laptop buyin time again

My Lenovo P50 has served me well. it is still working, but I want to get something newer before I can no longer get a laptop w/ windows 10.

I was looking at an Alienware X17 R1 refurbished at $3,313. But it is just way more than I want to spend. I do love the build quality and heat dissipation though.

Any suggestions?

I want a dedicated graphics card. Something like the NVIDIA RTX 3080. (But this is possibly where most of the money is going). An RTX 3070 would probably suffice?

Also, I want easy access to NVMe slots (at least 2) and non soldered ram slots (at least 2). I don't want to have to remove the keyboard to get to them.

My current laptop has a screen resolution of 1920 X 1080.
Some of the models I am looking at claim 3840 x 2160 or 2560 x 1440. I'm afraid to end up getting a resolution that I have to magnify.

I just purchased a Sceptre 35 Inch Curved UltraWide 21: 9 LED Creative Monitor QHD 3440x1440 Frameless AMD Freesync HDMI DisplayPort Up to 100Hz, and my laptop will primarily be driving this monitor and also a yet to be purchased monitor in portrait mode.

I was unable to edit the topic and add a 'g' to the end of buyin. boo

What's your primary use case? Are you mostly in the office? Mostly on a factory floor? Is avoiding a Windows update the main reason you want to upgrade now?

An RTX 3080 is really, really overkill unless you are playing video games or doing 3D modeling (which, if you are serious about, you should not be buying a GeForce card for anyways). Nobody can tell you what video card will suffice unless we know what graphically intensive tasks you are planning on doing. Even opening CAD files at 4k a 3080 is way too much. Have you considered AMD as well? Their current lineup of GPUs (as well as CPUs) are really solid if you are concerned about price.

Lastly, a 17 inch laptop is massive. I know its only 1.5-2 inches larger than the P50, but its a big difference. Are you okay with hauling around such a large laptop? Most backpacks have trouble fitting a 17 inch laptop in them.

this looks fast

How about this one?

What's your use case? This is a gaming laptop and has features a controls guy will never need unless you like to play video games on the road. If all you're doing is automation work you're throwing away money to get something that looks fast.

I am looking for a desktop replacement that will last a few years, won't over heat.
I've NEVER ever bought a laptop that was too fast.

There's no such thing as too fast a computer, but there is such thing as wasting money on things you will never need.

For example, both Alienware laptops come with an expensive high speed adaptive refresh rate displays. This is awesome technology but expensive and only benefits video games. If you don't play video games, this is a huge waste.

If you aren't doing any graphically intensive processes, even an RTX 3070 is insane overkill. It's a Ferrari and if you're not doing 3D modeling or video games you're using the Ferrari as a grocery-getter. It's power hungry, it's hot, and it's very fast. It also only activates when you have a video game running. If you don't have a video game running, the laptop doesn't use it anyways (to save power).

I'd recommend looking for a 15 inch laptop with at least 32GB of RAM, whatever storage you want, a current generation core i7 (i9 sounds better but is really geared to heavily multithreaded workloads - not what we do, and can actually be slower than i7 for regular work) and if you really want a video card go with something like an RTX 1060Ti. This is still way overkill but it's not a huge price increase over no dedicated video card. Keep in mind, unless your specifically configure the video driver to run the video card, it'll be unused unless you're playing a video game.

If you're happy with the P50, I suggest looking at the P15 models. They have about as many ports as you'll find in a current laptop and they're rugged. I am a big fan of the T and P series. I have a loaded P17. It's an awesome powerhouse beast, but it's not a joy to transport. My daily drivers are 14 inch T models.

I had a gravity incident with a T490 tonight. Part of it separated at the seams. I squeezed it and snapped it back together and never even thought to be worried to make sure it still worked. It was fine when I used it later, as I knew it would be.

The cheapest way I know to buy Lenovo is through Perks at Work if you can get access to that.

I would go with the Gaming Rig too. Cooling is a huge issue with (Professional Laptops). I know i have a Dell 7750, i9 10885H 8 core @ 5.3, Nvidia Quadro RTX 4000 with 4k display. It was almost $5000. You can get a whole lot of gaming laptop for alot less and the Cooling is soooo much better.

The biggest issue with gaming laptops for Professional work is memory. Most only have options for 32 g. I run alot of VM so i need 64g.

Jmeadows7676 said:

Cooling is a huge issue with (Professional Laptops). I know i have a Dell 7750, i9 10885H 8 core @ 5.3, Nvidia Quadro RTX 4000 with 4k display. It was almost $5000.

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So what is a socalled 'Professional Laptop ?
If it is for 3D CAD work then ok, but for other uses, both the i9 10885H and RTX4000 are power hungry and totally not needed.

Am I wrong in thinking that AMD Ryzen is generally has significantly less power consumption and heat generation than comparable Intel CPUs ?
If I could chose I would not go for a gaming laptop for PLC and HMI programming.

Am I wrong in thinking that AMD Ryzen is generally has significantly less power consumption and heat generation than comparable Intel CPUs ?
If I could chose I would not go for a gaming laptop for PLC and HMI programming.

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That is mostly correct the new 12 series processors from Intel are less power then the AMDs but are also the new hybrid chips with 4 "Power" cores and 4 economy cores on non mobile chips.
My thoughts on new mobile systems would look for a Rysen 5800 with a gtx 1660 if not doing any gaming or cad. Keep the weight and power use down.

JesperMP said:

So what is a socalled 'Professional Laptop ?
If it is for 3D CAD work then ok, but for other uses, both the i9 10885H and RTX4000 are power hungry and totally not needed.

Am I wrong in thinking that AMD Ryzen is generally has significantly less power consumption and heat generation than comparable Intel CPUs ?
If I could chose I would not go for a gaming laptop for PLC and HMI programming.

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I don't know where the Term "Professional Laptop" game from. If you google "high end professional laptop" the Dell Precision and Lenovo P17 come up. Like myself a lot of Programmers use Multiple VMs to run there PLC and HMI Programming software. If you do this you want 3 things. High core count CPU, Alot of Ram, and a Dedicated GPU for 3d hardware acceleration. Most of my Programming is done in the office using 2 28" 4k displays. The GPU card helps a little there, the built in display doesn't use the GPU

I think you are right about the AMD ryzen, but i like Intel. So I bought a Intel.

01101 said:

That is mostly correct the new 12 series processors from Intel are less power then the AMDs but are also the new hybrid chips with 4 "Power" cores and 4 economy cores on non mobile chips.
My thoughts on new mobile systems would look for a Rysen 5800 with a gtx 1660 if not doing any gaming or cad. Keep the weight and power use down.

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Those new 12th gen CPUs are being sold with PL2(Power Limit 2) of 120W+, they can and will thermal throttle in mere seconds under heavy usage..

All I can add, is make sure your Laptop has a built in RJ45 for Ethernet.

We had some laptops come in that required a dongle for Ethernet which was a pain.

Even though the images may show an RJ45, check the specs before you submit your order.

Might I add that we still don't know the use case? There's a good chance gauntenator won't ever even enable his video card if he gets a dedicated one. I get the feeling specifications and recommendations are being thrown around without knowing if they're actually helpful.

celichi said:

All I can add, is make sure your Laptop has a built in RJ45 for Ethernet.

We had some laptops come in that required a dongle for Ethernet which was a pain.

Even though the images may show an RJ45, check the specs before you submit your order.

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RJ45 and at least a couple USB ports. My work laptop does have an RJ45, but it only has one USB 2.0 port. It does have a USB 3.0 port but for some reason it isn't backwards compatible, so I only get to use it the odd time for my thumb drives.