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Of course, it won't arrive til 2nd week of august, but that's ok. I'm out of town til then.

I've had laptops in the past--but they've all been work laptops. And I've bought laptops for the wife and kids at various times. But work laptops have always been sufficient for those times I go out of town and need a machine. I've never bought one for myself.

Unfortunately, the company I work for has started putting monitoring software on our machines. You know, the stuff that reports back on the software installed on your machine? So here I am, unable to install Steam and get my gaming on while I'm between friends and family visits. So, I ordered me an Alienware laptop. I will be able to connect to the VPN and remote into my work desktop at need with it, and I can consign the work laptop to the shelf where it can collect dust.

Normally, I wouldn't buy Alienware...when my eldest stepson wanted an Alienware for Xmas one year, I broke down the costs of all the stuff in it, and showed him he was paying about $500 extra for a pretty case and for someone to build it for him. So, in the end, I found him a case he liked, and built it myself, and saved myself some dough.

Unfortunately, you can't really buy off-the-shelf parts and build up a laptop. Though I think that'd be an amazing business model.

On a side note, and speaking of cases, my stepdad asked me to look at his computer, which was acting up. He bought this monstrous mid-tower case that looked like two cases welded together side by side. It was like a volkswagen bus. I couldn't understand it.

The laptop industry in general is in somewhat of a bad place right now. Everyone wants desktop performance, but they want it in a laptop form factor so they can have their mobility and Beat Saber it, too. This means the manufacturers are butting up against thermal limits of the current generations of CPUs/GPUs that might be easy to control in a desktop case, but which are getting harder and harder to manage in a laptop’s limited space. ASUS has especially been in the reddit limelight of late for some of their design choices.

Really, unless there’s some breakthrough with power requirements/management in laptop-class processors/graphics, we’ve hit a sort of performance ceiling where things just can’t get any faster without exceeding the power budget. This is why the multi-year postponement of Intel’s 7nm chips is such a big deal, and why Apple’s decision to move to the more power-efficient ARM is being watched so closely by everyone else.

—Patrick

My best friend went through all this, looking to update his laptop.

Basically, what it looks like, is if you want 4K and all the latest greatest shit, you have to pay Alienware (or alienware prices with other vendors).

But if you're satisfied with 1080p, you can get some really great deals by buying an Asus.

Too bad you didn't pick up one of these:




...it's like 1984 all over again. Adjusted for inflation, the price has gone up by 50%, but you do get somewhat of a boost in computing performance for your money.

--Patrick

We used to call those "luggables"..I actually know a guy who welded a big handle onto his computer case so he could bring it over for LAN gaming nights.

update: Laptop was just delivered by Fedex 5 mins ago.

edit: Jesus, the power brick is bigger than my Amazon Fire HD.

Edit 2: Size comparison between this machine and my work machine.

Too bad you don’t have a FLIR to show us how else they differ.

—Patrick

No doubt. The keyboard is definitely warmer. The important specs for the new machine:

17.3" FHD (1920 x 1080) 60Hz IPS, 300-nits, 72% color gamut
1TB PCIe M.2 SSD
16GB, 2x8GB, DDR4, 2666MHz
NVIDIA® GeForce RTX™ 2070 8GB GDDR6 with Max-Q Design
Windows 10 Pro (64bit) English
9th Generation Intel Core i7-9750H (6-Core, 12MB Cache, up to 4.5Ghz w/Turbo Boost)
+ some multi-color LED lights that I could do without and would prefered to have $150 off of the laptop to exclude them

I don’t know why they put an RTX 2070 in there but then only fitted you with a 60Hz panel, unless they expected your GOOD monitor to always be external.

—Patrick

PatrThom said:

I don’t know why they put an RTX 2070 in there but then only fitted you with a 60Hz panel, unless they expected your GOOD monitor to always be external.

—Patrick

Click to expand...

An external monitor was on their list of "recommended buys". As it so happens, I already have a good monitor.

skiplaunius said:

MOD EDIT - SPAM LINKS

Click to expand...

Are spammers not allowed to say Apple all of a sudden?