New Laptop On The Way!

[Pielstick]

As some of you know I work at sea, so a desktop computer has always been impractical for me. I've been using laptops since 2004 and never really had a laptop with performance which really satisified me for use with my various flight sims - Fujitsu, Sony, Advent, HP, Alienware... had them all! Funnily enough the worse laptop I've had was the supposedly top of the line £1,800 gaming enthusiast custom built Alienware - absolutely shocking design and build quality!

I got a bit fed up with laptops last year and bought a custom built desktop with some monster specs - i7 950 overcloked to 4Ghz, 6GB RAM, Geforce GTX480 1GB graphics card, 64GB SSD and a 1TB HDD.... it runs everything beautifully, even FSX with all the addons I can load it down with.

The time is rapidly approaching for me to go back to sea and my nearly two year old Sony Vaio AW31M laptop is starting to show it's age - Core 2 Duo P8700 2.5Ghz, 4GB RAM, Geforce 9600M 512MB graphics card and 500GB HDD. I thought it was time to move onto something more modern....

So I've gone and got myself one of these:

http://www.scan.co.uk/products/156-msi-gt6...-bag-mouse-w7hp

Ok I know the styling and silly LEDs are a bit OTT (thankfully they can be turned off). However, this is a pretty astonishing spec for a 15" laptop - and the price is pretty good to boot, especially when you compare it to Sony or the premium priced Alienware laptops. I'm hoping the combination of an i7 processor, GTX460 and 8GB RAM will power through most of my flight sims. I know it's not going to be as fast as my desktop but as long as it runs DCS A-10, Rise of Flight and Il-2 1946 to my satisfaction I'll be happy enough. I don't think I'll put FSX on it as I know I've been spoiled by my desktop. I'm also hoping the 1TB HDD means storage space won't be an issue for a while

What's interesting is the MSI range of 15" gaming laptops pretty impressive. If you check out the GX660R series with an i5 processor and ATI5870 graphics card - a pretty damn powerful gaming laptop for £1,000 - extremely good value for money! Well worth considering if you're in the market for a high performance gaming laptop.