3d work/Gaming/Affordable Laptop?

nacire

Hey everyone, I may be in the market for a new laptop in the near future and was wondering if anyone had any insight on the subject. I'm a desktop man myself and love building them, but this will be my first time investing in a lappy. It will be mainly used for modeling and texturing, but I'd like it to handle some gaming as well. It definitely doesn't have to be the end all be all gaming machine (I'm hoping to build another desktop at some point for that), but I do want it to hold it's own in some regards to performance. Last but not least it needs to be semi-affordable. I really don't want to go over 2k and I'd love to be able to keep it closer to the 1,300 area.

I've done some googling and hunting and found this place. Has anyone heard of them? Their products seem to be quite loaded for the price. Also, is there anything substantially different to consider when buying from the UK? I also saw some ASUS laptops on newegg and was curious about them. I wasn't aware that ASUS made laptops, but they are apparently top sellers at newegg.

*Edit* Well I guess the UK company is out of the question. I had no idea the exchange rates were so low on the US dollar these days. Sorry, I rarely keep up with the times.

oXYnary

Try to get a manufacturer which makes their own circuitry versus just buying someone elses. Toshiba, Acer, Asus, MSI, IBM (now sold under different name - forger), and Twinhead come to mind. You can usually find more options for future upgrades versus another manufacturer who will only "support" how the laptop was initially built. So wont admit a problem with hardware even if its there original item failing versus upgrade.

Try to get one thats assembled here versus overseas (or just get a barebones). You will find more leeway with your options then.

Stay away from: Dell and HP.

Try to find one that has American support versus India. If they are sending you to India, that pretty much tells you how much they are willing to spend for after sale support for the end customer. I have just witnessed an heard too many stories about India based support. They pay them shit, and they are used to dealing with so many idiots, they they become dispassionate about helping versus getting the call over as quickly as possible. Not that its different here, but at least then you have a clearer line a management that directly ties to the company. Nothing is worse than ending one of those calls and realizing you have no other options because you don't know the chain from your customer support to end decisions of the higher ups.

I personally would buy like a Asus barebones. But Falcon Northwest make great higher end computer/laptops. http://www.falcon-nw.com/

rawkstar

my wife has a dell laptop, i have asus a8js i think the model is called.

there's nothing wrong with dells or hps, who gives a shit where support comes from? people that don't live in india and don't have an accent all of a sudden care more about your problems? I don't think so.

with that said lower end dells do have poor build quality, they're cheap, and thats also how they feel. their support isn't bad though, u can chat with a customer service guy on their website 24/7 so thats a plus.

asus isn't a bad brand at all, mine recently died but i got it back all fixed up in a couple of days, they paid for shipping etc. make sure you get a good warranty of whatever you buy laptops have a tendency to break.

some of the higher end business HPs are actually really good, some of them have awesome video cards in them as well, poop has one and i think he loves it. they are slightly more expensive, but build quality is much better.

screens below 15" are usually very bad, my 14" asus has pretty bad viewing angles.

another thing to keep in mind is they sometimes switch fn and ctrl keys in the bottom left corner, UBER ANNOYING, you'll try to press ctrl and find fn there... and no way to remap it since fn key doesn't actually have a registry string attached to it, its just a modifier.

brands to REALLY stay away from are: Falcon Northwest and VoodooPC. Those are just ridiculously overpriced glitter.

a couple of other brands you could check out: Sager, Clevo. they're both built on the same chassis, i used to have a sager and it worked like a charm, never had any problems. you can buy those from www.pctorque.com they have some fairly reasonable prices.

and here's a couple of websites you can check out to find reviews and more info:

http://www.notebookforums.com

http://www.notebookreview.com

PfhorRunner

I LOVE the Asus G1 series... Check em out, but they're pretty damn expensive.

Gmanx

I asked the very same question here on Polycount and went for the dell xps in the end. It was expensive here in the UK, but you might get a better deal in the US. I've had no problems, but I'd agree with Rawkstar that the lower end dells have a cheap build quality to keep prices low.

nacire

Thanks for all of the tips guys! I definitely liked the Asus and the Sager models as they seemed pretty decent price wise and hardware wise. I'll probably take a look at the Clevo too before it's all said and done.