Hello Lume, first let me remind you to read the FAQ in this subforum, even though it looks a bit outdated the info is good and theFalco's guide is auto-update.
Since you considered buying a gaming laptop, let me first say that I would never buy a gaming laptop because of my experiences. Firstly the built in peripherals are poor. The keyboard, touchpad, mic and speakers built in to the laptop are very bad. In addition you will find that even if the monitor is 18" 1080p it won't look as nice as an external monitor, and besides that it won't be at the right height level so you will be looking down instead of straight ahead. Both of these things sound kind of trivial, but if you are going to have to buy a new keyboard, mouse, headphones, and monitor then why are you getting a laptop? Secondly the hardware and size make it very heavy and bulky, it will not really be portable. And even so, barely more portable than a desktop would be. Do you even intend to move it? And if you do, will it be so often that you couldn't take a desktop? For example if you plan to use it for LAN parties you will find that a desktop is easy enough to move. If you plan to take the laptop to school/college/university/work you will find it is too big and bulky to do so anyway. So why bother getting something portable with built in peripherals if you cannot take advantage of it?
Sadly at the moment you are looking at buying hardware in what are uncertain times - we are due for next gen consoles to be announced any time now, which will set the new benchmarks for hardware. So I suggest investing in solid CPU, mobo, PSU and excessive RAM rather than GPU. Of course you do need a strong GPU, but I would consider the GPU market to be the fastest moving, new models are released constantly - and yet an old GTX280 can play everything! Take a leaf out of that book, and look to upgrade every 2 years rather than spend a lot at once. A solid CPU, mobo and PSU will give you a great base to keep upgrading. Of course you can upgrade your CPU often too, and take advantage of the deeper integration, but CPU moves effectively slower than GPU.
So why did I advise you to buy excessive RAM? Well to answer that we need to take a quick look at the overview of a computer system. How fast does a CPU run? Very fast! How fast does a GPU run? Very fast! How fast does a harddrive run? Very Slow! Even in a basic operation you can bet your bottom dollar that the harddrive will be the choke point. What can we do about that? Well a 64gb SSD costs around $80 and will fit your OS and a few programs, so that is good. But 64gb can't fit a Steam library, so we have to manually move games there to get the benefit, plus we all know SSDs can be damaged by intense writes over a long period of time, so do we want to be copying in and out 10gb game folders? I think the 100x speed increase of the SSD over the HDD is great, but there is something far better than that. RAM has read/write speeds well over 5gb/s (some at 15gb/s), so using a basic RAMdisk software will let you use your RAM as a harddrive. Want to play some casual Starcraft but hate waiting for map loads? Not a problem, move your entire Starcraft install in to RAM (or just your map folder and use a symbolic link to trick Starcraft in to thinking it isn't moved) and then you will instantly load even those nasty 800mb maps. If you have 8gb of RAM, then you can use 4gb as a drive comfortably. But if you have 16 or 24 gb then you have way more to play around with. If you have even a bit of scripting knowledge then you can make some scripts to move your game installs in to RAM when you open them, or just keep your favorite games in RAM for when you want to use them! In other words, 2 GTX680s will be fast, but if you have to wait 2 minutes for the game to load up, it sets the tone for the entire game. Besides that what game can utilize that much power? Do you know what the latest breakthrough in gaming graphics was? FXAA, a new antialiasing algorithm that is a few orders of magnitude better than previous techniques - a way to get more for less power. Don't be fooled in to thinking that the only improvements in graphics require better hardware, algorithmic improvements have much more effect on graphics than hardware ever did. How much better is the 680 than the 590? Is it 1000x better? Even if you used the same computer since the turn of the century, graphics will improve every year like clockwork.
And now on to peripherals. I see a lot of people getting sucked in to things like "neon light mouse" or "keyboard with macro functionality". I think maybe you should play in a well lit environment and save yourself some money and some eye fatigue, and also learn to use AutoHotKey, a powerful high level scripting language, and save yourself from learning the gimped kludge language that comes with certain brands - and also pressing alt+q is almost always faster than pressing some extra macro button in whatever weird position they put it. Brands like Razor are all about neons, if you are in to that garish ascetic then good for you, get a glowing mouse. If not, get something quality. Logitech has far superior build quality, wireless technology, and better tracking and lasers than Razor. As for keyboards Logitech may be nice but they aren't
mechanical. Razor now has 1 mechanical keyboard, and sure it has a few rave reviews, but guess what, Razor has been making mechanical for a few years. A brand like Filco (general purpose great boards) or Ducky (Asian pro gamers use these) or Das (generally for typists) have been making mechanicals for decades. Do you think a handful of years can compare? If you are buying a keyboard I would personally suggest a Ducky backlit with MX blacks. But Filco makes MX blacks too, I don't think backlit so you would have to be a confident gamer to even consider one of them.
For headphones I have heard good things about Tritons, but of course headphones are a big topic. The general gist is, if you can't tell the difference between good sound and bad then get some cheap headphones. The cheapest noise canceling is earmuffs - take advantage by wearing inner ears and muffs.
Please never spend more than $2000 on a desktop in one hit. Remember $1000 over 10 years buys equivalent hardware to $10000 now (I am being generous with that estimate, it may be closer to $1000000). Incremental upgrades are the king of computing.
By the way if you are only gaming, you should pretty much just halve your hardware that you are thinking about. Games are not as strenuous as people seem to think. If a 5 year old xbox360 can run it then why do you need a $4000 rig... If you just want to enjoy the graphics-porn *cough* crysis *cough* then you need a bit better. But what game is there that 580x2 can max but a 580 can't? What game can burn 4gb of RAM? (Ok, you do need some for your OS, that's true) What game can fully utilize a 4ghz x4 processor? Even if you are going for max, half is fine.
On a personal note, as a long time gamer I can't condone of people who think gaming is all about graphics. Nethack was way more enjoyable than ME3... Graphics is a part of the game, but gameplay experience is not as easy as clicking "very high"... Games don't have sliding scales for gameplay, a good game on low graphics should still be a good game!
Last edited by kumi; Mar 24, 2012 at 06:29 PM.