are there any REALLY well specced laptops with a slim form factor?

vibe666

okay, so my requirements are:

high end i7 CPU, pref. skylake
32GB RAM
1TB SSD, or *possibly* 256GB SSD and an additional 1TB hybrid disk if it doesn't bulk it up too much, or possibly an external 1TB USB3 SSD instead.
preferably decent mobile graphics, but not as essential as the other specs
slim, light & portable

screen size not that important, as long as the resolution and screen themselves are decent, but 13-15" max I would say for portability purposes.

If I can't find anything that fits the bill, I may just relinquish some performance in favour of portability and wait and grab the 14" version of the Surface Pro 4 when it comes out in a couple of weeks.

I'm wondering if there's any ultrabooks that would fit the bill and still have decent battery life?

I'll be running a nested ESXi cluster on it with all the bells and whistles for testing/demo purposes, so yes I will need all that RAM, and 32GB is pretty much going to be the absolute bare minimum for what I'm going to need to do with it!

It also needs to be as portable as possible as I'll be travelling with it for work and I don't need any extra bulk that can be avoided, hence considering the Surface Pro 4.

at the moment I have a dell i5 with 16gb of ram and a 256gb ssd and a 2tb usb3 external disk and it's just not up to the task, so I need an upgrade.

Lu Tze

Never seen a laptop come configured with 32GB of ram. Have a look at PCSpecialist website, they have a number of 13" and 14" laptops, lots of configurations available including the 4th and 5th gen quad core intel processors, up to 1-2TB SSD, full hd IPS screens as options. No option beyond 16GB of ram though. There are 16GB so-dimms available though so you could send an email to enquire if the laptop motherboard supports them in which case you could order with the cheapest ram option and replace yourself with 2 x 16GB.

ED E

It doesnt exist.

Get a good 4G dongle, use RDP to do work remotely on a machine designed for such workloads and stop trying to fit a compute cluster in your pocket.

For Forks Sake

ED E wrote: »

It doesnt exist.

Get a good 4G dongle, use RDP to do work remotely on a machine designed for such workloads and stop trying to fit a compute cluster in your pocket.

HP Omen is slim, 15" and has i7 plus decent graphics but think it can only be configured to 16gb ram.

ED E

vibe666 wrote: »

and 32GB is pretty much going to be the absolute bare minimum for what I'm going to need to do with it!

For Forks Sake wrote: »

HP Omen is slim, 15" and has i7 plus decent graphics but think it can only be configured to 16gb ram.

So yeah

K.O.Kiki

I thought Dell had a Precision workstation with 32Gb RAM but it seems to have been discontinued.

Only i7/32Gb RAM laptops seem to be 17" gaming monstrosities.

coldfire1x

I have a Dell Precisoin 4800, i7-4930MX with 32gb RAM, 512gb SSD, Screen resolution 3200 x 1800, 15.6"

It's a bit on the heavier side, dont think you can fit these into a ultra slim laptop.

So they do exist

circadian

I'd build a pc/server for virtualisation and use a laptop/vpn to connect as a laptop will present scaling issues, especially running an ESXi hypervisor.

Explosive_Cornflake

As other have said, smaller laptop and host a server somewhere.
SSH/RDP/ICA into it then.

There's a total of 12 laptops with 32GB RAM on here

unkel

ED E wrote: »

It doesnt exist.

+1

AFAIK there aren't even any single 16GB 288pin DDR4 dimms yet for PCs

never even mind 16GB SO dimms for laptops...

vibe666

sorry, I missed the notification for the thread and didn't spot the replies.

I should probably elaborate on the whole "travelling for work" thing, I already have a lab at home that i'm currently in the process of rebuilding, but i'm not talking about nipping to cork for a few days, I'm currently living in perth and travelling for work means flying out 2 hours into the arse end of nowhere in the outback for 3 weeks at a time where even basic mobile coverage is spotty at best, and 4G is a totally alien concept, so I need to be able to be totally self contained.

These are places where the main radio station is still broadcasting on AM as FM doesn't have enough range to be useful, and the primary form of communication is still CB radios due to the lack of mobile coverage.

anyway, it turns out that eurocom do several laptops available with up to 32gb RAM (they have 4 ram slots) and even a few with xeon cpu's, although most of them aren't *that* portable, there's still a few options that might still fit the bill.

http://www.eurocom.com/

vibe666

ooh, another update, seems like lenovo have "done the needful" and provided us with workstation laptops with up to 64GB of RAM, Quadra gfx and Xeon CPU's!

http://news.lenovo.com/news+releases/lenovo-thinkpad-p50-p70.htm