T̷s͢uk̕a͡t͜ư wrote:'m less sure about graphics design, but I think 15.6" is a fine size for work and personal entertainment (i.e. gaming, watching movies). 17" is definitely portable so long as you don't have some super-slim notebook case or something. At the very least, you could go for the 15.6" to keep it very portable but use it with an external monitor when you do your graphics work.
smartalco wrote:15". With a decent resolution it can still provide plenty of pixels, and I find a 17" too big to comfortably use in many places (however this is a personal opinion, with size you are better off just messing with a few at Best Buy or the like and seeing what you think will work)
I've read a lot of thing now and I really prefer to have a 17". I will take a 15.6" only if there's no 17" responding to my criteria.
T̷s͢uk̕a͡t͜ư wrote:You should know that these two things might as well be mutually exclusive. Either drop all expectations for one of these two categories or prepare to pay out the ass.
smartalco wrote:As Tsukatu said, these are pretty much mutually exclusive without paying out the ass. The MacBooks have about the best battery life you can buy, but they're also pricey and you have stated you don't want one. You also seem to be emphasizing performance over general utility, which also hurts both of these, so be willing to take some compromises.
Ok so I think I'll forget the low weight and good battery life and really emphasize good performance.
smartalco wrote:1) What exactly are you doing that requires it to be 'powerful'?
2) Why do you think you need 8gb of RAM? 4gb is plenty, 6 is excessive for almost everyone, 8 is just stupid for all but .1% of people. And given that you mention school, I'm doubting that you are doing excessive editing on 20 megapixel RAW images or editing cinema quality video (I could totally be wrong here, please inform me of such if I am)
Next year I'm going in a shcool (I'm not sure it is excatly the right therm) for 3D works, graphics. They said 4G is enough but 8G is perfect. They also said i7 is preferable. And you know, most of the laptop which cost over 1200$ have both i7 and 8G of Ram.
smartalco wrote:I'm curious though, why not split it up in to a desktop to do graphics work and gaming on, for which you can get a lot more performance for cheap, and then carry a cheaper laptop other places? A $1000 desktop and $500 laptop sounds like it'd be within your price range, and might match your usage better than just a high powered laptop.
As I've said, I need a powerful laptop to use it AT school, work on project, etc.
smartalco wrote:Why Nvidia? (I agree with the other part of this, I'm all for more pixels)
T̷s͢uk̕a͡t͜ư wrote:Fuck Apple and fuck AMD.
Hum... I don't really know why I prefer Nvidia. Every "very good" laptop I've seen had the Nvidia Geforce or Quadro, or an Ati Firepro.
But for the AMD Radeon I've actually no idea if it's as good as a Geforce and I'm thinking it's anyway less good than a Quadro (but I can be wrong). I've seen a nice laptop with a Radeon 6850M. Does somebody know its equivalent in Geforce or Quadro?
T̷s͢uk̕a͡t͜ư wrote:I bought a Lenovo Y570 recently that meets most of your specs (minus battery life) and ran me about $1400. I wouldn't buy something like it again, but you probably have different expectations from your laptops than I do.
It has 8 GB of RAM, a stupidly good NVIDIA graphics card (at least I'm impressed by Assassin's Creed 2 running smoothly at max settings on a laptop), a quad-core Intel i7 (which, with hyperthreading, is effectively 8 virtual CPUs), an HD screen, etc.
...buuuut it's got a heavy air of cheapness of quality to it. It's mostly a combination of little things, like the fact that the keyboard is total crap and no OS I've installed on it seems to like its USB 3.0 ports. Also, the network card likes to make the computer randomly crash horribly, but I'm not allowed to complain about it because I only seem to trigger that when I'm, er, doing things I shouldn't. I also have a personal gripe with this NVIDIA Optimus thing (dynamically switching to the Intel graphics card to save battery life) because the CUDA development kit won't install on it (which was half the goddamn reason I sprang for a machine with such a powerful graphics card in the first place), but that probably means very little to you. Optimus won't fuck your shit up when you do graphics work.
When I bought it, I was torn between it and a W-series ThinkPad, and if I could make that choice again with the experience I have now, I would go for the ThinkPad. The IdeaPad Y570 was the only machine Lenovo sold with a quad-core CPU and its graphics card beat out every other offering by quite a wide margin, so I sold out and went for the non-ThinkPad.
Thanks for this very helpful comment man! The Ideapad Y570 seem to have the same general specs than the Thinkpad w520 but the Thinkpad is at least 500$ more expensive... I guess it is because its a lot more professional. I mean better general quality, more port, better screen and a Nvidia Quadro instead of a Geforce. But the Thinkpad w520 had few thing which make me not sure to buy it:
- No keypad...
- I heard that the general sound quality of the w520 is not really good.
- I would really prefer a 17" screen, so sad they don't make thinkpad in 17" anymore...
- and...
mediate wrote:Again, OEM OS blows so prepare to reinstall.
l'oeuvre wrote:OEM = Original Equipment Manufacture. What he's saying is install your own copy of Windows 7 when you get it.
[/quote] Ok just a question and sorry if it sounds stupid but why does the OEM OS is not good?
Some people have said me to take a the HP pavilion 6180 or
HP Envy 17-2050. They seem quite good and they are 17" but again it's a AMD Radeon graphic card and I'm like :-/ (Am I wrong?).
A lot of people said me the
Sony Vaio F serie are shit, it's quite sad because It seemed perfect for me...
There's also the Elitebook 8760w in HP but they're really really expensive...
Anyway thanks for all those who've helped me. I went on many forum and they said me nothing really constructive. You guys are the best...