Need a recommendation for a high performance laptop

[Iceman]

I'm getting some money for a high performance laptop for work and I'm looking for recommendations on what to get. It will be purchased with funds in a one-time purchase so I need to just order one configured as I need it to be. I'll need a lot of fast disk storage (at least 2 Tb), a top of the line graphics card, and a high bandwidth motherboard. Anyone have a good suggestion?

[Krom]

Define budget.

[Iceman]

$3000 or less

Looking at this one ... I like Dell Precision 7700 series but they don't come with nVidia ... Gotta add nVidia GPU as a req ...

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... gnorebbr=1

[Krom]

Going directly to the alienware site yields a configurable alienware 17 laptop which if you throw in a 1 TB PCIe SSD option actually goes over your budget by around $300, but would put the vast majority of desktops out there to shame.

Keep in mind, no GPU laptop or desktop this year will be able to reach a guaranteed 60 FPS at the native screen resolution offered in that model, but as long as you aren't planning on running the latest and greatest games it should be fine.

[Iceman]

I'll check into it thanks. I may be able to fudge the budget a little
This won't be a gaming PC it's for an infrared scene generator/simulator we are building. It's all OSG and shaders and pushes a huge amount of imagery data and terrain geometry and textures to and from the GPU. Full screen operation is not a requirement for it, mostly bus bandwidth

[Krom]

Is there some reason this has to be a laptop then? Is it going to be something that moves around a lot? If you are pushing a lot of compute, the thermal and power limits of a laptop might become a significant restriction. Or if you are planning on doing compute that isn't strictly FP32, then the geforce design itself will be a major restriction. (Although speaking of blowing the budget, a Tesla accelerator would be very expensive even if it is ~15-30 times faster than a geforce from the same family at FP64 or FP16.)

Also speaking of doing a lot if compute and image processing with a huge data set without blowing the bus bandwidth, AMD recently announced a card that might be interesting to you: http://www.anandtech.com/show/10518/amd ... ds-onboard

[Iceman]

Yeah, I have 2 high end desktops in my office that we developed our scene generator on. I need the laptop so that I can hop on an airplane and fly around to different customers and train them. I need to stick with nVidia because we use a whole lot of nVidia OpenGL extensions. I realize that the AMD cards do a good jon with the nVidia extensions but we are pushing the envelope in a lot of instances. Also, ALL of our customers (U.S. Government and subcontractors) use nVidia

[fliptw]

There are such things as external video card enclosures

Im not sure how that would work with carry on luggage limits.

[Iceman]

Excellent video post thanks

[Iceman]

Update ... my budget is now $5100

[Iceman]

Still haven't bought one, the money should be in here in a few weels but my budget stands at $5100

Is Alienware worth a ★■◆● now that Dell has bought them?

[Krom]

Pretty hard to buy a crappy laptop in that budget range from any brand. But yea, alienware should be acceptable.

[Iceman]

Ok thanks Krom