Maximum PC

hey guys I'm new here and have been reading the magazine for awhile learning a bit about computers and it gave me a few ideas which i will post in this thread instead of making one for each idea.

A. Laptop
been looking around for a laptop for moderate gaming(mostly ftp games and maybe WoW on low to mid settings) with a decent battery life, screen size doesn't matter and my budget is up to 800 bucks the cheaper the better but around 800 is nice

I found this one and was wondering how good it was Acer Aspire AS5750G-6496 Notebook



B. Desktop

in the April issue i saw a nice build for about $1000 but i wanted to modify it slightly so i could fit a i5 2500k in it.

Also with this build i want to be able to play games like WoW on high settings while being able to run programs like Mat lab smoothly

here are the specs

case: CM 690 II Advanced

PSU: Antec TruePower New TP-750

Motherboard: ASUS P8P67 PRO

GPU: ASUS Radeon HD 6850

CPU: Intel Core i5-2500K

Cooler: COOLER MASTER Hyper 212

RAM: CORSAIR Vengeance 16GB

Optical: LITE-ON iHAS424-98

Hard drive: Western Digital Caviar Black 1TB

Monitor: Samsung 27" P2770HD


well that's all for now and i am willing to take all suggestions

and thanks again!

~Myselfmetal

Nothing wrong with the laptop you picked out, although the tasks you detailed can be performed on a $400 12" AMD Fusion netbook these days.

I picked up one of these as my main monitor....

http://cgi.ebay.com/Samsung-27-P2770HD- ... 20ba056436

27" baby. It's a refurb, but I've never had many issues with refurbs. Whatever was going to break already did and got fixed. You sure as hell can't beat the price to performance ratio, and it's a TV!

thanks for the response, sounds like a great monitor.

as for the desktop i was debating whether or not to use water cooling

Nothing wrong with water cooling if you're planning on overclocking. You can either go the all in one route i.e. the Corsair H series, or you can customize your own loop. If you're looking for custom parts I would recommend xoxide.com, crazypc.com, or performance-pcs.com.

On a side note, unless you plan on running a lot of software in a virtual environment, you might consider halving your RAM and putting the extra $ toward an even better video card. Even with the abuse I put my machine through I've never seen it allocate more than 5GB of the 8GB I have installed, and nothing will get "old" faster than the video card.

cool what kind of cards did you have in mind?

For a laptop, I can recommend the Alienware m11x from personal experience. long battery life, decent gaming, and (in my opinion) awesome looks.

For the desktop, I agree with halving the RAM. meanwhile for a HDD, look at the Samsung Spinpoint F3 1TB model. For the processor, you only need the 2600k if you are doing something with a lot of threads (>4), which is where the hyper-threading comes in.





Ted

Personally, I despise the look of the m11x myself. It's nice to have the power, but it looks like a child's toy. Not to mention I also dislike anything Dell, but I gave the m11x a chance. Supposedly they've fixed the hinge issues, but it's still too thick and heavy for an 11.6" system. Part of the hinge issue was due to the weight of the screen. Sorry, but I don't see the need for guerrilla glass over an 11.6" screen, and don't even TRY using the m11x outside.

Just an opposing point of view....

Video card - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... llFullInfo

2GB frame buffer on a 256bit wide bus....oooooh momma!