New laptop – How’s this look?

[John Rofrano]

Yea, that looks like a solid machine. It should be fine. Let us know how it performs when you get it.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[Ken Mitchell]

USB 3.0 on the laptop? could be a really plus if you have it.

[Dave Haynie]

I’d probably look for USB 3.0 these days if I could get it… nearly as fast as eSATA, but way more useful. Not a deal breaker, but that would be on my list.

The GPU is a lower-end dedicated graphics unit… better than a shared-memory GPU like the Intels, but it’s not for serious 3D gaming. That product number (GT520M) is either based on a GF108 core with 128-bit private memory bus, 1200MHz internal, or a GC119 core with 64-bit private memory bus and 1480MHz internal clock. Here’s the Notebook Check page on it: https://www.notebookcheck.net/NVIDIA-GeForce-GT-520M.43104.0.html

It should be fine as a video accelerator… it has 48 unified shader cores, and can accelerate at least two simultaneous 1080p decodes. I have a GeForce 8400M in my laptop, which has only sixteen of the nVidia older stream processors, and even with just a dual-core 2.4GHz Core2, it can decode a 1080/60p stream in realtime. Never tried two, but it does do at least three 6Mb/s 1080/24p streams simultaneously (part of a networking demo I ran a few weeks ago). The CPU on mine is not fast enough to do this without GPU acceleration.

If we had reasonable GPU acceleration in Vegas, or it was known to be coming, I might hold out. But at this point in time, that’s a big unknown. That GPU should be fast enough to be a big help on things that use OpenGL like some of the Boris BCC7 plug-ins, if you ever use that stuff.

CPU, memory, and screen are close to the best you can get on a reasonable laptop these days (sure, there are some totally nutter machines built for gamers that use desktop chips and essentially have no useful battery life).

-Dave

[Kevin O’kelly]

That video card seems underpowered for an i7 CPU.

I have an Acer Laptop. AMD 970N quad 2.2GHz/6650M video. it’s well balanced.
30% slower than my 965×4 desktop with dual MSI6850 video cards.
But this laptop is dual purpose. I only paid $630 from newegg. Save money buy another in a year or two. I sold my old one for $250 and it was 3 years old. fleabay is wonderful.

I build our desktops. at least one a year. Just remember to try and research benchmarks for your application. Each cpu can perform better at some tasks than others. Most of the time you do get faster when you spend more money but verify the application.

good luck.

[Ken Mitchell]

Usb 3 is actually much faster that esata