Laptop question, advice please

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Hmmm...

Thats a tough one. Actually desktops or tower servers make far better gaming rigs then laptops. Laptops can actually overheat easily when the graphics get going. I just would not build a serious gaming rig out of a laptop. Besides you will spend a lot of money on a gaming laptop versus the performance you end up with.

There are many good gaming machines out there at Best Buy. I have a better build.

Go to Dell.com and look at their servers. Get a tower server for small business with a Xeon processor, 4 to 8 gigs of RAM and a floppy disc drive for older apps. (Trust me, sometimes you still need a floppy) Delete the DVD drive unless it also has a burner and lightscribe. Sony's DVD burners are reliable and can be made region free more easily then most if you desire.

Obviously if you build it yourself, going to tiger direct and buying 7 Ultimate 64 bit edition is a no brainer.

After that, to to newegg and get a decent sound and graphics card. All of the gaming performance is in the sound and graphics cards. Get the best you can afford.

Use a PCI-express graphics card, not an AGP card.

A gaming machine only needs a middle weight CPU. Any dual core 64 bit processor will do. Xeon or Opteron processors are the best.

For hard drives, RAID is only necessary to protect your data. Any SATA-II drive will be fine. If you use RAID, just do mirroring or RAID 10. With a good backup plan, you don't need RAID. In gaming, performance is in graphics and sound. A middle performance hard drive is fine (10k rpm or 7500 rpm speed). Just make sure there is enough storage to meet your needs.

You do NOT need a SCSI drive for gaming.

Carefully add up the cost of building a server into a gaming system versus getting one of those alienware or falcon monster machines. Trust me, you can save a lot of money building a tower server into a gaming machine.

Don't forget to get a good monitor, comfortable chair and decent speakers.

A PC shouldn't be too expensive.

True, a normal PC is cheaper. However, if you go to Dell and build a server and then carefully add parts to that, you can save even more money. Yes, you can go to Best Buy and get a powerful gaming desktop. They may even help you make monthly payments. That isn't the best way to go about it.

I'd put your money into the graphics and sound cards. The stores generally build computers with far more storage and far more powerful CPUs then you need & then go cheap on the graphics and sound cards. They do this so that you come back to Geek Squad or whoever later and then upgrade.

Servers have better cooling fans. Generally, their motherboards have more buses and slots for daughter boards. The cases are physically larger and many have locking doors on the front for physical security. The Windows 7 64 bit OEM DVD and license is cheaper then the full version.

You don't need 7 Ultimate for a gaming machine, but it's a good idea to get that. Ultimate has hard drive encryption so that your personal data doesn't get stolen if the computer is stolen.

I've built a few of these for people before. The results have been quite good.

Very true. The weird thing is it's true even for those gaming rigs.


This I'm not so sure. It may have a better CPU cooler if you buy a server class CPU (at what cost?) but there are definitely better ventilated desktop case than servers. The bus part is also not true unless you are talking about multi-socket boards.


That is full disk encryption. It's useful if you are very concerned about privacy. To the point that you don't even want a forensic team to know what you have done on your computer. But that comes with a heavy overhead that I'm not sure a gamer would want. A milder version of folder and file encryption that anyone logged into your account can access has been available in Windows for years and you don't need Ultimate for that. Anyway, if you are interested in this feature, TrueCrypt is a viable alternative.

True crypt is a good product. However Ultimate doesn't just have encryption. You get the media center (for play and DVDs) + you can join domains when you work.

Servers DO have more slots available on their motherboards all things being equal. You typically have both IDE and SATA ports which can be put into RAID (but not with each other) There are more fan slots that are available if you overheat.

Multiple PCI-express buses are the norm. Servers are basically heavy duty PCs in a slightly larger tower. I would not use a rack server or a blade server to make a gaming machine.

You can get a tower server from Dell for $500, OEM Ultimate for $200. A good graphics card ($200 to $400+) A good sound card $100 approx. Try that with one of those falcon or alienware PCs ! !

Ok, this time I think I'll finally buy as discounts have come to the shop near my house: prices are similar so please tell me which one (gaming first) among these:

1) Intel Celeron T3100, Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 4500M

2) AMD Athlon II Dual-Core M300, ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4570, 512 MB DDR3 dedicated

3) Intel Pentium T4400, ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4650, 1 GB DDR3 dedicated

4) Intel Core i3-330M, ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5470, 512 MB DDR3 deidcated

5) Intel Core 2 Duo T6670, Nvidia GeForce GT 320M 1 GB of video memory

6) AMD Turion II Dual Core M500, ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4650, 1 GB dedicated


1 and 2 are a little cheaper, please tell me

I'd avoid 1 and 4. 1 has an integrated graphics card, and an i3 is a low-end CPU that might do good for gaming, but I wouldn't bet on it.

I'd say 5 is your best bet, of the computers you've chosen. But the others(aside from 1 and 4) are also good.

I like AMD a little better then Intel. I'd say go with 6 or 2. #5 is also OK, but you'll pay more for the Intel name. Remember, for gaming you only need a multiple core CPU. The graphics and sound are most important.

Or just build it yourself unless the same absolutely beats what you can do.

So I went for the 5, part for the specs, a little part for aesthetics and part because it's Asus and the others Acer and I've read the former is more reliable and has better customer service. Hope it will suit my needs, it definitely looks beeeeeautiful

AMD CPUs are cheaper for the same computing performance but they are also more power hungry which means shorter battery life. Other than that, 5 looks like a good choice.