What to choose - Go for Screen Res or the SSD

Reati

Buying new laptop, not sure which is the better option. Both priced nearly same, coming in around 1030euro mark.

Main thing for me when i started the search was screen size/resolution. I'm not a hardcore gamer so don't really mind a small lack of power in the GPU but I do heavy photo processing and programming so needs to be able to handle those.

Narrowed down to this system:

Intel® Core™ i7-2670QM processor (2.20GHz)
3GB GDDR3 RAM NVIDIA® GeForce® GT 555M Graphics Card
8192MB 1333MHz Dual Channel DDR3 SDRAM
1TB (Website says 5,400rpm but sales quote says 7,200rpm) Serial ATA Dual HDD (2*500GB)
17.3" Anti-Glare (1920x1080)
9-cell 90Whr Lithium Ion battery

or this system:

Intel® Core™ i7-2670QM processor (2.20GHz)
1536 MB GDDR5 RAM NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX560M Graphic Card
750GB (7,200rpm) Serial ATA HHD
120GB SSD
8192MB 1333MHz Dual Channel DDR3 SDRAM
15.6" Anti-Glare (1366 x 768)
9-cell 90Whr Lithium Ion battery

everything else is on par - Bluetooth 3.0, USB 3.0 etc

Now, I'm leaning towards the second system - The only tickler for me is I wanted a nice High Res screen. I currently have a 16" 1600 * 900. Will 1366*768 be the horrible drop I fear it is?

Would love to hear everyones opinion.

Torqay

Why not take the first one, replace one of the two hard drives with an SSD (decent 120 GB drives sell from 130 Euro)? As a bonus you'll have a nice 500 GB HDD that you can use as an external drive in a nice caddy.

A decent dislay is a blessing for photo editing, you don't want a small screen with only 1366x768.

cookie1977

If youcanget hold of the 555nvidia card with 1.5GB ram then do as there's little or no difference between it and the card with 3GB's apart from the extra cost.

_AVALANCHE_

Reati wrote: »

Intel® Core™ i7-2670QM processor (2.20GHz)
3GB GDDR3 RAM NVIDIA® GeForce® GT 555M Graphics Card
8192MB 1333MHz Dual Channel DDR3 SDRAM
1TB (Website says 5,400rpm but sales quote says 7,200rpm) Serial ATA Dual HDD (2*500GB)
17.3" Anti-Glare (1920x1080)
9-cell 90Whr Lithium Ion battery

or this system:

Intel® Core™ i7-2670QM processor (2.20GHz)
1536 MB GDDR5 RAM NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX560M Graphic Card
750GB (7,200rpm) Serial ATA HHD
120GB SSD
8192MB 1333MHz Dual Channel DDR3 SDRAM
15.6" Anti-Glare (1366 x 768)
9-cell 90Whr Lithium Ion battery

"but sales quote says 7,200rpm"<--->What this mean?

First one is Dell, where's the second one coming from?

Torqay wrote: »

Why not take the first one, replace one of the two hard drives with an SSD (decent 120 GB drives sell from 130 Euro)? As a bonus you'll have a nice 500 GB HDD that you can use as an external drive in a nice caddy.

A decent dislay is a blessing for photo editing, you don't want a small screen with only 1366x768.

Do this.

It's one HDD on 2 platters...yes? Take out the DVD drive and get an SSD and stick it in their.

I can't recommend one (caddy) but I'm sure someone can.

Torqay

_AVALANCHE_ wrote: »

First one is Dell

Yea, I have a feeling we're talking about a Dell XPS 17 (L702x)

_AVALANCHE_ wrote: »

It's one HDD on 2 platters...yes? Take out the DVD drive and get an SSD and stick it in their.

Nah, even easier.

cookie1977

If this is an alienware read elsewhere that sometimes the included dvd drive is a slim one which can then cause problems with swapping it out for an ssd. I'll try find a link as I know this is a problem for the m14x models. Not sure about the 17 inch ones.

_AVALANCHE_

^^^What's going on there?:o

I'd follow it back but someone used imgur

Torqay

cookie1977 wrote: »

If this is an alienware read elsewhere that sometimes the included dvd drive is a slim one which can then cause problems with swapping it out for an ssd. I'll try find a link as I know this is a problem for the m14x models. Not sure about the 17 inch ones.

We're certainly not talking about a 14" Alienware here. The XPS has two HDD bays, just replace the first HDD with an aftermarket SSD and be done with it.

Requires the OS to be reinstalled though, as they come in RAID0 by default, IIRC, you can't just clone the first drive and get on with it. Best way to get rid of the bloat anyway.

cookie1977

Hmm. I think I know it's not a 14 inch model hence my post re 17 inch. And we can't be 100% sure if theop is talking about an xps here either.

Torqay

cookie1977 wrote: »

Hmm. I think I know it's not a 14 inch model hence my post re 17 inch. And we can't be 100% sure if theop is talking about an xps here either.

No, we can't but read the specs here, they do look very familiar.

cookie1977

And to the alienware 17 to
http://www.dell.com/ie/p/alienware-laptops#!facets=93410~0~1450395&p=1

Torqay

cookie1977 wrote: »

And to the alienware 17 to
http://www.dell.com/ie/p/alienware-laptops#!facets=93410~0~1450395&p=1

No, the 17" Alienware have a HD 6990M, no way, they'd stick a GT 555M in a high end gaming laptop.

cookie1977

I'll give you that one.

Reati

_AVALANCHE_ wrote: »

"but sales quote says 7,200rpm"<--->What this mean?

On the Dell website it states the 1TB is 5400 RPM but when I talked to a sale adviser to get a better deal, he stated that the drives are 7200RPM drives.

Those who said Dell XPS 17 are correct. The second one is something a mate found for me. Not sure which site though he just sent the specs.

I'm good with a re-install(most likely to be sticking Win8 preview on it for app development).

The big question for I'd love help on here -

How big of a difference does a SSD make to normal use?
How big is the difference in the GPUs performance?

_AVALANCHE_

Reati wrote: »

The big question for I'd love help on here -

How big of a difference does a SSD make to normal use?

Their's loads of youtube vids that you can look at in realtime where they're compared to 7200rpm side by side, this may be a good one (I'm stuck using mobile broadband today so can't watch them to check)

Double click vid to go to youtube, loads their down the side.

Reati wrote: »

How big is the difference in the GPUs performance?

30fps (frames per second) is the magic number, if it's above that you can play a game at a decent quality level, scrool down for game benchmarks

http://www.notebookcheck.net/NVIDIA-GeForce-GTX-560M.48313.0.html
http://www.notebookcheck.net/NVIDIA-GeForce-GT-555M.41933.0.html

Same as for the SSD, loads of vids for most cards playing games on youtube.

Reati

Awesome. Thanks for your help.

Think I'll go for the XPS 17 and stick this url]http://www.komplett.ie/Komplett/product/ssd/20087741/corsair_force_3_120gb_2_5_sata_600/details.aspx[/url into one of the HHD drives if I get the urge! I have a case for the extra drive from an external that died last month.

Is there anything special I need to do once I get the SSD and do the re-install onto it?

Torqay

Reati wrote: »

Is there anything special I need to do once I get the SSD and do the re-install onto it?

There certainly is: disabling hibernation, doing away with system restore and file indexing, a whole rake of NTFS filesystem tweaks, etc.

Probably covered already in other threads.

Torqay

If you have two 7k2 drives in that laptop, they'll suck the battery dry in no time. If you planning on replacing one with a SSD, you might as well save the money and stick to the original 5k4 drives.

_AVALANCHE_

Reati wrote: »

Awesome. Thanks for your help.

Think I'll go for the XPS 17 and stick this URL]http://www.komplett.ie/Komplett/product/ssd/20087741/corsair_force_3_120gb_2_5_sata_600/details.aspx[/URL into one of the HHD drives if I get the urge! I have a case for the extra drive from an external that died last month.

Is there anything special I need to do once I get the SSD and do the re-install onto it?

Torqay/someone else be more up to date to answer that than me.

Good guide here but it wouldn't be all relevant.

I don't think their's any need for turning off/moving pagefiles, system restore, hibernation instead of sleep and all that on the new SSDs.

_AVALANCHE_

Torqay wrote: »

There certainly is: disabling hibernation, doing away with system restore and file indexing, a whole rake of NTFS filesystem tweaks, etc.

Probably covered already in other threads.

Are the new SSDs not capable of x millions of read/writes that would mean the psu or motherboard would give up long before they would?

_AVALANCHE_

Torqay wrote: »

If you have two 7k2 drives in that laptop, they'll suck the battery dry in no time. If you planning on replacing one with a SSD, you might as well save the money and stick to the original 5k4 drives.

7k does the job faster and so stops using power quicker than 5.;)

_AVALANCHE_

_AVALANCHE_ wrote: »

I don't think their's any need for turning off/moving pagefiles, system restore, hibernation instead of sleep and all that on the new SSDs.

Scratch this if using a 64GB or smaller drive as you save a load of space.

Torqay

_AVALANCHE_ wrote: »

7k does the job faster and so stops using power quicker than 5.;)

If "the job" is just shoving around data then the answer is yes, but RPMs alone translate into better performance, data transfer rate is not everything (unless you're big time into video processing). Access time, burst rates, cache memory are equally if not more important for hard drive performance. So, just because it says somewhere 7,200 RPM it shouldn't be a sales argument. Find out make and model and then compare the benchmarks.

cookie1977

I'd agree with torqay. The 5400 drive is fine. The 7200 will generate more heat and suck the battery power for little or no speed difference.