Laptop reccomendations

[Raldo]

4 years ago (has it really been that long?) I bought a laptop for the express purpose of being able to play FFXIV. An exercise in futility, I know. I have next to no knowledge when it comes to buying computers, so I ended up with one of these (or something extremely similar).

Long story short, after several intermittent failures (blue-screens and black-screen driver failures), the NVIDIA GeForce 250M card inside had literally melted itself into oblivion. When the card failed, I couldn't even power the machine on until the card was replaced (which is absurdly expensive for laptops, by the way). Once replaced, I went so far as to purchase a $50 cooling pad just to keep the damn thing alive, which has worked successfully thus far. Between 2.0's "better" engine and that cooling pad, it's survived this long, but since we're fast approaching 2.0 release, it's time to actually put the poor bastard out to pasture and find a replacement, so...

Does anyone here use a laptop for FFXIV that hasn't melted itself or their balls off and can run for hours and hours?

All I need is a full-size keyboard (i.e. a numpad), 1080p screen, an HDMI out, and of course either a great cooling system built in or a card that won't run hot. RAM? Whatever. Hard Drive? Don't care. Seriously, I'm not that picky.

A friend of mine suggested this:
http://powernotebooks.com/ASUS-G750J...-sys-5634.html

[Toxictaru]

It would be fine. I run an MSI gt70 that I bought last summer that runs 14 just fine. Very occasional frame drops, but even at just under max settings it is very smooth. The Asus you linked should handle FFXIV just fine, but maybe not at max settings.

End of the day a desktop is still going to be better, but I am in a situation where I need a laptop too, and I still get to enjoy the game just fine.

[Manako]

I went with the Lenovo Y500 http://shop.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops.../y-series/y500 tested "Very High" on the benchmark, above 2k points. I'd run the test again but apparently I deleted it. Ran the beta fine a few weeks ago, went through the intro sequence and some of the Story battles, looks good to me

They had a deal on it when I got it, still seems cheaper than that ASUS, I got the 750M, your link is a 770M so that would account for the cost. When I first got it had overheating issues but RMAed and got it fixed super fast and hasn't been a problem since. I looked at the ASUS machines at PaxEast and for me they were a bit too big, not sure if thats an issue for you, I find the area before the keyboard was too large its not like its an ergonomic wrist rest or anything.

Apparently I can take my DVD drive out and put in a second video card, but considering I got it for when I'm away from my desktop and not as a replacement, probably won't bother.

[The Stig]

If FFXIV isn't very CPU intensive (not tried it yet), I'll throw in something I thought was a good idea:

The MSI GX70 laptop

It basically combines a somewhat average AMD CPU with a top class mobile GPU (ATI 8970M in this case)

It probably won't win benchmarks when it comes to intensive tasks that uses CPU (i.e. video encoding) but it might push the game fine. However, if things get busy on the game and it does depend on CPU, then your bottleneck would be there.

All other companies will marry that GPU to a top of the range i7 Intel CPU instead but will cost more (but not that much more really...). But if cost is important then it's a consideration.

To be fair the GPU linked (ASUS) is more or less equivalent in terms of power.

[shidobu]

i have an alienware M17x r4 win8 i7-3630QM CPU @ 2.40GHz (8 CPUs)/Radeon HD 7970M

get 65+ frames everywhere high volume is not a problem either. 1080p

my shit runs hot. but thats what you are going to get with a gaming laptop. I never (rarely) have it in my lap, i only use my laptop at work because i sit at a desk all day. And use my rig at home. I know most people people hate on alienware but their laptops are solid as fuck. I had an M17x r2 and it lasted me for 4 years with 0 issues, gave it to my friend back in december when i bought this R4 during black friday sale. Hoping i get atleast 5 years out of this one too.

[The Stig]

i have an alienware M17x r4 win8 i7-3630QM CPU @ 2.40GHz (8 CPUs)/Radeon HD 7970M

get 65+ frames everywhere high volume is not a problem either. 1080p

my shit runs hot. but thats what you are going to get with a gaming laptop. I never (rarely) have it in my lap, i only use my laptop at work because i sit at a desk all day. And use my rig at home. I know most people people hate on alienware but their laptops are solid as fuck. I had an M17x r2 and it lasted me for 4 years with 0 issues, gave it to my friend back in december when i bought this R4 during black friday sale. Hoping i get atleast 5 years out of this one too.

I also have a m17x (r1 though .... GPU is dead after 3 years, or it keeps crashing so I disabled it and it's now a drone machine), and since day 1 I brought this with it http://store.antec.com/Product/noteb...5-75019-6.aspx

Highly recommended and it sits extremely well on it too, near perfect fit.

I love Alienware myself. I'm aware of the hate since people view it as overpriced hardware, which is indeed somewhat true, but the build quality and the uniqueness of it all makes it all better. Although I only owned 2 (2004, and in 2009) each of them has lasted for its purpose and I enjoy the uniqueness of it compared to say, a Macbook.

Also, that site, powernotebook in the OP, I forgot to mention ... I would not buy from them. Site looks like it got pulled from year 2001 and I have an expectation that people selling stuff like this online should be somewhat more professional in their presentation. Of course, they could be a very very very good company that just happens to suck at presentation, but if it was just linked by a friend you really have to wonder or gauge if you knew what he was doing at the time of linking. Also, clicking around, I don't get how they operate. It looks like they order the laptop for you and then send it to you ... ? lol. As far as I know Alienware laptops only get sold officially by a limited number of stores (in the UK anyway).

[umisame]

You dont need a good graphic inside of your laptop, you can use a external graphic when you are in home and when you need to go outside(not to play) with your laptop just go without external graphic.

Buy Vidock or something that can be used to connect a pc graphic to a laptop. Your laptop will shine, its better than a good mobile graphic inside of your laptop.
Check videos in youtube.

[Raldo]

Brilliant!

[Ratatapa]

Yeah but the dock is like 200$ + 200$ for a good card, + monitor (if you don't have one)

Almost the same price as a gamer laptop with more hassle

but thats my opinion

[Raldo]

Wait, what? Wouldn't it show up on the Laptop's monitor?

[Ratatapa]

No

http://www.villageinstruments.com/vi...k2Spider34.png

didnt try it but people says it needs to go on an external monitor

[Raldo]

Bahhhh, that defeats the whole purpose.

Also, what little research I've done says I'm limited to a USB 2.0 connection, and that it kinda sucks since I don't have USB 3.0, PCIe, etc.

Well, that was fun while it lasted; scrap that idea then.

[Ratatapa]

For this is to buy a cheaper Laptop

A good gaming laptop is what 1600$???

A nomral 4gig ram Laptop can cost 400-500$ + 200 for the item + 300 for an ok graphic card

That is about 1000$ + 200 for a monitor (if you dont have it) so it<s like 1200 instead of 1600, you still save but yeh it<s hassle

[Raldo]

Can't put the monitor in my lap. If I'm going to go through all that trouble of setting up an actual workstation area where I can place a monitor, I may as well just buy a desktop.

[Ratatapa]

That is true, but still an ok soltuion for some situations

[Icarian]

Games aren't usually bottlenecked by CPU nowadays, so if you're looking for a gaming laptop the first thing to look at is the GPU.

http://www.notebookcheck.net/Compari...rds.130.0.html

This will give you a rough idea, anything short of class 2 (and that's kind of stretching it if you take the half bottom part of class 2 into account IMO) will fail horribly at any kind of graphic intensive game unless you play either 720p or at very low settings if you want to keep it at 1080p.

If I'm not wrong that site also has many benchmarks of Laptop GPUs so you can see and compare about how much you're willing to spend vs what performance you're comfortable with.

[Raldo]

Cool link, but unfortunately there's no metric for "how much this is going to burn your nuts off". Sadly, I care more about that than I do peak-performance or even money. According to that link, my current system contains a class-3 (GTS 250M) and it plays FFXIV just fine with mid-range laptop settings (I'm no videophile; that's perfectly acceptable to me). The problem is that FFXIV causes itself to melt from the inside out (it already happened once; cost me ~$400 to replace the card).

[Icarian]

I think you're SoL then, I don't think there's a laptop that doesn't get hot when playing anything but indies, any modern game will make a laptop cry for cooling.

[Kainos]

if your looking for something really cheap ($200-400) im currently using alienware m11x r1

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Alienware-M1...item3f27bceb86

cpu can easily be overclocked to 1.7, as can the gpu. benchmark gets 3100 ish on standard settings or 3700(fairly high) if you overclock gpu
I just use the hdmi to an external monitor for higher res, plays fine for longterm gaming

[The Stig]

I think you're SoL then, I don't think there's a laptop that doesn't get hot when playing anything but indies, any modern game will make a laptop cry for cooling.

Faster than Light makes my fans go full throttle ;__;

According to Kainos's advice you can probably go back even further and find a similar high performance laptop from the older times. In fact I am surprised to hear a m11x r1 can play it. Are you using the U-series CPU or Core2Duo?