Laptop buying thread part 37

loinburger · June 19, 2011, 00:12

My laptop has been sluggish when I use it at work (I3 processor, 4GB ram that is regularly at an 80% commit and occasionally thrashes if I'm not careful), so I'm thinking of getting a new one in a month or two - my job will pay half the price of the laptop but it'll take a few weeks for the paperwork to go through. The primary reason for getting a new laptop rather than upgrading the old one is to get a larger screen. I'm not too concerned about battery life - I've got a netbook for the times when I'll be unplugged for several hours. Here's what I'm looking at:

ASUS NX90JQ-B2
Intel I7-740
8GB 1333mhz RAM
18.4" 1920x1080 monitor
NVidia GT 335M 1024MB
Dual 500GB 7200RPM hard drives (I may replace one of these with an SSD, but it's more likely that I'll hold off on this until the technology is more mature and the prices have dropped)
4x Blu-Ray Reader / 8x DVDRW (I may downgrade this to a 8x DVDRW to shave $60 off the price)
Win7 Home Premium x64 (I've got Pro on my current laptop but have found that for my purposes Virtualbox works as well as XP Mode - initially I used XP Mode to virtualize two old XP OS's, but for the past six months I've only used it as a sandbox)
$1900 (this price will go up if I get any doohickeys like a backlit keyboard, but said doohickeys are not relevant to my questions below)

Questions:
Is this reasonable?
Is there a compelling reason to extend that 2 months to 4 or 6 months, e.g. a new release from Intel that will drop the price of the I7?

Spaced Cowboy · June 19, 2011, 11:35

Assuming that there are not a lot of people crying on the internet over issues with this build that sounds tasty.

loinburger · June 19, 2011, 12:38

My current laptop, my previous laptop, and my current netbook are also Asus - I've never had any complaints about the brand.

loinburger · June 19, 2011, 13:44

It looks like Toshiba is also a decent brand - their Qosmio X500-Q930X has approximately the same specs plus a backlit keyboard and Pro x64 for $1800

Sir Og · June 20, 2011, 02:09

You should definately go for the new CPUs I7 2xxxQM (4 cores/8 threads with turbo). The one in the OP is the previous generation.

Also +1 for the SSD (get one from Intel. They seem to have the best reliability)

AMD is releasing a new line of mobile CPUs now but they will have no impact on the prices in the segment that you are interested in.

loinburger · June 20, 2011, 09:02

The Toshiba uses the next gen CPU, so I'll be going with that instead of the Asus

My brother will be able to get me an employee discount on an SSD, so I'd install one myself rather than ordering one with the laptop; the question is whether to get an SSD or a hybrid (ordinarily I'd get the hybrid, but since the computer has a second HD I'd consider an SSD instead)

Provost Harrison · June 20, 2011, 15:49

My new laptop is sat at home at reception while I am in Germany, it arrived today. Very frustrating.

loinburger · June 20, 2011, 15:50

$230 for a 160gb SSD, so I'll be going with an SSD and a 500gb magnetic drive. I'm not able to find a manufacturer that will ship a laptop with one empty hard drive bay, but whatever; maybe I can sell the extra 500gb drive for a few bucks on ebay.

Provost Harrison · June 20, 2011, 16:34

These SSD drives sound quite interesting albeit pricey.

loinburger · June 20, 2011, 16:37

My brother sent me an article detailing how you can get a lot of the performance of an SSD for less cost if you get a hybrid drive, e.g. a 500gb magnetic drive with a 20gb SSD cache. The reason I'm going with a non-hybrid SSD is a. the laptop has two hard drives so I don't need the extra storage of a hybrid, and b. my brother doesn't get discounts on hybrids (Intel manufactures the SSD portion, but another company manufactures the actual hard drive + SSD).