sweet as, cheers, yea both those cards have HDMI out.

in the end that i5 only had the radeon 7470 card which by the checks looked below average, they had a dell on sale though

2nd Generation Intel Core i7-2670qm
NVIDIA GeForce GT 525M

the only model with the 7650 card was $1600

it said limited stock $1100 on the website but was $875 in store, was a display model runout but they had a new boxed one... in the end pretty sweet deal, it's a Dell but alot better than the other two.

best place to buy a laptop online?

looking at around $800-900.

Stocktake sale at CentreCom: http://www.centrecom.com.au/catalog/...catalogue.html

I haven't bought there before, a workmate sends me this stuff.

damn it. too many options.

is this thing any good? http://www.jw.com.au/asus-k53sj-sx078x-p-1759

http://www.onlinecomputer.com.au/

^for prices on Asus, these guys usually rate alright

always check what they list against staticice.com.au though


their special seems comparable:

http://www.onlinecomputer.com.au/pro...oducts_id=9137

i7
8gb
extra 2nd year warranty
larger hdd
same gpu
same screen size/res

..not sure if there are other differences in the fine print or physical/aesthetically speaking, but on paper it looks better.

wow. that site is a lot better. cheers!

http://www.onlinecomputer.com.au/pro...oducts_id=9137

They're upstairs in Capitol Square, George St (OnLine Centre). Might as well just go there.

oh sweet! just down the road from me

Take a printout of the online price. They're shifty little buggers.

Fuck compuboxes are so much cheaper there than here.

what's with SSDs in gaming laptops? High-end expensive machines only?

New laptops being rolled out at [steel client] run SSDs. They're just mid-spec HP units for office use. At the consumer end, they're probably mostly in high end units because your average pleb won't pay the premium. Nothing stopping you upgrading a HDD yourself though.

I'm not convinced SSDs are all that beneficial for gaming, unless you fork out for a 500GB drive to fit your whole Steam library on.

they do make your pc lighting fast though. Still get a benefit from having your OS installed on one

SSD's only help load times in games, since most games are optimised for small load times the performance boost is small.

Youse present good points.

For the intrepid installer, what's good and bad in SSD brands at the moment? Anything to avoid?

intel for reliability, crucial for performance, ocz for a gamble.

there's a new drive from samsung that's getting great reviews but the name escapes me.

Are kingston and corsair ssds aight?

update report on the laptop. was for my lil bro's birthday. he lost his shit.

Media Player

Nintendo Sixty-FOOOOOOOOOOUR - YouTube

Spoiler:

thanks again dudes. everything went better than expected!

I'm an asus fanboi from way back, and considering one of their ROG numbers.

However, the Clevos look like a significant discount for the same specs. Worth a look at? I'm assuming the build quality and design is inferior, but is it enough of a step down to warrant paying more for the asus brand?

I've had my Clevo for just over 12 months now, still rock solid. My only complaints have been the cheap keyboard, and trackpad that is too grippy. The latest models have a much improved keyboard apparently, and it's backlit too:

http://www.logicalblueone.com.au/sto...-notebook.html

This question might do better in here:

---

I've been wanting to do this to my laptop (I have a similar model) as I think I used the CD drive all of two times last year. Wouldn't hurt to upgrade the drive to an ITB either. This will also be a good opportunity to clean out the internals as I imagine there'd be a good 3 years worth of shite in there.

This looks like it'll do the trick for mounting the SSD.

As this is my first foray into SSDs there's a few things I'm not sure about. Will the constant read/write of the page file wear out the drive quicker and do I need to do something about putting that on the platter drive instead, or does Win7 do something tricky there / is that no longer an issue with newer SSDs?

Other than faster load times, is there much benefit/risk with having programs like 3DS Max and Creative Suite installed on the SSD?

Anyone done something similar to a lappy?

put windows on the ssd, put a tiny page file (like 512MB) on the mechanical drive. no page file on the ssd

make sure your cs scratch disks are not set to the ssd. It'll be fast if they're on there but they WILL fill up the drive

the nand in ssds can be written to shitloads of times, even a power user wouldn't kill a drive in 5 years.

there's guides on the net for optimising ssds in windows 7, but some of the 'tricks' are apparently debatable. you wouldn't really suffer if you just banged it in and didnt do any optimising. i'm not familiar with 3dsmax but i'd have creative suite on there. anandtech reviews have good benchmarks of creative suite (and maybe even 3ds but i gloss over unfamiliar software) on their ssd reviews which are the most though that i've found.

Cheers for the replies.

How I manage the OS and programs will pretty much dictate if I go for a 60gb or 120gb SSD. I'm guessing moving the Users folder to the mechanical drive would be a good idea too?

If CS is sweet on the ssd then I'm guessing 3DSMax should be fine as well. No dramas keeping the scratch disks purely on the mechanical drive either, I think I'd prefer it that way. Nismo, you say to keep the page file on a separate drive but then Rancho mentions that the drives these days are fairly resilient so I'm not sure which way to go there.

go for 120/128gb, they're so cheap now it's inexcusable to go 60. 120 is usually a bit faster than 60 due to the scaling with increased number of nand chips. 240/256+ i usually another step up in speed but 120/128 is best bang for buck.

intel 330 120gb is only ~$150

from what i gather pagefiles are read far more often than they're written, and ssd's are awesome for random small reads. sooo, yeah.

the sheer speed of ssds makes the need for page files redundant imo, which is why i say put a tiny one on the other drive. That's how i have my desktop set up & it flies

you could always do the bushy way and have no page file, but windows will just secretly make one anyway so better to manually restrict it.

This laptop only has 4gb of ram so I'd rather not ride bareback. I did consider upgrading the ram but I think the hard drive upgrade would be far more noticeable and effective. I don't think I'll bother messing about with page file after all.

I think the 120gb is the way to go, the step up in price is chump change. I was already leaning toward Intel as they seem to be best for reliability vs. economy.

Ok cool, thanks guys. It helps to sound this stuff out.

cs & 3dsm on win7 + 4GB RAM? you're nuts.

Ridin' diiiiirty.

(3yr old laptop )

in that case, 20GB page file on the SSD

Spoiler:

really, i mean prob about 2GB on the ssd. You'll be forever waiting from memory hard faults (ram spilling over to hdd) on the mechanical drive when you do anything creative.

lol at the moment I'm running win7 off a 50 GB harddrive partition

so yeah, go the 120/128

Oh snap, can get 2x4gb sticks for like $50. Might even give that a shot.

200gb page file. Got it.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Mickstah

I think the 120gb is the way to go, the step up in price is chump change. I was already leaning toward Intel as they seem to be best for reliability vs. economy.

gruso and i both bought the intel 330 120gb, so like... all the cool kids are doing it. don't you want to be a cool kid too, mick?

Damn right I do!

i only have an 80GB 320 series but that's coz they were the bang for buck option at the time

i manage to keep 20gb free on it. Installed a bunch of apps that i don't use so much on another drive

I only went the 60GB actually. I have made a terrible mistake.

But nah, it's only the HTPC so it'll be Win7, XBMC and some utils.

gruslol

Grusno! How could you?!

sorry

*clevoblog bump*

The yearly refresh of the Clevo range is coming in April (deets). That'll make my P150HM two years old, so I started entertaining thoughts of dropping $2k on an upgrade. Then I un-retarded and decided to pimp up the existing one.

Picked up this thing:



I'm going to ditch the optical drive and put the existing 500GB HDD into that slot. Then pick up an SSD for primary.

I can upgrade the GPU from 6970m to 7990m for about $600, but I'm shelving that option for now. I OC'd the 6970M today using the gumby AMD options and saw an average 10fps improvement in DayZ. From what I've read, with better utils I can probably gain that again (and safely).

So for now:

HDD caddy adapter $25
OCZ vertex 4 128GB $125

SSD + a little more OC should provide excellent bang for buck I reckon. I might drop $600 on a 7970M later in the year, which is apparently well worth it.

tldr; Clevo.

Yeah definitely do the CD caddy upgrade, I did that a few months ago along with a ram upgrade and I rekkon it's given this laptop another two years of life. Very happy with performance now.

guy at work got the Lenovo Yoga 3 from the states for AUD1600.
tis awesome!

Quote:

Originally Posted by Mickstah

Yeah definitely do the CD caddy upgrade, I did that a few months ago along with a ram upgrade and I rekkon it's given this laptop another two years of life. Very happy with performance now.

Swoit.

Quote:

Originally Posted by jarrardscott

guy at work got the Lenovo Yoga 3 from the states for AUD1600.
tis awesome!

Link? I can find a Yoga 13 which is only $999USD.

I still don't have a computer over here (use the work laptop for gaming, lol).

Spending all mah moneys on travel. Need something for downloading OpenBSD ISOs though. I'm so far behind.

Crabmang i'll be selling my laptop in the next couple months if you wanna grab it. It's still under warranty from novatech as i just bought it in November 2012.

15 inch
i7 3630qm
gt 650m
8gb ram

PM or whatever if you are interested, i'm after 500 gold coins.

Is the keyboard clean?

yes it is.

SSD finally in. Windows install time, cray cray. Boot time, cray cray. Amount of shit I have to tweak and install before the job is done, cray cray.

At least it all happens extremely quickly.