Would you please check my specs for gaming laptop?

fadejah

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Sep 18, 2010
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1_What is your budget?

About 2,400 USD, but this budget must also cover a monitor and Microsoft Office 2010 Home and Student in addition to the laptop.




2_What is the size of the notebook that you are considering?

Around 15"




3_What screen resolution do you want?

Not sure here...




4_Do you need a portable or desktop replacement laptop?

Semi-portable desktop replacement




5_How much battery life do you need?

Not as important as performance.




6_Do you want to play games with your laptop? If so then please list the games that you want to with
the settings that you want for these games. (Low,Medium or High)?

Starcraft 2 at the highest possible settings.




7_What other tasks do you want to do with your laptop? (Photo / Video editing,watching movies, Etc.)

I use Protools for recording music which can be fairly demanding, but this is less important than
SC2.




8_How much storage (H.D.D Capacity) do you need?

250-500GB would actually be plenty, as I use externals for my Protools files. I guess if the money could be better
spent on performance, I can easily make do without a ton of storage. I am interested in an SSD for speed and have further question on this below.


9_If you are considering specific sites to buy from, please post their links.

After reading this post: [http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/62738-35-need-picking-gaming-laptop], I
started looking at the ASUS Republic of Gamers Laptops (Link below). The G53JW-A1 seems to be a much
better value than the Toshiba Qosmio and Alienware laptops that I was looking at earlier... better
processor, better GPU, more memory, normal looking, for less $$$.

http://www.powernotebooks.com/configure.php?special=861

I am considering the G53JW-A1 which appears to be either out of stock or unreleased.

Upgrades I am considering with the forum's blessing:
-The 80GB intel SSD in addition to the stock 750GB SATA II drive. If I went this route would
the SSD be my primary drive, second hard drive, or does it not make a difference? This will be my
first experience with SSDs-if I do indeed go this route.
-I also am going to upgrade the RAM to 8GB.

This gives me a price of $1946.00 including MS Office '10 and shipping, Which would leave me roughly $400 for my monitor.

I'm open to totally new options too, but I otherwise just wanted to post my specifics on the ASUS for last minute suggestions before "clicking the button."

I messed around with the G73JW-A1 (The other Republic of Gamers model), but could find no advantage from it due to the stock dual-hardrives upping cost to provide storage space I don't need. The 8GB comes stock with it, but that is only a $45 upgrade from the 6GB stock on the G53JW-A1.

Thanks in advance for any assistance. I've been out of the computer market for eight years... it has
become a frightening place. :]

-Kyle
 

thaghost101

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Aug 20, 2010
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-The 80GB intel SSD in addition to the stock 750GB SATA II drive. If I went this route would
the SSD be my primary drive, second hard drive, or does it not make a difference?

You would want to use your SSD as your primary drive and use the 750GB as storage. The SSD has faster loading speeds.