College / Gaming laptop. Up to €1100

hare05

I'm looking to buy a good laptop for college use, gaming, and running VMs on as part of my college course.

My last one was an i7 Dell Studio I bought at Christmas. It ran so hot it nearly melted. So that got returned, and I'm gonna stay away from quad cores.

What I'm looking for:

-Good monitor. HP envy, mac, and dell xps 16 all have good screens, anything else on the market worth comparing?

-Good graphics: 4570 and upwards

-Good battery life: 3 hours +

-7200rpm HDD if possible

-Good build quality: I'm considering macs or hp envy, even at the extra cost. How do other manufacturers compare with the build quality / support of those two?

-i3 or i5 processor, no i7s. How do ULV processors compare in games?

-Bluetooth, 802.11n if possible

-Screen size anything between 13" and 15" (Any bigger won't fit in the bags I bought for the dell)

-Portable and as light as possible.

-If it has media keys, have them separate from the Fn keys (Very annoying with the Dell, keys reverted to default settings every time the battery was removed. A real pain in games.)

So, there's my list. Is there anything Sony, Acer, Asus, Toshiba or Packard-Bell have that hits some of these points?

TheAmateur

Someone posted this the other day, been looking at it myself: http://www.kobaltcomputers.co.uk/gs660_specifications.php
Only problem for you might be the 15.6" screen...

hare05

TheAmateur wrote: »

Someone posted this the other day, been looking at it myself: http://www.kobaltcomputers.co.uk/gs660_specifications.php
Only problem for you might be the 15.6" screen...

The dell had a 15.6, 16:9 (It was a bitch to fit in bags) so I think that'll be ok. LED screen seems good, and I've been looking at their basic gaming laptop (5870? 1920 1080? LED screen? Hell yes.). Only problem right now is the price, lol. Thanks for the find!

Voodu Child

If you want to play the odd game on it, get something with a better GPU than ATI 4570. Thats pretty much low-end nowadays, or close enough. That Kobalt has the 5470 which is no better tbh, still low end.

Go for something like a HD5650, its signficantly faster, and can still be got in laptops for under a grand.

hare05

Voodu Child wrote: »

If you want to play the odd game on it, get something with a better GPU than ATI 4570. Thats pretty much low-end nowadays, or close enough. That Kobalt has the 5470 which is no better tbh, still low end.

Go for something like a HD5650, its signficantly faster, and can still be got in laptops for under a grand.

I know that, but from my experiences with my previous Dell, I know that the 4570 can play the games I want, so I set it as a minimum standard. 5650 / 5830 are what I want lol

TheAmateur

Well, if anyone understands German, these guys seem to have some cool stuff:
http://www.deviltech.de/
I put in an Irish address and it didn't seem to have a problem with it, was charging me €50 to ship with UPS, but even so was working out at €927 for the 15.6" "Fire DTX" model with Windows 7 home premuim, a Core i5 520M, Radeon HD 5650, 4GB of DDR3 Ram, 250GB 7200RPM hard drive.
This any good?

hare05

TheAmateur wrote: »

Well, if anyone understands German, these guys seem to have some cool stuff:
http://www.deviltech.de/
I put in an Irish address and it didn't seem to have a problem with it, was charging me €50 to ship with UPS, but even so was working out at €927 for the 15.6" "Fire DTX" model with Windows 7 home premuim, a Core i5 520M, Radeon HD 5650, 4GB of DDR3 Ram, 250GB 7200RPM hard drive.
This any good?

Looks pretty good. 952 +pnp seems to have most of what I want, but I've seen some bad reviews with regards to the build quality.