Well this is an update....So I was originally going to get a Sager laptop with a i7-6700K, a GTX 1080 and 4K display w/G-Sync. Having a G-Sync display is very important to me. I changed my mind after hearing how hot the laptop gets. It would have needed some tweaking (undervolting) to cool it down, but it still would have run a bit on the toasty side even after that. But another major factor that bothered me was how loud the fans get on it relative to some of it's rival's laptops.
So I was looking at an MSI laptop wth a i7-6820HK, GTX 1080 and a 4K G-Sync display. It's a bit less powerful on the CPU side compared to the 6700K, but it too is unlocked and people have gotten 4GHz and even higher out of it. It also runs cooler and is 5db to 8db quieter on average than the Sager. I was gonna get it in the next couple weeks after the taxes on the sale of my house were figured out. I was also holding off until the new blazing fast Samsung 960 Pro SSDs became available.
Well those new SSDs just because available in the last week or so and I was ready to purchase..... only to find out that the MSI laptop model I wanted was unavailable. I live chatted with the sales team and they said it was gone because it was EOL (End Of Life) and when they were gone, they are gone (crazy since this laptop only came out in August I believe
). I asked if there was an equivalent spec replacement coming out and they said they don't know of one at this time.
They did point me to the exact same laptop that just has a higher configuration. Well the higher config forces you to choose between 48GB or 64GB of RAM...... nothing lower. I only need 16GB max personally. It comes with 2 x 512GB SSDs in Raid 0 config. Replacing them with Samsungs SSDs hardly gave me a price break credit for the original SSDs. Long story short.... buying this config would have been $800 more than the one I was gonna get. Sorry.... I just can't stomach that kind of an increase considering I'm being forced to pay for a boatload of extra RAM and SSDs that I don't want or need... and obviously at exorbitant prices for them all.
So since I don't want to wait around for a possible similar spec replacement from MSI, I was gonna pull the trigger and get the Sager. But I asked Sager one question that ended up killing the purchase from them as well. I knew the 3K 120Hz display was TN technology, so I was gonna get their 4K 60Hz display thinking it was using IPS or a similar display technology. TN displays have less input lag than other display technologies.... but at the cost of worse color reproduction and viewing angles. But while MSI's 4K display was IPS, the Sager's 4K was a TN display. That killed it right there for me.
So I decided to purchase an interim laptop that more than gets me by for now in preparation for TSW's release. I will still get a powerhouse laptop in the future with all the bells and whistles I want. Likely in a year or so. By then...Nvidia's true generational successor to the Maxwell architecture called Volta (the current Pascal architecture in the 10-series cards are more of a major tweak of Maxwell than a true generational architecture advance) will be out and I can get a laptop based on it.
So... thanks to the good tech site reviews, PC magazine's editor's choice award for it's great bang for the buck gaming laptop......and cuz of it's limited time $300 price break that ends on Dec. 3rd..... I decided to pull the trigger and get HP's best spec'ed gaming laptop... the Omen 17-w151nr for $1500 (normally $1800). Certainly cheaper than the $4000 I was gonna spend. I'll spend that on my next laptop.
Here are the specs....Intel i7-6700HQ quad-core (2.6GHz base/3.5GHz turbo)
Nvidia GTX 1070 w/8GB GDDR5
16GB DDR4 RAM
512 GB PCIe® NVMe™ M.2 SSD
17.3-inch 4K UHD 60Hz IPS display with G-SyncWhat sucks is that all the pre-release review units sent out to the tech websites had a 2TB hard drive added. Either they changed their mind or simply got rid of it to bring down the cost on their GTX 1070-based unit. At least the specs page on the one I bought currently doesn't show a hard drive included. I'm hoping it's a typo and it does have a hard drive after all. The lower config versions (with a GTX 960M or 965M) I think have a 128GB or 256GB SSD + a 1TB or 2TB hard drive. So as far as I know... I can't upgrade anything except the RAM. The SSD is likely soldered to the MOBO and I can't add an HDD except for an external one for backups.
So while it's not the GTX 1080 I wanted to get, I''ll get a beast of a laptop next time around. The GTX 1070 is Nvidia's 2nd most powerful card with the 1080 being roughly 30% more powerful than it.... at a price premium. They both have the exact same GPU chip... only that the 1070 has some of it's CUDA cores disabled and uses GGDR5 instead of the 1080's GDDR5X memory. And at $1500.....it's pretty much a steal for a laptop of these specs. I used the $300 in savings towards a 3 year extended warranty on it.
I'll do the same TS2017 test as before once I get it all setup and post the results. I'm very busy in life right now, so it may take at least a week or two to get around to it.
I've yet to see a video card that runs it decently with the parameters I listed or in general. The GTX 1080 is 30% more powerful than my GTX 1070 and I highly doubt it would do much better. Maybe a couple frames at the most.