mnheat

Thanks but not everyone uses desktop computers and not everyone builds them. I travel across the country for work and enjoy a spot of gaming in a hotel room from time to time. How convenient do you think it would be for me to check a computer tower with the airline and then what would my likelihood of getting it back in one piece be ? Some people like desktops and others like laptops, I'm a laptop guy. I think my biggest thing would being buying parts that are compatible but I would suppose there are some basic kits that help with that. I might try building my next laptop. I seem to get a good 3-4 years out of each one and spend around 2k each time.

Looks like this one has something of a similar setup with a large vent to both the rear and the side of the CPU and GPU. I agree with you that it's a better setup than putting the vent on the bottom.

I do play games other than GTA IV but not very often. I was looking at lesser PCs but found this one and was tempted by the specs for the price. I also thought about building my own and I know it's the worst excuse ever but i don't know how. Anyone with a computer and the internet can learn how to build a PC/laptop because there are so many resources out there. I just have no interest in building one mostly because I don't want to risk messing it up and being out the cash for the parts. Cooling is actually the one thing I was worried about with this system. What's your cooling setup?

I have some textures out there, however this is my first post in the forum. I hope that it'll be productive and help someone who is in the same boat I was and that's looking for a power gaming laptop without breaking the bank. I have been playing GTA IV on a bootcamped partition of my MacBook Pro Retina. My Macbook is pretty well spec'd, Intel i7 2.6GHz, 16GB Ram, Geforce GT650M. I would have thought it would have no issue playing GTAIV on the lowest settings but it just didn't work. Man, the fans screamed and you could cook an egg on the aluminum. It would crash out of the game after 10 minutes or so with a warning box that I had exceeded the system memory (the GT650M has 1GB VRAM). Bear in mind that I wasn't playing the game on the native Retina resolution settings and had all of my settings on the low end. I set out to find a gaming laptop worthy of crushing any game on ultra settings with a budget between $1000-$1500. Surprisingly, you can do pretty well in this price range when it comes to a gamer but you can't do *awesome*. I scoured the web and found a powerhouse on Amazon: Intel i7-4800MQ 2.7-3.5GZ Turbo 16GB DDR3-1600 Nvidia GTX 880M 8GB 750 GB 7200RPM HDD 120 GB SSD Similarly spec'd systems online ranged from $2000-$3000. I found this system on Amazon for $1600 marked down from $2200. The system is on the manufacturer's website at the $2200 price point. Not sure why Amazon is selling it for so much less. Here's a link to the system on Amazon (the were 6 left, now 5 since my purchase). I also found a lot of negative out there on the web about the manufacturer but I'm taking a chance based on their 10 star rating on resellerratings.com and the awesome value for the specs of the system. Anyway, I thought I'd share in case someone else was looking.