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Quality powerful Laptop? (must have within a day or two)

alostpacket

alostpacket

Over Macho Grande?
So I need a laptop, and mostly need it soon. It will be a portable dev station and some light multimedia. Gaming would be nice but not a must.

It seems my best bet is a Macbook Pro quality wise and so I am able to get it quickly (have an apple store nearby)

I'm not a fan of Apple or anything but they make great laptops.

So my question is: are there quality alternatives I could get from somewhere like BestBuy? I worry anything ordered over the internet will not arrive in time for my needs.

Budget is $2-3k

Thoughts?
 
Alienware or the new Dell XPS line should be right up your alley. You acn always pay extra for expedite shipping which should get you the righ in a couple of days. The problem with buying off the shelf is that you rarely get the exact configuration you want or need (unless you're buying apple).
 
Yeah when I configured an Alienware just now it said 8 days build time at least....doh


thanks for the replies btw
 
Thanks for the replies guys, I ended up grabbing a MBP just so I knew I could have it in time for my training session wednesday.

But I may very well keep researching and return the MBP for something else after my training. So feel free to keep the suggestions flowing :D
 
Isthmus said:
Alienware or the new Dell XPS line should be right up your alley. You acn always pay extra for expedite shipping which should get you the righ in a couple of days. The problem with buying off the shelf is that you rarely get the exact configuration you want or need (unless you're buying apple).
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I dont think dell XPS have good graphics cards...

i would go with Alienware.
 
Lenovo, i have a t410s and i love it.

The new X1 is really nice and its on par with a mac book air in terms of design. not to mention you can get an SSD and 2nd gen i7.
 
alostpacket said:
The specs on those are awesome for the price.... almost too good to be true.
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yeah, it's really surprising that more people haven't gotten them. I see Malibal as the new alienware, back when alienware was kewl and not owned by Dell.

BringItSon said:
I dont think dell XPS have good graphics cards...

i would go with Alienware.
Click to expand...

One and the same, these days.....

meme405 said:
Lenovo, i have a t410s and i love it.

The new X1 is really nice and its on par with a mac book air in terms of design. not to mention you can get an SSD and 2nd gen i7.
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Hmm, interesting. I've heard lots of good about Lenovo's in general....
 
It's funny though when I configured the Malibal with a few nice option the price crept up back to almost normal.

I think one way they kept it down was that it doesnt include Windows(by default, which is nice in some ways too). Still in the end it was a good value for that amount of power. I'm certainly considering it. but I do like this MBP too. I have 12 days to decide if I want to keep it basically.
 
Thanks for the suggestions all, at this point I'm still leaning towards keeping the MBP -- partially because I already have a beast of a desktop Windows PC and having some variety to use different OSes is good.

Though I will miss some of the gaming options.
 
BringItSon said:
I dont think dell XPS have good graphics cards...

i would go with Alienware.
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You do realize that Dell owns Alienware, right? As for the comment about the XPS line not having good gfx cards, you are surely mistaken. I have 2 gigs of VRAM sitting in my XPS and it performs magnificently. It's not nice to pass along false information.

On a side note, those Malibal laptops look sweeeeeeeeet.
 
NYCHitman1 said:
You do realize that Dell owns Alienware, right? As for the comment about the XPS line not having good gfx cards, you are surely mistaken. I have 2 gigs of VRAM sitting in my XPS and it performs magnificently. It's not nice to pass along false information.

On a side note, those Malibal laptops look sweeeeeeeeet.
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Speaking of false information... Having more VRAM doesn't always mean better, especially in a laptop with a low(er) resolution screen. VRAM is best used for higher resolution images and textures (using AA also utilizes VRAM, as well as a significant portion of the GPU's processing power). Manufacturers throw more VRAM into mobile GPUs so customers think they are getting a good card. RAM doesn't mean crap if there isn't anything behind it to feed it data.
 
NYCHitman1 said:
You do realize that Dell owns Alienware, right? As for the comment about the XPS line not having good gfx cards, you are surely mistaken. I have 2 gigs of VRAM sitting in my XPS and it performs magnificently. It's not nice to pass along false information.

On a side note, those Malibal laptops look sweeeeeeeeet.
Click to expand...

:p And *you* realize that I already said that way back when? *snicker*

johnlgalt said:
One and the same, these days.....
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drdoom said:
Speaking of false information... Having more VRAM doesn't always mean better, especially in a laptop with a low(er) resolution screen. VRAM is best used for higher resolution images and textures (using AA also utilizes VRAM, as well as a significant portion of the GPU's processing power). Manufacturers throw more VRAM into mobile GPUs so customers think they are getting a good card. RAM doesn't mean crap if there isn't anything behind it to feed it data.
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IOW, a lappy with 2 GB of DDR3 on a GTX260M car ain't gonna do squat compared to a lappy with only 896 MB of DDR3 on a GTX560M....

So, you (meaning anyone that is not me) take the 2 GB card and I'll take the 896 - #winning
 
drdoom said:
Speaking of false information... Having more VRAM doesn't always mean better, especially in a laptop with a low(er) resolution screen. VRAM is best used for higher resolution images and textures (using AA also utilizes VRAM, as well as a significant portion of the GPU's processing power). Manufacturers throw more VRAM into mobile GPUs so customers think they are getting a good card. RAM doesn't mean crap if there isn't anything behind it to feed it data.
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It's sitting behind a top tier mobile-i7 cpu w/ 6 gigs of RAM and a monster HDD. Not to mention it's a 1080p LED monitor. I think that's more than enough to feed.
 
NYCHitman1 said:
It's sitting behind a top tier mobile-i7 cpu w/ 6 gigs of RAM and a monster HDD. Not to mention it's a 1080p LED monitor. I think that's more than enough to feed.
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I think you missed my point. Let's use a desktop GPU as an example. Say you have a 3Gb GTX 550 and a 896Mb GTX 560. Those model numbers don't seem that far apart, so they can't be that big of a difference in performance, right? (wrong, but for this example, we are an uninformed customer) But those VRAM numbers, that is a 342% increase! That must mean the 550 is faster than the 560 because it has more vRAM! Wrong. I don't care how much AA, high quality textures, and screen resolution you throw at both the 550 and the 560; all of the damn RAM in the world won't make the 550 faster than a 896Mb GTX 560. The 550 has significantly fewer shader (CUDA thanks to Nvidia's stupid naming scheme) cores (I think it is roughly 50% fewer shaders compared to a GTX 560). Even though its shaders and core are clocked higher than a 560's, it won't perform nearly as well without those extra shaders.

In case you didn't feel like reading that wall of text, basically VRAM on a video card doesn't make the card (sure it helps, but not as much as additional shaders and a good core). Having more VRAM without a good core and shaders is like having a maxed out muscle car with a lawnmower engine; it might look great from the outside, but when you open the hood or start it up, you realize that it isn't going anywhere or doing anything while being held back by that weak engine.

You have yet to list what video card you actually have; it could have potentially avoided this whole debate, but I'll leave that for another post/topic.
 
drdoom said:
I think you missed my point. Let's use a desktop GPU as an example. Say you have a 3Gb GTX 550 and a 896Mb GTX 560. Those model numbers don't seem that far apart, so they can't be that big of a difference in performance, right? (wrong, but for this example, we are an uninformed customer) But those VRAM numbers, that is a 342% increase! That must mean the 550 is faster than the 560 because it has more vRAM! Wrong. I don't care how much AA, high quality textures, and screen resolution you throw at both the 550 and the 560; all of the damn RAM in the world won't make the 550 faster than a 896Mb GTX 560. The 550 has significantly fewer shader (CUDA thanks to Nvidia's stupid naming scheme) cores (I think it is roughly 50% fewer shaders compared to a GTX 560). Even though its shaders and core are clocked higher than a 560's, it won't perform nearly as well without those extra shaders.

In case you didn't feel like reading that wall of text, basically VRAM on a video card doesn't make the card (sure it helps, but not as much as additional shaders and a good core). Having more VRAM without a good core and shaders is like having a maxed out muscle car with a lawnmower engine; it might look great from the outside, but when you open the hood or start it up, you realize that it isn't going anywhere or doing anything while being held back by that weak engine.

You have yet to list what video card you actually have; it could have potentially avoided this whole debate, but I'll leave that for another post/topic.
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I understood what you meant, I just stated that it does quite well in real world performance. I would never expect a mobile GPU to compare to a desktop GPU, in terms of power. That's just stupid.

It's the Nvidia GT 435M.
 
NYCHitman1 said:
I understood what you meant, I just stated that it does quite well in real world performance. I would never expect a mobile GPU to compare to a desktop GPU, in terms of power. That's just stupid.

It's the Nvidia GT 435M.
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My point was that (regardless of the platform) more VRAM doesn't mean it is a better card. Your GT 435M is a good example of what isn't a good card to shove more VRAM into. Even being considered a mid-range card for laptops, there is no way that card is going to be able to utilize 2Gb of VRAM without falling well below playable framerates. The card itself simply cannot process that much that fast.
 
drdoom said:
My point was that (regardless of the platform) more VRAM doesn't mean it is a better card. Your GT 435M is a good example of what isn't a good card to shove more VRAM into. Even being considered a mid-range card for laptops, there is no way that card is going to be able to utilize 2Gb of VRAM without falling well below playable framerates. The card itself simply cannot process that much that fast.
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All I know is that beyond the specifications that it contains, it performs very well. I've been playing various F2P MMOs on it, Starcraft 2 (on high settings), some Counter Strike: Source (high settings), and Mass Effect 2 (high settings) and it plays them all without a hiccup. If that's not good enough mobile processing for you, I don't know what is.
 
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