# Gaming laptop advice, with one is better?



## mac208x

Im going to purchase my first gaming laptop and i want the best bang for my bucks, my budget is 1700$ and after a little bit of reasearch im torn bettwen MSI gt780dxr-447us with includes the following:


	 Intel® Core™ i7 2670QM 2.2GHz
17.3" Full HD Anti-reflective Display (16:9; 1920 x 1080)
•	NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 570M discrete graphics (DDR5 3.0GB VRAM)
•	Accelerated performance with MSI TDE Technology
•	Full-color programmable backlit keyboard by SteelSeries
•	MSI Cooler Boost Technology
•	Dynaudio Premium Sound Speakers
•	1TB hard drive in Raid 0
•	12GB DDR3 system memory
•	USB 3.0 for high speed data transfer
•	HDMI 1.4 (High-Definition Multimedia Interface) output
•	Built-in 720p HD webcam
•	802.11 b/g/ n Wireless LAN with Bluetooth

and Alienware m17x with includes:

8gb ram at 1600mhz
Intel® Core™ i7 2670QM 2.2GHz
1.5gb Geforce GTX 560M
750gb HDD

So as of right now, the MSI has a better graphic card, alienware has faster ram even tho the msi has 12gb. MSI has 1TB raid 0 HDD vs standard 750gb on alienware. ANd they are both the same price.

If there is any other good gaming laptop manufactures let me know.


so with one do you think is better? or what should i actually get? and does the 1.5gb in graphic card rly makes a difference right now?


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## wolfeking

I would get the MSI laptop. It is better equipped to take on games.


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## FuryRosewood

...raid in a laptop sounds like a deathwish to me c.c


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## wolfeking

as long as you have a windows disk and do it before you install anything, you can disable the RAID and be fine. Or possibly uninstall the RAID drivers. That will be the best option, and you still get 1TB of storage, or if need be a replacement HDD should the primary fail.


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## mac208x

FuryRosewood said:


> ...raid in a laptop sounds like a deathwish to me c.c



What are the problems with raid 0???


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## wolfeking

Unreliability. RAID 0 is meant for speed. No where near a SSD speed, but should 1 drive fail, you loose everything on both drives. 

You would be better off, both in speed and reliability, to get a 1TB laptop HDD and a small SSD to install windows on.


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## mac208x

wolfeking said:


> Unreliability. RAID 0 is meant for speed. No where near a SSD speed, but should 1 drive fail, you loose everything on both drives.
> 
> You would be better off, both in speed and reliability, to get a 1TB laptop HDD and a small SSD to install windows on.



so from what you said i get this:

keep both internal HDD and have one external for windows?

or replace one of the internal HDD with a 500gb SSD

OR get rid of RAID 0 and keep HDD

Srry for not understanding, as i know more about GPU and CPU, RAM and more than HDD's and such plus coming from a macbook and jumping to a high powered machine is a big step and still got learning to do.

Edit: Also the MSI comes with 2x 500gb HDD's not a single 1TB.


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## wolfeking

of you want speed (the original intent of RAID 0) go with a SSD and keep 1 HDD 
If you want storage space, get rid of the RAID and keep both 500GB drives. 
If you want both, keep RAID and get a external drive to back everything up in case of failure.


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## mac208x

wolfeking said:


> of you want speed (the original intent of RAID 0) go with a SSD and keep 1 HDD
> If you want storage space, get rid of the RAID and keep both 500GB drives.
> If you want both, keep RAID and get a external drive to back everything up in case of failure.



kk thanks but im wondering what would be the "speed" improvement on the HDD coming from a macbook pro. Well ill most likely get a internal SDD and get rid of one of the 500gb HDD.


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## wolfeking

honestly the only way to compare a MBP with a PC on HDD speed is to install a linux distro to both machines and use a benchmark program to test it. 

Either way, RAID 0 is about 1.5-1.7 x faster than a single HDD. A SSD is looking at ~3 x faster IIRC (both of coarse on a SATA 3Gb/s interface).


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