Hello, sorry if this is poorly formatted but im typing this out on my phone. Anyways im a truck driver who is living out of my truck and only spends 2-3 days a month now at home, so my $2000 gaming rig is pretty much dead to me now… And all I have is my HTC One M9 to keep me sane. So I desperatly need a gaming laptop reccomendation!
Honestly, im so used to building desktops that it pains me to even think about spending money on a laptop but I dont have a lot of options here… So if im going to do this im going to do it right! My budget is going to be $1500-2000.
Im currently torn between 970m sli and a single 980m… Im fine with a 15-17in screen, and am shooting for the mid tier i-7s with 6-8mb cache… And 16+ gb ram w/ a small msata 128-256 gb boot drive (i have extra ssd’s lying around to throw in)
So im currently looking at the semi-custom route, thru companys like cyberpower. But if theres something really big coming soon, than Id be happy to wait a few months and maybe expand my budget to $2200-2400.
Also do you think a high end 900m and midtier i7 will work for some lite useage of programs like 3ds max (without a quadro) and protools 11? If you have any question feel free to ask, im trying to keep this short cause it sucks typing this out on my phone. Thanks!
Im very weary of buying used especially since it could be a few weeks to a month before I get home and get my hands on it after it ships. Plus I dont have the time or patince to file an ebay claim. Also cause it cant be easy to replace or repair alot of the proprietary hardware that are in these laptops. So im kind of looking for a quality garuntee if that makes sense. But i fully appreciate the suggestions!
I guess one thing im looking for advice on from someone with experience are mobile gpu's... I havent had one since my gtx 8200m like 8 years ago lol. So if im playing Fallout 4 and GTA 5 with heavy graphics mods would I need that 980m 8gb, or should sli 970s (I think its available in 6gb) be ok... Also can sli 970M's or a 980m be used to reasonably run 3ds max? Or do you really need a quadro... Thanks again for your help guys!
I would go for 970M SLI. You'll crank out more frames, and I don't think Nvidia has anything like AMDs VSR so on most laptops 1080p is the limit anyway. 3gb is just fine. Keep in mind when something is in CFX or SLI memory bandwidth is equal to that of a single card. Older Aleinwares are super modular, can't speak for other manufacturers though. I noticed your post changed.
Anything over a GTX 580M will push 30FPS out of most (if not all) modern games. I'm using a Radeon HD 6990M at the moment and it doesn't struggle at all unless you push massive amounts of AA, and even then it simply runs into a thermal cap. The GTX 980M is going to give better performance than the two 970Ms in the event that a game does not support SLI, and in the future when you want to upgrade (given the laptop uses MXM) you won't have much of a hardware whitelist issue to deal with.
There used to be the argument that the stability of SLI/CFX laptops was fairly compromised due to the limited VRM/power capabilites. A prominent example was the Alienware M17x-R2, which had power issues that would crash the graphics drivers and cause the machine to get stuck in power-down. I'm not entirely sure this has been solved in later SLI/CFX designs, but it's something to research.
Anyways im a truck driver who is living out of my truck and only spends 2-3 days a month now at home, so my $2000 gaming rig is pretty much dead to me now… And all I have is my HTC One M9 to keep me sane. So I desperatly need a gaming laptop reccomendation!