Toshiba Qosmio x500 any good?

[Vaulter]

I'm looking for a good quality laptop to use for college next year, I'm going into graphic design, and am going to end up using a lot of programs at once such as the adobe creative suite programs. I would also like to do some minor gaming, such as diablo 2 =], and maybe lfd2 and cod mw2. I was looking at the toshiba qosmio, because of its core i7 and loads of ram. I dont want a mac! theyre nice, but way overpriced for thier specs.

 

[Decembermouse]

I doubt you'll need a quad-core for that stuff in a laptop. Low clocked (1.6GHz, right?) and obscenely expensive... if I were you I'd get a cheap $400 laptop. Then, with the amount left over after that $400 laptop, you could build something way faster than an i7 laptop... both machines and way more processing power for the same price. You'd have a laptop for portability, and a desktop for power. Instead of one heavy, crotch-burning laptop. Those i7 laptops are going to run very hot. The wattage on those suckers is through the roof.

When I started college in 2004, I got a Voodoo Envy M:860 which was quite expensive as a graduation gift. It was very very nice for a laptop, but after not too long, there were desktops that were way cheaper and much faster all over campus, but we'd wasted too much money on a fast laptop so I fell behind technologically; couldn't get a desktop too. I should have gotten a cheapo Dell laptop (ew... Inspiron 1100) and an upgradeable desktop.

These days you can get a 2.0GHz dual-core, a video card with 40 stream processors (Radeon 3200 or 4200), nice hard drive, plenty of RAM, for $400 if you look a bit.

And for the desktop, you can build an extremely powerful machine for $450 right now. I'll put together a Newegg shopping cart if you'd like

I just think if you bank on a 1.6GHz quad core to get you through college, it might not last you...
1) it will literally burn out, or
2) at 1.6GHz, it will end up seeming pretty slow in a few years even though it's real expensive now

 

[snarl]

Actually the i7 Quads are plenty fast, I have an i7 720QM in my Laptop and it runs about as quick as my desktop with an Overclocked Q6600 (2.95Ghz) I realize the Q6600 isn't exactly state of the art but it's still plenty fast, so is the i7 720QM