I am looking for a laptop one of which i can take around university do course and well game programming. I have yet to hit the staff where i am using several detail textures as once but intend have some work at that level by summer next year. I have seen several computer, in fact i work in a computer store but i don't think the standard ati radeon mobility 512mb 4830 will cut.(i think) I am looking at an expenditure of £1200 with a £600, is that too little or more than enough??? I have looked at nova-tech, pcspecialist, dell and asustek but i can't justify the expense in my head. What are your views???

My honest opinion is build a desktop yourself. A laptop for college is more pain then you could think of, especially if you get into the tendency of taking it to class. It will interfere with the class itself.

I'm running a radeon hd4850 1gb, amd athlon x2 7850, 4 gigs of ram, 320gb hdd. I bought this for $550 about 2 months ago and assembled it, I had to buy everything but dvd burner, I had a spare. So with case, psu, mobo, cpu, ram, hdd, vid card, and 19" monitor it was $550. A very nice budget build, only have a max resolution of 1440x900 but if you go with a laptop thats all you would get anyways.

I'm using a Dell Studio 15 with the video card upgrade and it's working fine for everything I do.

If you want Dell configurability without the Dell logo, you may want to take a look at Zepto's notebooks. I am using the now discontinued Znote Z6225WD, and it has served me well for almost a year and a half so far. It is also very Linux-friendly for a laptop.

EDIT: In the end it comes down to making sure that your computer is equipped with a decent video card. The one thing I'd stay away from is integrated Intel chips.

Moved to the Lounge.

An interesting option might be the new Acer Ferrari notebook.

What you get is a very portable (11.6") laptop with a dual-core, 64bit AMD CPU with an integrated Radeon 3200 graphics to suit your on-the-go needs -- and the interesting bit, is that it also has an XGP port -- which exports 16 PCIe lanes out of the laptop, allowing you to dock with a full-blown desktop GPU that sits in a box on your desk.

For my own needs (If I hadn't already bought a unibody macbook) this would have been perfect -- enough on-the-go power in a very portable form factor, but with the ability to tap more power when its needed. The XGP box is small and light enough to be lugged around for say, demonstrations, and you're not forced to pay the size/heat/battery-life penalties of having a discreet graphics card all time.

The couple downside I can imagine might be of concern are the resolution (1366x768) which is adequate, though not great, for coding, and the keyboard size -- Its got a "compact" layout typical of most small notebooks, but since it goes all the way to the edge I imagine its full-size, or very-nearly full-size (say 95%). The 12.1" Dell 700m I had about .75 inches to either side of the keyboard, and it was 95% fullsize.

I'd recommend the ASUS K50AB, we've recently bought it for my girlfriend. It has a Mobility 4750 (handles Crysis on Medium/High with 60 FPS capped) and what's seriously important for me as a programmer - it has a real, full sized keyboard. No tiny buttons, no missing keys, no Fn multipurpose key messing around. I was shocked at the amount of firepower that thing has, especially considering the price (around $600). The thermal management that thing has is another thing. It's quiet and even with a full-scale Gentoo compilation going on for two days non stop (on both cores), it never goes above 60 °C. Case is sturdy as a rock, display's fine except for that bullshit 16:9 ratio and 1366x768 resolution.

I bought a X61Z (which is a F50Z rebranded for eurasian market, looks almost identical to the K50AB) around 6 months ago for over 800 bucks and this (K50AB) machine surpasses it in almost every aspect. The X61Z has a Mobility HD 3200 GPU, which has only shared memory and is therefore severely bandwidth-bound (low fillrate too). Can play Crysis on low with half the native resolution though ^^

They both run a dual core Athlon, Puma chipset, Atheros 802.11 wifi, 3 GB of RAM and 320 GB of local storage on a SATA 2 line, bluetooth and whatnot. All the hardware is fully supported by linux.

Quote: Original post by JonConley
My honest opinion is build a desktop yourself. A laptop for college is more pain then you could think of, especially if you get into the tendency of taking it to class. It will interfere with the class itself.

Indeed. I have discovered this myself and have decided that this will be my last laptop, purely for convenience reasons. Laptops are often difficult to upgrade, expensive and difficult to repair when they go wrong (and they will, also remember they usually have dodgy non-standard hardware in one way or another) and, really, I got no benefit whatsoever out of using it in lectures. It becomes a distraction, offers little to no benefit for note taking (if you need to read along with the slides, take notes now and print the slides off using your desktop later in the day) and carrying it everywhere gives me the willies because I have fear of it getting stolen or damaged. My current laptop is deskbound and never leaves my flat and I still use it because I can't justify replacing it.

Next machine for me is a home built desktop. No assing around with "Can't peel that label off, might bugger the warranty" or "Oh noes, my Quantum-Xanjing XBI 273 Onboard Graphics Accelerator with proprietary formfactor has died, replacements start at £morethanthemachinesactuallyworth and this new RAM doesn't fit, FML".

Yeah, taking a laptop to class is kind of pointless. I go home on the weekends from my dorm on campus, so I just take my laptop with me. Last year I had an hour or two between class so I'd take my laptop with me and sit in the hall.

The problem with most people is that they don't save up enough so they end up buying a poor laptop when they should be getting the best of the best with no intention to upgrade. I've been using my laptop for around 6 years. It has a 7800 go and a centrino duo 1.83 ghz in it. Other than playing really new games it hasn't shown its age yet. (I played both crysis games with it!). (Currently running Windows 7 Professional RTM).

I've been looking at some future laptop stores. (I won't upgrade for another 3 years, but this question comes up a lot).

17" laptops from malibal with i7 (desktop processor) and 280m
18.4" Laptop with Dual 280m's
If you can afford to spend £1400 then you'll be fine. I prefer 17" widescreen for coding, but the 18.4" looks really nice.

To be honest, I'm happy using my EeePC 900A for game programming. Graphics chip on it isn't *that* poor, runs reasonably well with XP SP3, but I've got 2GB of RAM and turned off swap (8GB SSD..). I have a beefier main PC which is what I do most of my development on, but the netbook does for when I'm not at home for a day or two - and it was cheap enough to not be a big loss if it's damaged, although I dropped a bottle of beer on the thing, bottle smashed, beer and glass over EeePC, and it was still ok - seems tougher than I expected.

Mind, there's been a few better suggestions so far if you plan to use it as a primary machine. I'm slowly going off the idea of having a beefy main PC as it takes up a fair chunk of space, needs to be all plugged in and setup - I'd much rather go for a decent laptop as a main PC, plug in an extra monitor, mouse and keyboard when at home.