Not necessarily for gaming? There are a ton of low end laptops (it's fairly hard to find one in stores above $800), but there seem to be very few that offer decent graphics cards / RAM for a reasonable price. Dell XPS seems to be very good. I have one now (4 years old) which is the best pc (laptop or desktop) I've ever had. Alienware is powerful, but seems a bit over-priced, compared to the Dell XPS, and is geared towards gaming. Lenovo seems impressive, but gets ridiculously expensive when you start adding any useful components (typical model has a 320 GB hard drive (WTH is that?!?! I would like at least 750 GB). HP seems good, but I haven't seen a graphics card over 2 GB in any of their models. Most manufacturers seem to offer no more than 1 GB graphics card! Dell/Alienware is the only one I have seen offering 3 GB Nvidia cards. Macs are slightly tempting, but so expensive, and less versatile.
First of, more than 1gb of ram on your video card isn't going to achieve shit in a laptop (aside from extra power use maybe). Just look at the model numbers of the cards those are FAR more important.
Atually, I just checked a different model of Lenovo (the IdeaPad - Y series). It seems quite reasonable (on sale for $600 off, new 3rd generation intel) How is the NVIDIA GeForce GTX660M 2GB?
The Nvidia Quadro series GPU is marketed to professionals, and is promoted for cad, Adobe creative suite, and 3D modeling programs. Nvidia's webpage for it seems to suggest it is very powerful. A Lenovo Thinkpad with the Quadro 1000 M , 2nd generation intel processor, and Quadro GPU is around $2400.
Nvidia touts the cuda cores in the Quadro as an achievement, however it has just 96 parallel cuda cores, with a 28.8GB/sec memory bandwidth.
It seems to be significantly less powerful than the GeForce GTX 660 M, which is in the Lenovo Ideapad Y580, a machine that sells for $1200 with a 3rd generation intel processor, significantly more RAM and a larger hard drive.
The GTX 660 M specs state that it has 384 cuda cores, with a 64GB/sec memory bandwidth.
Not necessarily for gaming? There are a ton of low end laptops (it's fairly hard to find one in stores above $800), but there seem to be very few that offer decent graphics cards / RAM for a reasonable price. Dell XPS seems to be very good. I have one now (4 years old) which is the best pc (laptop or desktop) I've ever had. Alienware is powerful, but seems a bit over-priced, compared to the Dell XPS, and is geared towards gaming. Lenovo seems impressive, but gets ridiculously expensive when you start adding any useful components (typical model has a 320 GB hard drive (WTH is that?!?! I would like at least 750 GB). HP seems good, but I haven't seen a graphics card over 2 GB in any of their models. Most manufacturers seem to offer no more than 1 GB graphics card! Dell/Alienware is the only one I have seen offering 3 GB Nvidia cards. Macs are slightly tempting, but so expensive, and less versatile.
@soulfulsoul:
First of, more than 1gb of ram on your video card isn't going to achieve shit in a laptop (aside from extra power use maybe). Just look at the model numbers of the cards those are FAR more important.
Really?! Why? How is 3 times the RAM not useful?
Atually, I just checked a different model of Lenovo (the IdeaPad - Y series). It seems quite reasonable (on sale for $600 off, new 3rd generation intel) How is the NVIDIA GeForce GTX660M 2GB?
Hmmm...
Now I'm confused....
The Nvidia Quadro series GPU is marketed to professionals, and is promoted for cad, Adobe creative suite, and 3D modeling programs. Nvidia's webpage for it seems to suggest it is very powerful. A Lenovo Thinkpad with the Quadro 1000 M , 2nd generation intel processor, and Quadro GPU is around $2400.
Nvidia touts the cuda cores in the Quadro as an achievement, however it has just 96 parallel cuda cores, with a 28.8GB/sec memory bandwidth.
It seems to be significantly less powerful than the GeForce GTX 660 M, which is in the Lenovo Ideapad Y580, a machine that sells for $1200 with a 3rd generation intel processor, significantly more RAM and a larger hard drive.
The GTX 660 M specs state that it has 384 cuda cores, with a 64GB/sec memory bandwidth.
Am I missing something?
Thanks for your help
@soulfulsoul: The Quadro/FirePro lines are designed for CAD and other professional applications.
Simply googling "quadro vs geforce" will yield a lot of threads where people have asked the same question.