Might makes light! And I'm feeling MIGHTY!
by
, August 14th, 2012 at 10:03 AM (3684 Views)
I found out that my laptop passed its cruel and torturous 96-hour burn-in period, and has now been mailed out to me. I should have it no later than next Monday.
What laptop, you ask? This laptop.
Actually, I lied. It was a customized version of that laptop. What did I do to it?
- Got upgrades to 16 GB of DDR3-1600 RAM and a 750 GB, 7200 RPM HD for free due to a special.
- Upgraded the screen to one with 90% Color Gamut.
- Upgraded the CPU to a 3820QM. (The extra 2 MB of cache is worth it.)
- Upgraded the disc drive to a 6x Blu-Ray burner.
- Upgraded the NICs to use an actually good NIC (Bigfoot Killer Wireless-N)
- Changed the videochip to a GeForce GTX 680M.
- Put superior thermal compound in for both the CPU and the GPU.
- Opted for a three-year warranty.
- Purchased a 256 GB mSATA SSD. (Their best option only allowed an 80 GB mSATA, so I did this off another site.)
The base config will run you about $1400, and it's not a bad price for a laptop, and even the stock hardware isn't too bad. To do what I wanted, though... well, that's closer to $3000.
Extra costs, itemized in no particular order other than how it appears on my bill:
- Screen: +$135
- Processor: +$350
- Burner: +$135
- NIC: +$60
- Compound: +$35
- Warranty: +$149
- Videochip: +$445
- mSATA: +$279
It will be a very screamin' laptop for some years to come, though. And I can even throw in a second hard drive at some point in the future if I need to. Which I well might do in some time down the road. That said, between the OS being on the SSD, the bulk storage being on the mechanical HD, and a 128 GB USB3 stick I bought... if I'm running out of space on the laptop, perhapsI should download less pornI have bigger issues.