• Welcome to Overclockers Forums! Join us to reply in threads, receive reduced ads, and to customize your site experience!

Laptop recomendation

Overclockers is supported by our readers. When you click a link to make a purchase, we may earn a commission. Learn More.

jamesgig

Disabled
Joined
Jul 2, 2006
Location
Harrisburg, PA
I am heading off to college in less than 3 months and need to start getting everything together. For my laptop, I will be sticking with a windows based system as all of my software is for windows and i do not intend on repurchasing CS4. With that in mind, I do not want to spend a lot of money on a laptop, preferably under $900 as I do all of my heavy editing on my desktop (also under development) due to the storage bandwidth requirements. I want the laptop mainly for light photo/video editing on the road, music playback, internet, and video playback. I note video playback as I need to be able to play HD h.264 videos at 1920x1080 on an external hdmi television.

specs under consideration
Intel® Core™ 2 Duo P8600 (2.4GHz/1066Mhz FSB/3MB cache)
2x2gb ddr3 1066 cas7
nvidia 9400M G
320gb 7200rpm
wireless N
14.1" 1440x900

Thoughts?
 
Asus is coming out with laptops with the new nVidia GPU. Those should be able to handle hidef files with not problem at that resolution. You're looking at $800 starting price at those laptops. newegg has a few of them already.
 
I have a dell xps 1530 which I consider to be a great laptop and most certainly plays ok though the HDMI out imho, got reasonable battery life with the 9 cell battery as well imho, no idea what price you would pay though as a UK guy I talk in £ and pence :p
I would personally take more ram than a faster processor any day of the week.

T9500 (2.6ghz/800mhz) 6meg cache
1440x900 lcd
8gb of memory
160gb Intel X25 M SSD
256 mb 8600 GT Nvidia
Blue Ray Slot Loader
 
Last edited:
My MSI GT725 is very good powerful at it's price,
Specs in sig, to overclock it was as simple as pressing the turbo mode, which puts it at a 2.92ghz (with P9500) standard turbo boost, and in BIOS you can change to 24% overclock from 16% and run at 3.13Ghz with 1000Mhz DDR2 5-5-5-15 4Gb as well. GPU is a powerful HD4850, enough to play many games on high on the 1680x1050 monitor. Mine cost just under £1,100, comes with a gaming mouse and a blu-ray drive.

When transcoding at 3.13ghz temps get to around 70-74C which I think is ok for a laptop, and runs stable and fast, of course not compared to my desktop.

Here is my 3dmark06 score:

3dmark06laptop313ghz.png


It may seem to cost alot, but compared to any other similar laptop I found it was much cheaper!
 
Last edited:
A Simple Dell Latitude D620 off ebay would do you some good on a budget.
idk about the hdmi output but my dads dell almost same model has a vga port.
Just got my friend a 1.8ghz Core Duo, 1 gig ram, and a 120gb hard drive, and dvd/cd combo burner for $308 so not to bad.

2896-1.jpg

Plenty for a college kid :p
plus tryin to save ya some green

Happy findings
 
Last edited:
Back