New Guy

By the way i will be playing those games at max settings.

Welcome to the forums!

The difference between the x17 and the x17E is that the x17E can hold two graphics cards. Therefore you will see a lot more performance out of the x17E, but in return you will see a higher price, and a bulkier chassis.

The x17E level 4 is basically the ultimate gaming laptop, of all time. You will have no problem with any game that I can think of.

If you wanted to reduce cost I would suggest dropping the extreme edition 3.0/3.9 GHz processor to the 2.8/3.8 GHz i7 3840qm. Since you'll usually be plugged in the CPU will automatically overclock if you set them to, so you save $550 and only lose .1 GHz.

I own the x17 and I max out every game I've played at high-ultra settings, so even the x17 level 4 will perform incredibly well at a much lower price.

I have the bigfoot networks card and it makes a slight difference. If you're going to be playing online through wi-fi a lot I would recommend it.

I can try to answer any other questions you have, but if you call Digital Storm during their business hours they will be able to answer all your questions.

Good luck!

I'm sure you could ask them to overclock it, but I wouldn't really recommend it for a few reasons:

1) You don't need it. Even with my 3.6GHz processor I have never had any bottlenecks with the cpu. These new laptop i7 quad-cores are so powerful that any additional overclock over the turbo boost is unneeded.

2) Heat issues. The cooling on the DS laptops is very good for a laptop, however it's still a laptop and cooling will never be as good as it is with a desktop. You could probably do a slight overclock with no problem, but I wouldn't push it too much.

I'm not sure if they will overclock for free since they have to spend the time to carefully adjust it and test it for maximum stability. This is what they do with their desktops. If they do charge you it probably won't be much though.

Here are the cpu requirements for Shogun 2:

"2 GHz Intel dual core processor/2.6 GHz Intel single core processor, or AMD equivalent (with SSE2)"

The minimum requirements are a single core 2.6 GHz cpu. The i7 3840qm has four cores at 2.8/3.8 GHz, so it's way over minimum requirements.

I only ask because 4k plus dollars is a lot and i want to make sure i can get the max out of it for a long time. Plus i dont know anything about computer components really.

The 3940 should be fine until long after anything else would be outdated. Very few games are extremely CPU intensive, outside of crowded areas in MMOs, so even if you went with the 3840, it would probably be more than good enough for gaming long after the cards are obsolete.

I would wager a conservative guess of at least five years, although if you waited until Q2 for Haswell, I'd wager that you could get seven years. Honestly, CPU performance does not affect it that much.




If you want, here is a link to an article that shows the performance of different CPUs:

http://techreport.com/review/23246/inside-the-second-gaming-performance-with-today-cpus

Page three is where the benchmarks begin, and the 3940 should probably be in between the 3570 and the 3770.

Thanks. 5 years was the goal before i buy a new laptop so im glad you mentioned it. Im also glad you mentioned upgradeability. So far everything sounds reassurring. I do wonder though what digital storm's opinion on overclocking is this specific laptop? Feel free to answer DS.

Oh by the way i do have another question. Would the 480GB SSD with the secondary 750GB SATA hard drive be to much if i wanted to save of all my games? Or would the 240GB SSD be plenty with the 750 GB SATA secondary hard drive?

Thats puts thing in perspective for me. So then for a gaming computer what's the point of a second hard drive unless its for storage of games? Gaming computers for games right? Unless 2 hard drives make the games run faster?

okay i see. So then becuase i have a portable 1 TB hard drive i guess i could save myself 90 bucks

Im guessing also that 2 graphics cards are really for desktops for the purpose of duel monitoring of some sort. If thats the case since a laptop has only 1 monitor what would be the reason for having 2 graphics cards?

what do you mean SLI? I thought the NVIDIA graphics card in digital storms laptops were the best already?

Configuration Number 749956

I agree with Dom on this, but if you do want the dual graphics cards, the AMD 7970Ms are about the same performance but cheaper.

Here is an x17E configuration very similar to Dom's, but with dual graphics cards for just about $3000:

750098 - $3067

The processing power of the 3840 should be more than good enough, and I decided to include the thermal paste upgrade and network card upgrade, although the network card upgrade is likely unnecessary. Also, the hard drives were in a configuration that assumed that you would not be using the external, so if you wanted, you could switch that around a lot.

If you have any questions, just ask.

Edited by Orange7 - 17 Nov 2012 at 5:15am

And as far as AMD im a little worried about purchasing from them since everywhere i go i hear that they are in shambles, going down, product quality lacking etc.

Thanks Alex. But it seems (and i could be wrong) that Digital Storm promotes NVIDIA a bit more though...

Now i really don't know which to choose lol