Where Can I Find a High Performance Laptop for a Fair Price?

[awri]

Right now I am running a mediocre alienware laptop (core 2 duo 2.0 ghz 2.5gig ram). Just running BOINC on this laptop heats the processor enough makes it hot enough to cause an emergency shutdown. This is due to a manufacturing (crap) flaw in the design. Thus I want a new one.

Id like to not get another alienware since I feel as I am paying money for a name. But I can't seem to find comparable performance anywhere else. To even get close with the max setting on a mac would costs ridiculous amounts. So I want to know if anyone knows of maybe smaller company or something that sells customizable high performance laptops. I understand I will have to pay for performance, but it should be fair.

What I am looking for:
core i7 or i9 (willing to spend lots here want the most processing power available).
at least 8GB or ram at 1333ghz or better
256 GB SSD (high rpm HDD will work too i suppose)
mediocre gfx

and it needs to be a laptop cause I am still a college student and desktops just don't work too well for the particular dorms I am in.

Thanks

 

[B. Elliott]

Right now I am running a mediocre alienware laptop (core 2 duo 2.0 ghz 2.5gig ram). Just running BOINC on this laptop heats the processor enough makes it hot enough to cause an emergency shutdown. This is due to a manufacturing (crap) flaw in the design. Thus I want a new one.

Id like to not get another alienware since I feel as I am paying money for a name. But I can't seem to find comparable performance anywhere else. To even get close with the max setting on a mac would costs ridiculous amounts. So I want to know if anyone knows of maybe smaller company or something that sells customizable high performance laptops. I understand I will have to pay for performance, but it should be fair.

What I am looking for:
core i7 or i9 (willing to spend lots here want the most processing power available).
at least 8GB or ram at 1333ghz or better
256 GB SSD (high rpm HDD will work too i suppose)
mediocre gfx

and it needs to be a laptop cause I am still a college student and desktops just don't work too well for the particular dorms I am in.

Thanks

I definitely wouldn't recommend running CPU intensive operations on a laptop due to most of them having inadequate cooling solutions for constant 100% CPU usage. Laptops were the first devices where heatpipe technology was applied in consumer computing. They're really efficient for their size at removing heat, but they can easily get heat soaked because of the small fan sizes. I'm willing to bet that's why your laptop was shutting down. Not really a bad design on the manufacture, but rather a bad idea to use a laptop for that from the get-go.

If you're going to be using a laptop for apps such as this, I would highly recommend a good cooling pad.

An excellent company that makes high quality laptops is Sager. They have line of ready built laptops along with the option of custom building one. They have relatively excellent cooling solutions (for a laptop), along with excellent expandability/upgradability later on. Pricey, but worth it for the performance and options. For example, their higher-end laptops feature additional bays for hard drives. Three total if you desire (three 1TB drives, a raid0 setup along with a storage drive, raid1, whatever). They also have SLI options if you want to use it for number crunching. The big drawback is that the laptops are super heavy. One a friend purchased that I recommended weighs in at around 12-14lbs. Humongous for a laptop.

 

[superflex]

Numerous high-end laptop builders/resellers are building systems based on barebones chassis produced by a Taiwanese manufacturer called Clevo. I have also recently been researching on buying a higher-end laptop (not AW). B. Elliot mentioned Sager, and they are one of the builders using the Clevo chassis for their products.

This link below would be a great place to start looking into these systems. I had already found Clevo-resellers through my research, but then I found this forum, which condenses a lot of information on the products and where you can buy them into one place.

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=91510"

 

[Topher925]

OMG! I can't believe what I'm reading! When it comes to computers, I don't think I have ever seen anyone actually take the time to research and learn about a product before developing an opinion of it. All I ever see is is people say, "buy a dell/mac/hp/compaq/toshiba/sony/etc because I think its awesome even though I don't know jack about computers".

Anyway...what was stated above is good information, but I would also like to add to what B. Elliot said, in that not only will your laptop be huge and heavy but won't have nearly the same power as a similar spec'ed desktop. You just can't put that much power in such a small package without making sacrifices. But you seem to be dead set on a notebook anyway so I would suggest you add cyberpowerpc.com to your browsing list. For example, the most powerful laptop they carry,

http://www.cyberpowerpc.com/system/Xplorer_X7_Xtreme_S2_Notebook/

Most Cyberpower laptops are just MSI chassis, just rebagged and custom hardware added. I find MSI notebooks to be a little on the flimsy side but you get a lot of descent hardware for your money and I doubt you will have one overheat on you.


BTW, my $800 samsung notebook has the same specs to your AW and only gets a little warm to the touch when running BOINC 24/7. With AW, you really are just buying the name.

 

[awri]

BTW, my $800 samsung notebook has the same specs to your AW and only gets a little warm to the touch when running BOINC 24/7. With AW, you really are just buying the name.

Yeah, its a shame I didn't realize that back in the day when I bought it. And I may end up getting the desktop now that I may have a permanent residence soon.

 

[The_Absolute]

It's much more difficult to cool laptops than it is desktops. Which is why the clock speeds of laptop processors are about half that of their desktop counterparts.