I found a custom built laptop company

[75]

I had some time off at work today, and I was thinking vaguely about what I would do if I had to travel somewhere for work, It's possible that I will be away more than at home, and the company laptops are very old.

I once went to a local PC builder shop, and they charged me a Macbook Pro price for a rather ordinary laptop, for a while, I assumed that my best option was to buy from one of the major companies (Dell, Sony, Toshiba, etc).

Today, I found this computer manufacturer randomly on Newegg. Their prices on Newegg are nothing special, but if you buy it through their website, you can get a very good deal, and you can have a lot of choices.

http://www.cyberpowerpc.com/

I was looking at a Core i7 laptop, 8 GB of ram, NVIDIA GeForce GT 540M 2GB, and a 1 TB drive for under $900, which is less than I paid for my tower which only had an i5.

The graphics card in there also has twice the RAM of my tower's graphics card, the memory clock is 1/3 of the speed of my tower's GPU, but the GT 54M's core runs twice as fast as my tower's.
(It seems like a bad idea to slow down the memory's clock in favor of a faster CPU, but perhaps the GPU doesn't need it because it's not attached to the HD, and just goes through the PCI-E?)

What I like most about it is the price, and that they allow me to choose what size of HD I want in it (you can even put a SSD in there), and that I can elect to not buy Windows 7 Home Premium (which saves me ~$80).

I saw one comment on there that said that these laptops are made to be easy to work with if you want to swap out components. That would be a welcome change, my old HP was very difficult and risky to take apart.

I guess that the options for tower PCs are even more flexible, but I haven't tried it.

I hope this helps somebody who is interested in a new PC

[brain candy]

CyberPower* tends to be one of those Good value, Poor quality brands. They get those prices by skimping on hardware where they can and following up with cruddy customer service. There are other "boutique" brand laptops that are way better if that's your thing. Having gone the boutique brand route myself though, I would recommend sticking with an ASUS. Hardware accessibility usually depends on the model and how it was designed, not brand specific so I wouldn't let that be a deciding factor either. My Apple is just about the easiest thing to get into and screw with, for instance.

*Not to be confused with CypberPower(Systems) brand UPS units which are pretty solid.

Also, when looking at your desktop's video RAM vs laptop VRAM (or VRAM from anything else) you need to consider the type of memory, effective memory clock, and the memory interface. You can't judge on amount of VRAM alone. I bet your desktop GPU is still way better.

[Atariangamer]

i can vouch for ASUS quality. I got one of their 'gaming' laptops and its an amazing performer. But while its got the same GPU as my desktop AND more memory AND a better processor, my desktop beats the laptop in most cases. not by much, mind, but its the quality.v.fps argument. The laptop can run most games middle to high at at least 60fps. The only time it's dropped is during Battlefield 3 on some super high settings. My desktop, on the other hand, handles all games on high, 60fps+.

And I see CyberPower computer/laptop ads in PC mags all the time with almost too good to be true stuff. BC kinda confimed that :-/

Anyway, that's just my two cents. Maybe look around the net for some reviews? Get a better idea of how the computers perform.

[ChexCommander]

BC's absolutely right, CyberPower is one of those brands with the fancy "HARDCORE XTREME PC" ads, but they don't deliver. For laptops, better off sticking with a real name brand (eg Toshiba/ASUS).

[75]

Ah, that's disappointing. I did notice that some of the parts they mentioned didn't have a brand attached to them.

[brain candy]

It's really disappointing because it would be nice to have more choice in boutique brands. Most of them are just re-branded Clevo chasses (Sager, Xoitic, Malibal, PowerNotebooks, Fortnax, etc) which can be pretty pricey and info/support can be a bit iffy depending on reseller. My Sager was a bit of a nightmare to track down because it is a re-re-branded Clevo (System 76 > Sager > Clevo). If I'd done it all over again, I would've purchased an ASUS. If you've got one of those, you get the great hardware AND the great support and documentation for generally less money. No mystery as to who provides what drivers and who to turn to for warranty. I had trouble in both areas.

The really sketchy thing about CyberPower is that they put in their own house branded PSUs that are absolutely horrendous. Even if they manage to put in other solid pieces of hardware, it's all going to come crashing down when being supported by that unclean, unstable power.