a few opinions.

Price range: 1k to 1500ish

Usage: School work (supposedly) and basic like...educational productivity, watching the odd movie, playing games (they both constantly play WarCraft: TFC, no idea beyond that how much GPU power they might require, but I'm guessing at least entry-level gamer).  Also they probably need to be fairly durable because from what I've seen my bothers abuse and ruin pretty much everything they come into contact with eventually.


Thoughts?

   

Is this something they need to haul around on a regular basis? I.e. does weight and size matter?

Nah, they are 18 year old jock types, they won't care about the weight or size.

Take a look at the Dell Inspirion E1505 with the GeForce Go 7300 GPU. You should be able to configure something decent for under $1500 and then you can use that as a baseline to compare to other laptops.

Laptop video cards being slightly behind the cutting edge desktop cards, if they truly want to play games on them, you probably want to get ones with the best vid cards out there.  Either that, or forget about games altogether.  It's currently an awkward position for laptops, with DX10 games supposedly coming out soon:  desktop video will (has already) upgraded to support, whereas laptops are kinda stuck with the level of technology that you buy them at yet are supposed to be useful for 3 years or so.

Personally I prefer mobility laptops right now, 12" (wide) screens, easy to plop down on a desk and get to work.  A 17" monster might be awkward to fit onto your small desk in class and take notes, even if they don't mind carrying the weight around.   I would recommend getting 14" ones, 15" at the most.

Thanks for the input.  I think the Dell's would be a good option for them since they can buy the support package and it's pretty straight forward to order one with whatever bells and whistles you want.  Duly noted on the screen size though.

I can second the E1505 suggestion. I got one about a year ago with the ATI x1400 in it. It's decent. They probably won't be able to crank the settings up to max but Oblivion, CoX, WoW, PSU and other fairly modern games run very well if they're not resolution whores. I don't know about the Nvidia chips they're now using but I'd assume they'd at least be comparable to what I got a year ago. Also, the E1505 straddles the line between being portable and being a desktop replacement. It's almost bulky but not quite. A lady I do tech work for got the E1405 and she was disappointed with the screen size. She now wishes she'd gone for the 15. I know a few peeps who got the 1705 and while they like them, it would be just a bit too big for my taste.

My 2 year old laptop with 512 ram and a 1.7 gig processor plays WoW just fine, if you're not into mass raiding or what have you. In any case, isn't this thing for schoolwork, anyway? Getting a fancy video option on that laptop is asking for trouble, especially with regards to theft.

I'm looking for a laptop too. A gaming laptop. Humor me.

So if anybody has ideas of a laptop (ideally Intel Core2 Duo, ideally nVidia 7xxx GTX) that aren't in the barking mad price range (no HP Voodoo recommendations required) I would appreciate it. I'm guessing it probably can't be a Dell either (a PC retailer that I'm doing some work for can cut me a break, but I suspect that web-direct stuff wont be things their suppliers can procure). But something akin to the Dell M1710 would be the sort of thing.

Well, name brands you got Toshiba (http://www.toshibadirect.com/td/b2c/nbsrch.jsp?stt=all&s=4294967002%204294966523&in_dim_srch=1), HP (http://www.shopping.hp.com/webapp/shopping/series_can.do;jsessionid=GCzpK2zAjJ22BF2kTKbni76fTLRbI9TaT3ebqrOgiqQvdmLye6k1!51335422?storeName=computer_store&landing=notebooks&a1=Usage&v1=Entertainment), Gateway (http://www.gateway.com/systems/series/529498113.php), Sony (http://www.sonystyle.com/is-bin/INTERSHOP.enfinity/eCS/Store/en/-/USD/SY_BrowseCatalog-Start?CategoryName=cpu_VAIONotebookComputers_CSeries&Dept=computers)...  I'm sure I'm forgetting a bunch of them.

Toshibas seem to have the video card you're looking for, although I don't know about the other options.

Toshibas are made with bubble gum and cello tape.  I don't think he'll ever get one of those again.  We know the names of the brands.  Just looking for personal recommendations, really.  Isn't Gateway another one of those that you have to buy online?

Seconding this. I sit beside my buddy in class and we both have laptops. If they were any bigger (15.1"? Something like that) we wouldn't have any space left to do anything. I think the 15 isn't too big and not too small. Doesn't hurt my eye's and makes it easy read over my notes quickly without the need for font resizing or squinting. Also, light enough that I don't really notice the difference when I put it in my backpack with my notebooks.

I can't recall the exact place I was looking but I seem to recall reading good reviews for Asus made laptops for gaming in my research.  Try Googling Asus laptops?

Ooooh... you can get one that matches your Lamborghini!

(http://usa.asus.com/999/images/products/1188/vx_a2.jpg)

And, yes, I did accidentally google anus first.   :oops:

Dammit.

If you want to wait a bit longer notebooks with the GeForce 8M GPUs should be available (they were just announced today) and then you'll have a DX10 GPU in case you want to upgrade to Vista and play DX10 games in the future. Otherwise here's the list from NVIDIA for notebooks with NVIDIA notebook GPUs:

http://www.nvidia.com/object/wtb_notebooks.html

Another option is to wait till the WWDC and see if Apple updates their MacBook Pro line with better GPUs. Given Apple's long-standing hatred for all-things Mac gaming-related they still wouldn't be as good as what you could get in a PC notebook but at least you'll still have OS X available when you need it.

That's quite a handy little chart, thanks. The new 8M GPUs announced don't sound like DX10 equivalents of the higher end 7 series - more like the low-mid range GPUs. It might be nice to wait for DX10 high-end gaming mobile GPU equipped notebooks, but that might be a long wait. An Apple is right out. If it runs OS X then that's what it'll always run... rebooting laptops to play games sucks. I'm good with having two laptops. :)

Other than the 5400 RPM drive, the ASUS G1 does look very good for its price. I found a stickied thread on a notebook forum with 3D marks:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=99051

You are correct that the mobile GPUs announced today don't include an "8800M" version but on the desktop side the 8600 GT is roughly comparable to the 7900 GS so assuming that equivalence holds up on the mobile side the only 7XXX mobile GPUs that would be faster than the 8600M GT would be the 7900 GTX and the 7950 GTX (ignoring the SLI-setups).

You can always put in your own 7200 RPM drive if that's an issue.

Asus laptops are really nice.  I have a W3J, 14" widescreen that's awesome for its size.  The build quality is amazing, the thing just feels solid.  The one thing I would recommend is upgrading to 2 gigs of RAM in any notebook.  It makes the slower hard drives in notebooks less noticeable.

Oh, and as an aside, ASUS makes the macbooks, or at least has in the past.  I haven't kept up on who's making them currently.

As a follow up, I ended up ordering one of these:

http://www.hypersonic-pc.com/CX7/index.asp

I went for 2GHz Core 2 Duo, nVidia 7950 GTX 512MB, 2GB RAM, 200GB 7200 RPM drive, DVD+/-RW, Bluetooth. $2591 inc. first day air. I'll let you know how it goes.

I know easily half a dozen people with Asus laptops and we all love them. Started off because someone we worked with had an inside with an importer for them so we got them cheap... now he works God knows where but we still buy Asus. Very good quality laptops, and they last forever, I don't recall any of us having to replace them except to upgrade. I'm still using one I got back in 2003 (I think) and I use this thing 12+ hours a day between working and playing.

Seconding the 2 gig, it makes a hell of a difference.

Then I heard nothing from them, was unable to raise them by email or phone and canceled the order. So I ordered the same thing from Sager, who were responsive and gave me an estimated shipping date.

http://www.sagernotebook.com/pages/notebooks/productx.cfm?ProductType=5760

I'll have it next week. Yay.

My Sager notebook has arrived. It's big, its fairly heavy, its astonishingly quick, but it doesn't seem to get as hot as my MacBook Pro. Which is nice. Not one of the 2,304,000 pixels is defective. Sager were responsive and efficient and kept to their delivery schedule.

Now to see what the 7950 GTX can do. :)

I hope it can tidy up the kitchen because I'm not gonna.

Wow, great price for that Righ.  How heavy is it?

It's 8 lbs.  I said "ow" when I picked it up thinking it would be light.  Last night he maxed out the settings on Oblivion and it didn't assplode.

I'm not convinced that Vista is ready for prime time, but shit seems to be working nonetheless. They pre-installed the 64bit edition of Ultimate on it which caused me to raise an eyebrow. Despite this, the nVidia driver is as up-to-date as the 32bit one - though the Vista drivers lag behind the XP ones for the mobile GPUs. Nothing that I've played so far has made me want to install XP, though the COH updater bleating for the admin password has me considering using the admin account and turning off UAC. Fucking hand-holding bullshit.

Edit: spoke too soon - while application switching, the nVidia driver got into an unstable state. Go, go Windows XP...