Might buy a new laptop (again)

[Demon Cleaner]

I saw that Mysn.de doesn't give you the possibility to put 6GB of memory, only 4 or 8.

The i7 is only 80€ more expensive, but that's the i7-620, still dual, which I doubt will bring more than 5% performance over the i5-540. The next one is the quad core i7-740 which would be 115€ more. They use the same cases at notebookguru.de, slightly more expensive, but there you can choose the 6GB, I just saw right now. They also have the i7-720 CPU, only 40€ more expensive than the i5-540.

So with the i7-720, 6GB of memory and the HD5870, the price would be 1784€. That would then be this one (only configurated).

If you compare both GPUs, the HD5870 and the GTX285, only with the games, the GTX card doesn't come that much behind, is even faster for some older games. You can check that on this benchmark:

http://www.notebookcheck.net/Compute...s.13849.0.html

If you restrict the following benchmark list to only these 2 GPUs, it looks a bit different, in performance:

http://www.notebookcheck.net/Mobile-...ist.844.0.html

[Harrison]

The graphics card is going to be the most important part to get the best performance from games, and if you look at the benchmarks for the GPUs you can easily see the 5870 is performing a lot more powerfully than the nVidia cards. Also worth noting that the only cards coming close are all SLI which means 2 cards are needed so it isn't a realistic benchmark as you can also run 2 5870's together in crossfire and that would completely blow the nVidia cards away.

If you look down the list, the first stand alone card is a GTX 480M with a 3DMark06 score of 15019, whereas the single 5870 is achieving 19080. Not a perfect test of performance compare to real world game FPS scores, but it does show the increased performance.

Regarding CPUs. It is worth you doing some research on the different i5 and i7 CPUs as some of the lower cost i7's are actually really i5 technology rather than full i7, and are missing the triple channel memory support, so not worth the extra cost. Do try to get a quad core CPU if you can though as games are now being coded for multiple core CPUs so new games will benefit from more cores.

[Demon Cleaner]

According to Intel, only the i7-9xx series have the triple channel memory, but that's way too expensive.

[Harrison]

Yeah, the i7 8xx series is more similar to the i5 than the original and better i7 9xx series and not worth the extra cost, although they do still have some additional features over the i5 range, such as hyper threading so a quad core appears as 8 cores to the OS.

Best to just stick with an i5. Have you got the option of the higher end quad core i5's? As the range is dual core at the bottom of the range and quad at the top. I highly recommend quad core for a new system as all software and games is starting to take advantage of multi threading.

[Demon Cleaner]

They only have the i5-540, which is still dual core, the first quad core being the i7-740, which is "only" 140€ more expensive than the i5-540. So I could stick with that one. i7-720 is still dual.

You can see what they have on their config page here.

But as I wouldn't need to have 6GB of memory, I could also buy it at mysn.de, where I looked in the first place, because they are even cheaper, but have exactly the same notebooks. Only thing is that they didn't offer the 6GB of memory.

You can see their config page here. I think they are cheaper because they have a Gamescom special at the moment.

Btw, do you think it would be better to go with a 1 x 4GB memory die, or 2 x 4GB? I saw that the 1x version is a bit more expensive (20€). Do they only offer that option if you want to upgrade later to 8GB, so that you don't have to remove the 2x2GB dies again, and replace them? Wouldn't it be better to use the 2x2GB to benefit from the dual channel memory?

[Harrison]

Yes, you will get better performance from the 2x 2GB configuration, rather than 1x 4GB. It is more expensive because 4GB ram modules still cost more, but a single one does, as you say, offer an upgrade path later if you needed. But 4GB should be fine.

One other question. What OS is provided with them. 64bit?

[Demon Cleaner]

There's no OS provided, unless I want one. Then I can go with whatever I want. I'm only using 64 bit Windows 7 versions at the moment anyway.