High Performance Laptop

Hi all,

I am looking to purchase a mobile workstation notebook. I have the following choices:

CHOICE 1: DELL PRECISION M6500

Intel i7-920 XM, WXGA 17" screen, 8 GB (2x4gb) DDR3 1333 MHz, 500 GB 7200 SATA, , 1gb gddr5 FirePro M7740, integrated sound card: costs approx £2900 inc VAT. DVD RW Replacing 500 GB SATA HDD with 128 GB ssd fully encrypted brings it down to £2700 inc VAT: 3 Year Std NBD onsite warranty, 0% finance available.


Choice 2: DELL Precision M6500

Intel i7-820 XM, WXGA 17" screen, 8 GB (2x4gb) DDR3 1333 MHz, 128 gb fully encrypted SSD, 500 GB 7200 SATA, , DVD RW, 1gb gddr5 FirePro M7740, integrated sound card, costs approx £2600 inc VAT, 3 Year NBD onsite, 0% finance


Choice 3: Kobalt Computers (UK based)

Comanche 17", WuXGA X-glass, i7 950 3.06 GHz, NVidia GEForce 285M GTX 1GB DDR3, 6gb (3x2GB) 1066 MHz DDR memory, 160 gb Intel Gen2 SSD, 500 GB 7200 SATA II with 16 mb cache, blue-ray rom/DVD RW, creative XiFI audio and headset, 3 year European collect and retrun, dead pixel guarantee (£90)......£3000 inc VAT.

Choice 4: CyberPower UK

http://www.cyberpowersystem.co.uk/ [...] _Notebook/

17", WuXGA X-glass, i7 960 3.20 GHz, NVidia GEForce 285M GTX 1GB DDR3, 6gb (3x2GB) 1333 MHz DDR memory, 128 Corsiar P series P128 SSD, 500 GB 7200 SATA II with 16 mb cache, DVD RW, onboard sound, 1 year collect and return.....about £2800.

I have not purchased any custom built so far. I do not know how good these companies are. I will be running a few real-time charting applications, real-time data manager plus a few other applicatioins. The real-time applications need good memory (at least 4 but more the better). I run these applications on a HP xw8600 (xeon x5450 quad-core) desktop that has 4 GB ram. These applications use about 70-75% of the memory and run faster. I need something comparable if not better on a notebook.

Reviews on the net about Kobalt and CyberPower appear to be good, while Dell reviews (customer support) is on the negative. I have not considered Eurocom as I read a lot of negative reviews about customer support and notebook crashing after a few months. Dell 0% finance and 3 NBD are the plus, while Cyberpower 1 year collect and return is troublesome. The UK cyberpower does not offer 3 year warranty. I also read a review that their xtreme notebook (chocie 4) uses still an old chasis, cheap plastics and hence not firm keyboards. Dell reviews are good but often complain about heat around the palmrest area.

I would appreciate any input/recommendations on these choices or alternatives. Please also advise/comment about the heat and the perofrmance of i7 Mobile vs i7 desktop processors used in those choices.

Many thanks,
SSri

Hello and welcome to the forums
What is your usage with your notebook ?

And games ?

Then go for the second one,you won't need a GTX 285 if you don't play games

I don't know much about Cyber power but Kobalt is very good,it's got positive reviews and has a great support.

No problem