[KyadCK]

I just saw some guys at AnandTech going on and on and on about this laptop @ around 1000/1100 dollars.

It seems to be a good mid-range laptop to use as a measuring stick.

Ultrabooks are not even in the same class as "gaming" laptops, don't ever use their prices to compare. Most of their cost comes from, well, being ultrabooks, not specs or build quality.

Who said anything about a gaming laptop? It's still around what Kara asked for except for the screen size. And if a computer has lower specs or a higher price for similar one, you'll know it's a bad deal, AKA measuring stick.

... You arent understanding me.

Ultrabooks are a class of laptop designed around weight, size, and battery life. Not any other spec. It's over $1000 without any dedicated GPU at all, and no removable HDD. Why? Because it's not even a centimeter thick at it's thickest point.

To compare an Ultrabook to any other class of laptop borders on stupid. They are not priced for the same reason. It's like saying "Here's a desktop with a 560ti for only $900, why does that laptop with just a 560m cost $1000?" No. That isn't how it works.

I like the way you took my post and turned it's meaning upside down.

I present a laptop that has pretty good value in a category even you deem to find more expensive for it's specs due to other concerns.

How in god's name would you find comparing it to any other laptop to check if it's specs are better or it's price for the same specs worse a baseless comparison?

Your analogy is the other way around. It's "If this laptop has these components and it's 1000$, why does the desktop have WORSE/SAME components and costs more?". The point is trying to see if you are getting ripped off.


Coming back to the main topic, future proofing a laptop is usually done without much concern for the graphic card. As long as what you have is good enough for the present day (graphically), it should be good enough for an "old laptop" a few years from now. If you start taking into account graphics, it's starts becoming prohibitively expensive.

I'd recommend just focusing on memory and CPU specs for this issue.

And comparing to an Ultrabook will make even the crappiest laptops around look incredible price/spec wise.

It is stupid to compare any other class of laptop to an Ultrabook for any reason. Period.

[FreeSpaceFreak]

I'm not particularly worried about it being a top of the range graphics machine in 4-5 years time (or even middle of the range). I am however worried about it running FSO so slowly in debug mode as to be useless. My current machine gets somewhere in the order of 10-15 FPS running Diaspora via the debugger (more with a debug build, but not much more). This makes it hard to play any missions and makes it completely impossible to run a second copy of the game so I can test multiplayer.

Well where's the bottleneck? The Task Manager should be able to show you whether RAM and/or CPU are nearing critical levels, and if they're not, it's probably the GPU. (Keep in mind that, depending on the amount of cores in your current pc, critical CPU levels may be 50% or 25% for single-thread applications.)

[The E]

Well where's the bottleneck? The Task Manager should be able to show you whether RAM and/or CPU are nearing critical levels, and if they're not, it's probably the GPU. (Keep in mind that, depending on the amount of cores in your current pc, critical CPU levels may be 50% or 25% for single-thread applications.)

.... Did you just ask one of SCP's lead developers if he knows where the bottlenecks in his engine are? One of the lead developers on the one team that did more than any other one to profile the engine and figure out where the bottlenecks are?

There are several reasons why debug builds are generally slower. Logging code that has to be executed, extra checks that have to be performed on everything, compiler optimizations that can't be present (compiler-optimized code being essentially unusable for debugging purposes), using the debug CRT....

All in all, FSO is almost always CPU-bound, with very few exceptions.

[karajorma]

To be fair, Swifty has done more profiling than me. But yeah, I have profiled the engine many times.

Yep, the main issue has always been the CPU, especially in debug. But it's hard to say that will still be the case in 4-5 years from now.

[FreeSpaceFreak]

.... Did you just ask one of SCP's lead developers if he knows where the bottlenecks in his engine are? One of the lead developers on the one team that did more than any other one to profile the engine and figure out where the bottlenecks are?

Well I didn't expect needing to ask for it, but there you go Now that it's established that CPU is still the bottleneck, the i7 seems like a good choice indeed. And the matte screen on that Medion should prove useful playing "dark" games like FS - on a glossy screen you'd merely see your own reflection. Unless you sit in absolute darkness, but that kills the eyes.