Looking for a gaming rig with Vpro and VT-d

[thx1128]

I am looking for a new laptop and I was completly surprised that the current "major" brands are junk. For all the hype, Alienware/XPS and Envy/DV6 are using the middle of the road chipset and apparently whatever CPUs Intel tells them to. It turns into a you can't have both vPro/VT-d *and* a decent gaming video card dilemma.

On a different note, HP used to be premier quality. No more. I had to return a HP due to a stuck pixel. You'd think that they would check for that sort of thing before it left China. Their 460W desktop power supply upgrade is actually a 415 Watt power supply... Ohhh I see it "consumes" 460 Watts.

The only "gamer" quality laptops I see available in the US are Sager/MSI/Asus. What other options are there for a i5/i7 vPro/VT-d laptop with a decent graphics card and eSATA and two SATA revision 3.0 (SATA 6 Gbit/s) drive bays?

 

[jrocks84]

The only differentiator between chipsets nowadays is their features. Take for instance the HM67 vs the HM65 chipsets, the only differentiator is 2 USB 2.0 ports. I'm fairly certain that those are the only chipsets which are used in consumer laptops. For business laptops, there's QM67 and that only adds vPro and AMT. I can see the use of vPro, but VT-d is useless on a gaming laptop. Are you really going to be running multiple virtual machines that need direct hardware access on a bare-metal hypervisor on a gaming laptop?

As for your complaints about HP, those issues you had are really just the normal crap you get from for all manufacturers give for their consumer products nowadays.

If that wasn't enough to convince you to not need vPro or VT-d, well you should look the way of HP Elitebook Mobile Workstations, the Lenovo Thinkpad W series, or the Dell Precision Mobile Workstations. They are the only laptops I know of that have decent graphics cards along with those features. They also happen to be business laptops with great build quality and customer service for them won't jerk you around as much as with consumer ones.

 

[fire400]

http://sagernotebook.com/
gaming notebook alternative

clevo is a good option as well.

http://www.laptopmag.com/mobile-life/best-brands-overall-verdict-2011.aspx
well, in your opinion, msi is great. but according to laptopmag, they suck now.

and as far as business notebooks go: 1) workstations, aren't entirely for gaming. 2) business mobility isn't necessarily for gaming. 3) just because business models are priced over 1K USD, it doesn't mean they're going to perform any better than enthusiast notebooks.

concerning your philosophy of PC gamer laptops, op; businesses generally claim that company laptops are outdated at the seventh month, from the day of purchase, -or- the day it was first released from the original cloning company manufacturer. gamers alike, should have a similar philosophy, can't get too comfortable with a forward-moving technology market with a single purchase.

buy something, enjoy, sell it, buy something else, enjoy, and repeat.