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Bob Morales posted:The regular 13" MacBook Pro has a really nice screen (as does the 15"), it's a bit glossy Understatement of the century. Bang on about the T430 though, wish there was a proper display upgrade available. Also that BF3 chart above puts laptop gaming into perspective given a desktop GT 640 is an ~$80 card
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Jun 3, 2013 02:16
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micron posted:
What's your actual usage? How often are you at your desk vs travelling? When you travel how do you do it? Personally I'm using a 2560p (which is only a dual core but that's plenty for most tasks) + docking station + dual monitors. This combination gives a decent experience when I'm at my desk but is sufficiently small and compact to travel with while having great battery life. The serious downside is using the laptop display is somewhat painful, its a 1366x768 panel and not a good one either.
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Jun 4, 2013 23:11
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InstantInfidel posted:Thinkpad thermals are really good on every model. They move all of the heat to a vent that disposes of it inobtrusuvely. You'll have no problems. I've been very impressed with my T430s with the dedicated GPU - copes with extended gaming sessions just fine and while the exhaust gets hot the actual casing doesn't really heat up at all.
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Jun 5, 2013 06:04
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Duck and Cover posted:I find the Synaptics trackpads just as good as Apples perhaps I'm just sucker for chiral scroll. Although I've only used one for all I know they have cheaper shittier ones. I have to admit I don't like the Apple trackpads much either - sure the gestures work great but actual finger tracking seems 'off' compared to my Windows machines and the maximum pointer speed is too slow for me.
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Jun 9, 2013 07:27
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Cream_Filling posted:There are very few durable laptops that don't have some form of positive closure for the lid. Annoyingly HP seems to be removing the latch from their EliteBooks - means they don't feel anywhere near as durable
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Jun 10, 2013 06:57
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sports posted:Panasonic Toughbooks are way too overpriced and honestly not very smart buys when Apple product surpasses their quality while being 60% of their cost. Please stop mentioning Panasonic Toughbook product lines when mentioning competitors to Apple, these laptops are rarely found in the US and aren't exactly machines of ownership. Apple products aren't rugged at all - not even compared to a Thinkpads/Elitebook let alone a Toughbook. As for quality it depends on how you define it - by some definitions Apple gear is great by others its terrible.
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Jun 11, 2013 00:48
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Boner Slam posted:Here is a German review of the new T431s Hmmm while battery is much better than the T430s its still not enough - they're definitely falling behind the competition there :/
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Jun 12, 2013 10:59
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Hadlock posted:My grandmother has a 15" laptop. She uses it about an hour a week to write email. The rest of the time it lives closed leaned up against the couch in the living room. She's from a different era, my grandfather has a full office with a computer, while her "sewing room" has no flat surface to put a computer My grandmother has a desktop in her sewing room still. Actually its well past time for replacement, next time around I think it will be a laptop (may as well keep the 19" 1280x1024 external monitor though - talk about huge text)
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Jun 15, 2013 02:21
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How much of a hurry are you in? I don't know about Australia but the NZ Lenovo site has done some pretty good deals over the past year so it might be worth keeping an eye on My T430s with Nvidia graphics, the 1600x900 display, backlit keyboard, Intel wifi and a 128GB Samsung 830 was just over $1000NZD last year whereas that combo is currently $1770NZD
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Jun 19, 2013 08:10
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Bob Morales posted:Smaller is better. Get the X230! The T430S is nice but the X230 is reeeally small. Remember you can plug an 11 or 12 inch laptop into a 22" monitor when you get back to your room/desk. Also battery life is going to be much better on the X230. My T430s is fairly disappointing in that regard.
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Jun 19, 2013 20:40
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Bob Morales posted:Do you have the 9 cell battery (or whatever the big one that sticks out the back is) The 6 cell is the biggest available option on the 's' - the battery sits beneath the palm rest so there isn't anywhere for a bigger battery to protrude from. There is an ultrabay battery available but its expensive and only quiet low capacity (plus I'm thinking of sticking a big hard disk in the bay)
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Jun 20, 2013 00:17
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movax posted:Yeah, wait for Haswell. My new job's offering either a rMBP or a T430s and I think the T430s is the better choice for engineering work though the rMBP certainly is sexy. I'd say the X240 or T440 would be the way to go when they finally launch. Yeah. I've actually found the battery life on my T430s to be fairly bad - its like 4 hours of light usage with the 6 cell. Aside from that and the display its a good little system but it seems a little unfair to offer it alongside a rMBP given its somewhere under half the purchase price of a base 13" rMBP
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Jul 4, 2013 07:44
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The NVS5200/5400 seem fine as far as driver support goes - they're basically just a 600 series and have no issues using the normal Nvidia drivers. Then again the NVS5200 isn't much faster than an HD4000 for gaming so I'm not sure its worth paying for
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Jul 6, 2013 08:01
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I'd either wait for the new one or grab a Haswell Air - the battery improvements are just too good to pass up (also better integrated graphics can only help on the retina model)
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Jul 6, 2013 08:56
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sigma 6 posted:Hopefully with something better than the Quadro K2000. I'm not sure if there is anything better (for CAD purposes at least) - the K3000/4000/5000 require quite a lot more power. Then again who knows what the situation will be by the next W530 refresh - I doubt its going to happen anytime soon (really it isn't going to help a full sized laptop anywhere near as much as it does on an ultrabook)
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Jul 6, 2013 23:56
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FM posted:1366x768 is pretty good for me. That's a mistake even without mentioning Indesign and Photoshop in the same post
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Jul 7, 2013 03:24
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Sendo posted:You can get a 13" Haswell MBA with an i7, 8GB RAM and a 512GB SSD and still come out ahead of the ATIV Plus (assuming that price is correct) by a decent margin, even the top of the line Vaio Pro is below that price and the top configuration Dell XPS 13 when it gets it's Haswell refresh would be as well. Not sure why you'd compare it to an Air instead of the retina Pro Sendo posted:They used the screen for it's far lower latency which for a gaming laptop makes a lot of sense. You still need to see what the hell is going on, and if the panel is as bad as stated then that is going to be an issue (my own laptop suffers from the same no correct viewing angle problem)
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Jul 8, 2013 09:13
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Sendo posted:The rMBP isn't Haswell and the Samsung has the same specs as the base model MBA. When the rMBP does get a refresh it won't be using one of those 15w TPD i5's that the MBA and ATIV Plus are using, it will more than likely use the same 28w i5 with GT3 that the Zenbook Infinity is using. As far as I'm concerned the main draw of the rMBP is the 'r' part, not the full power CPU. Also look at UK Apple prices http://i.imgur.com/az7pN5i.png
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Jul 8, 2013 09:41
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The X1 Carbon doesn't have a glossy screen though. Also pretty sure you're dead wrong about durability of it vs the MBA.
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Jul 11, 2013 00:19
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Just because there is a discrete GPU there doesn't mean you have to use it - on the Nvidia side at least switching works seamlessly.
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Jul 13, 2013 03:18
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Not sure why you'd want to turn the DGPU off - just choose which to use on a per app basis in the Nvidia control panel. It really is that simple.
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Jul 13, 2013 07:24
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Its not really the same thing - the T440s will have a low power processor and has a fairly small built in battery (plus another small add on battery) whereas the T430 has a full strength CPU and a bunch of different battery options.
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Jul 15, 2013 10:47
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Revol posted:I have never seen an option inside the control panel to disable Optimus. There is an option to select a 'Prefered graphics processor', but I don't believe that would overrule the specific application settings. In the 'Global' tab you get three settings, auto select, nvidia and integrated. If you set global to integrated then it will set every program to integrated as well, you can then override them individually if you want from the 'Program settings' tab.
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Jul 15, 2013 20:19
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enahs posted:
I have a T430s which is pretty similarly specced so here's my impression Screen: Pretty noticeable compared to most desktop monitors I've used, especially on darker colours (which suffer a huge amount of shift even if you only tilt the screen slightly) Video card: Mine only has the NVS5200M but even that is a bit of a step up from the HD4000 in most games. I've noticed it does ramp the fans up a bit, but nothing seems to get unduly hot. I'd strongly consider getting a bigger battery - whether or no its more economical to do this at order time or jut buying the 9-cell afterwards depends on what Lenovo is charging for the upgrade. I'd also consider getting an SSD - this can replace the hard disk, or you can get an MSATA model to install alongside the disk.
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Jul 20, 2013 06:14
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QuarkJets posted:I like to think of integrated graphics as keeping your laptop relevant for the years after games have moved beyond its hardware capabilities. A laptop with an obsolete GPU has all of the problems of a discrete GPU with none of the benefits, whereas an older integrated graphics laptop is still going to be a great coding and screwing around laptop. So the question is whether you're going to want to use this laptop after its GPU has become obsolete in 12-18 months. As I see it Optimus makes this a moot point - just switch the dGPU off if it becomes irrelevant (and really it should have been off for that sort of usage all along) There also isn't always a size/weight penalty in a lot of cases - try picking up a T430 with the dGPU and one without and see if you can tell the difference.
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Jul 21, 2013 00:52
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InstantInfidel posted:No, we're talking about 5000. The graph doesn't include it, but it's still better than quite a few dGPUs. I thought it was roughly the same as a 630M?
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Jul 21, 2013 02:07
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shrughes posted:I've also heard of reasonable prices for the MBA 13 in New Zealand. It was a bit less than the U.S. price after the exchange rate. I'm not sure what Thinkpads cost there, though. They're all over the place. I got a killer deal on my T430s last year (high res screen, backlit keyboard, SSD etc for around $1000NZ) but they seem really pricey at the moment - admittedly not as bad as Australia. The problem with Apple gear in New Zealand is their after sales support is appalling - there aren't any proper Apple stores here so it isn't like other countries at all.
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Jul 24, 2013 04:15
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Its vastly better at being a laptop - that being portability, battery life and durability. It will also feel a fair bit snappier in day to day usage because the SSD makes way more of a difference there than a quad core CPU and 16GB of RAM
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Jul 24, 2013 06:34
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The i5 is $1424AUD - still missing the SSD though. I don't think dual core i7s are worth it in general, even at the $180 premium on the MBA
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Jul 24, 2013 08:38
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Its still unlikely to be worthwhile - if you need to do any actual heavy lifting then the MBA isn't the right system to start with, better off with something with a full voltage CPU that can get rid of heat better
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Jul 24, 2013 09:14
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Windows updates. Even Windows 8 can't do its quick boot thing if it needs to install updates.
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Jul 25, 2013 05:53
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DrDork posted:e; the screen would draw the same power at 3200x1800 as 1600x900, since by far the biggest factor in screen power use is the backlight. The need to duplicate pixels to correct the resolution is negligible by contrast. This is why when you want to extent your battery life, you turn the screen brightness--not resolution--down. Don't you need more backlight to light up a denser screen? Pretty sure that was the cited reason for the iPad Retina getting a giant (comparatively) battery to the iPad 2
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Jul 27, 2013 23:38
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Goober Peas posted:
And this is why we have docking stations on proper laptops
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Jul 28, 2013 00:17
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csidle posted:Does anyone have experience with laptops that only have 128 gigs of SSD space and nothing else? I'm helping my sister pick out a computer for university, and one of the candidates is a Lenovo that has but 128 gigs of SSD. At first I figured it wasn't enough to use for a primary computer, but now I'm wondering if it might be alright if she makes good use of an external hard drive for storage. She's got a 1tb external drive that she has a bunch of stuff on, where she could store what doesn't need to be on the computer all the time. Besides school, she's also going to use the computer for photoshop and toying around with photography, which is another concern of mine. I don't know if photoshop files are gonna take up too much space for 128 gigs. So the question is if 128 gigabytes is enough for school stuff, a little bit of photoshop and photos, and music, provided that an external hard drive of 1 tb is used for storage? One thing to note is you may not get the whole space available anyway - my T430s has a 128GB SSD but only 109GB is available (the rest is a dedicated hibernation partition) Anyway I'm coping just fine, the only downside is I can only have one or two games installed at a time.
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Jul 30, 2013 20:21
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Hadlock posted:3x3 ultimate-n owns bones, at $25 upgrade it's probably the single most useful upgrade you can get on any laptop, period. If you can't get online, about 90% of your laptop's usefulness drops off a cliff. Dollar for dollar it's invaluable. You can access gmail just as fast on an i3 vs an i5, but if you can't connect to the wifi at the airport you can't read your email. The Advance N card with the 2x2 antenna is far from bad - it still an order of magnitude better than a Macbook
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Aug 7, 2013 09:31
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kbar posted:Weird, it's incredibly rare that I see this opinion. Even if you blast OS X off of the hardware altogether and just run Windows on it (hell, Lifehacker's editor-in-chief does just that) it only takes a week or so to get accustomed to the odd key positioning. There is also the sub-par wifi reception and heat issues the Air has to consider. Not to mention that glossy display (apparently less so the an MBP but that's not saying much). It's a shame because the battery life and packaging are so good
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Aug 11, 2013 07:59
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arisu posted:That's a little obnoxious. The laptop needs to fit the needs of the user. What good does something with 11 hours battery life when I don't come anywhere near close to needing that amount? Why not pick up something that'll fit my lifestyle better? sports is trolling - simple as that Not that I think gaming laptops are a good idea for most people, but then nor is the MBA necessarily the right choice
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Aug 16, 2013 06:49
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Cream_Filling posted:Trying to get your job to pay for a laptop so you can play computer games on it at home does sound kind of weird to me, though. Yeah its a foreign concept to me too. Then again so is getting to choose your own laptop at all - everywhere I've worked at the choice you get is between a 12.5 or 14" Elitebook or Thinkpad (depending on who the preferred supplier is)
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Aug 16, 2013 07:23
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The problem with those Asus models is the keyboards are really bad even considering how cheap they are
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Aug 23, 2013 06:56
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On older Sony models you couldn't always use the generic drivers
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Aug 25, 2013 04:03
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