Buying a gaming laptop... which brands to trust?

[Evan11]

Well ive decided to buy a gaming laptop and ive saved up quite a bit. i am just very hesitant to spend money on something i might regret. i did some research and discovered that some brands like Sager, Hypersonic Aviator, Asus, Acer, Mtech, and Vigor provide what looks like better laptops for better prices than the common labels like Dell, Alienware, and Rock. I am especially looking into buying an Aviator EQ7 or a Sager NP5960-V but is this too good to be true? Knowing that most computers begin as generic clones somewhere in Indonesia, can i rely on investing so much? The rigs for the aviator and sager are below:

Sager NP5960-V
-AMD Turion 64*2 TL-60
-Dual Nvidia Quadro Fx2500 512 mb. with Sli tech..
-4gb. DDR2 - 7200 rpm. ram.
- 2 hard drives .. each 100 gb- 7200 rpm. RAID 0 tech..

*whats the difference between RAID 0 and RAID 1?

Hypersonic Aviator EQ7
-Intel Core 2 Duo Extreme - 4mb L2 cache 2.67 GHZ (X2)
-2 GB Mushkin ram
-Dual Nvidia Geforce Go 7950 GTX 512 mb. Sli tech..
-200 GB 7200 rpm SATA RAID 0

Is the AMD Turion 64 X2 better than the Intel Core 2 Duo Extreme?

Assuming these companies are as reliable as major brand names, I would most likely choose the Aviator...

Id appreciate any feedback you guys can offer.

[frostbitetwice]

Welcome to RR, Evans. I see your question was moved to this department. I glad you are doing this research before you buy. For more helf in this subject you may want to try the following.

http://techIMO.com/forums

http://www.notebookforum.com

As for your question regarding the difference between Raid 0 and 1 it is the following: Raid Level 0: the data is "Striped" or broken into chunks that are spread out across two or more hard drives. The benefit is twice the data access speed. The downside is if one drive dies you lose the entire files.

Raid Level 1: Fiiles on one drive are "mirrored" or duplicated on another. Plus is the fault tolerance which will allow the system to run even if one hard drive fails. Minus if that you only get the storage capacity of the smaller drive.

GL, Evans in finding your answers. When you decide which model to purchase report back to us.

[saturnotaku]

Powernotebooks is an excellent place to purchase a laptop. They have a lot of models to choose from and have excellent configuration options. I had them build me a PowerPro system about 10 months ago, and it's been absolutely flawless. They sell Sager as well.

One thing, though - don't get a Quadro graphics card. Those are designed for workstations, not gaming.

[Evan11]

Thanks a lot ... ill be looking into those sites frostbitetwice...
ill do some more research but ill most likely be coming back to ask more questions. stick around
One more thing, whats the technical difference between the quadro and the go... quadro cost more...

[Peter Cornstalk]

Toshiba or Sony. I have not used a Clevo based laptop, but hear they are good.

[Rakshasa72]

Before you consider going with the Hypersonic system, take a look at some of the reviews. A Few of us Customers of Hypersonic have posted their Laptop Horror Stories that are on going.

Notice how their Rating has tanked over the last 6 months.

I hope that wich ever company you choose gives you good service. However I cannot recomend you purchase any product from Hypersonic.

[michaels39]

You're right to avoid companies like Dell,their prices may seem attractive until you really look at what's in those cheap systems,and their customer support is terrible.You could check out builders like Velocity Micro and AVAdirect,they have very reasonable prices and good ratings.As to your question on CPU's,at present Intel's Core2 Duos win hands down over AMD.

[Planatoid]

You don't want a Quadro video card. Those are for graphics editing, more so than gaming.

[Iron Felix]

I have got the same problem: Which laptop to buy? I am looking for a gaming laptop which will last for couple of years. So far I have on my list:
Dell XPS M1730
Pioneer PowerBook d90
Hypersonic Aviator EQ7
Rock (dun remember the model, but the quad core 1)
I was initially going to buy Dell, but after comparing it to other gaming laptops I got lost. As others, such as Hypersonic and Rock offers Quad Core processor. And the total price is lower than M1730s'. However after hearing that Hypersonic is not that good I got totaly lost. Any advise? Thanks.

Or should I just go with Dell?