Laptop ?? HP DV7-1177 vs Qosmio G50

[misterlarry]

Anyways, a guy is about to pay me $4,000 for a little bit of technical writing that I did for him and out of that I've allotted myself $1,500 to buy a new laptop which will run some games (Fallout 3) when I'm on the road.

Does anyone have any personal experience with either of these models. They both have the P7350 CPU, Geforce 9600 GT GPU, and 1066 FSB. The HP has a Blu-Ray reader and can take 8 Gb of ram and is $200 cheaper right now. I'm waiting to hear back about the 4 to 8 Gb ram upgrade cost.

Any suggestions or comments would be useful. Thanks all.

[JD]

Should spend all $4000 and get a laptop with SLI

Anyways looks like HP is the better choice seeing as it's cheaper and has the same specifications.

[Jmac]

I sell the HP, so I have a fair amount of experience with it. It feels pretty solid and looks very nice, but keep in mind that the glossy finish will get smudgy as hell, so keep your polishing cloth handy if you want to keep it looking purdy. We've yet to see any cracked screens on the new chassis, which is a good indication that they've improved structural rigidity of the LCD panel. The LCD is bright and sharp, with a glossy finish that provides better blacks and improved colour saturation at the cost of reflection.

The unit is decently quick, though I wish they had opted for the faster P8000 series CPU rather than the P7350. Battery life is decent for a laptop of its specs, but you will still be lucky to get 2 hours out of it. Heat output is noticable, but not substantial.

The 9600M GT is NOT the same as the desktop 9600 GT, as it only makes use of 32 stream processors rather than the 9600 GT's 64. Expect performance roughly equivalent to that of a desktop 8600 GTS. The unit has all the expected inputs and outputs for its specs such as HDMI, VGA, Firewire, 4 USB ports, audio in/out, etc. Speaker quality is average, which is somewhat disappointing given its emphasis on media playback. The unit makes use of a 320 GB 5400 RPM hard drive (not sure of brand, can check that next week if you'd like) which is an okay performer, but I would've liked to have seen a 7200 RPM drive.

The unit ships with Windows Vista Home Premium 64-bit, which is standard for this price point, but keep in mind that there is a small amount of software and hardware that will not work with 64-bit operating systems (Dragon Naturally Speaking, for example). The unit comes with a fair amount of junkware and no Windows discs (you'll have to make your own recovery discs using the provided software), so be prepared to do some uninstalling during setup.

I've seen those new dv* units go on sale for crazy discounts, so if you keep your eyes open, I wouldn't be surprised to see it drop to around $1000 ...

I don't have any experience with new Qosmios, but the old ones (last year) were freakishly thick and heavy. The HP is certainly much thinner and lighter than last year's Qosmios by a significant amount. The Qosmio was built like a tank, though, and certainly had far superior speakers.

As for the 4 > 8 GB upgrade, it looks to be about $300 ... I think I'd rather upgrade to a 7200 RPM hard drive for about $100 before doing the memory upgrade.