Would this be a good college computer?

[ZaIINN]

Hello there! I was curious to whether or not this would be a good college computer yet also be able to play games fairly well. I'm also not sure how much of a premium i'm paying for the parts, but it looks to be well rounded from my P.O.V. I also plan on replacing one of the HDDs with an SSD (if you can recommend one 128gb~ish). Thank you very much to whoever allocates input to this dilemma! =)

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834152266

Any feedback whatsoever is greatly appreciated in making this purchase. Need to decide within a week or so.

~ Zane

EDIT: My major is going to be "Computer Engineering" or at least that is the plan at the moment.

 

[AbdullahG]

That;s a nice laptop! The 560M is one of the best laptop video cards on the market. The i7 has a lot of power, not to mention would be great for the major you plan on taking (if you will be using rendering and editing). Overall, it is a nice mobile gaming machine as well as for college.

 

[shadamus]

That configuration should serve you well for Computer Engineering/Computer Science/anything.

While not having any direct experience with that MSI model, I own the ASUS N53sv-XV1, which is the same configuration, but with a weaker GPU (the GT540M w/Optimus) and use it as my development workstation (I'm a software development consultant).

The couple things you might be hampered by, depending on how much you plan to haul this thing around, are the weak battery life and weight. I only get between 3 and 4 hours, depending what I'm doing, with an almost identical configuration. 3-4 hours isn't bad, for a machine with this kind of power. Really, it's not so much a "desktop replacement" as it is a "Lab Replacement" ;-)

As you note, to really feel it sing, replace one of the hard-drives with an SSD. I'm using a 256GB Samsung 470 in mine (bought Samsung again, even though there are faster models available, because I love the 128GB Samsung 470 in my other laptop) -- would recommend Crucial RealSSD C300 or Intel 510 series to take advantage of your SATA-III connection. Be careful in selecting an SSD, some of them have unreasonably high failure rates (see mountains of reliability problems with drives using the Sandforce controllers, in particular OCZ...) Do lots of research -- Reliability should be more important to you than a few percentage points in a benchmark.

You may be able to find a less expensive machine with similar specs. For example, though NewEgg.com is no longer carrying the ASUS N53SV-XV1 that I bought there for $980 + $420 for 256GB SSD + $100 for 16GB of RAM + $40 for Optical bay HDD adapter (my model didn't come with two internal HDD bays), it is still available through other vendors on Amazon. Also look into some of the other custom builders and see what configurations they have that will fit your needs (I didn't have a lot of luck trying to do this a month or so ago -- very few machines out there that can hold more than 8GB of RAM with an i7 Quad and a 15" 1080p display).

In my software dev usage (MS programming stack), I found that I needed to run several Virtual Machines for certain client scenarios, which forced me to look into machines that could hold more than 8 GB of RAM, and I wanted the quad-core i7 w/hyperthreading, and absolutely had to have a screen with as much resolution as I could find (to reduce the pain of not having a secondary display when traveling). Running on an i7-2630QM + 16GB RAM + SSD allows me to run several VMs simultaneously, with each of them feeling like dedicated hardware, while maintaining a very snappy dev environment in the native Windows 7 Ultimate x64 host OS.

Good luck.

 

[ZaIINN]

Best answer selected by ZaIINN.