Super machine - no cost spared

[Ryanuk]

Hi all,

I'm looking for a super laptop which has the ability to expand and change as technology moves on. So far I think that the Thinkpad is most suitable, however I'm struggling to find out the benefits between the different versions.

I'm going to wait until Ivy Bridge is in production with them, I came across a press release today which announced it but I'm still a little confused.

I need the laptop to be a i7 quad core (highest spec possible) with the option to upgrade the RAM upto 16GB DDR3 and a powerful graphics card. It needs to run 4 x 20 inch monitors (possibly using a matrox graphics card?) It's running a lot of statistical programs so it'll be constantly refreshing the screen.

Anyway, my budget is around £2500 so please feel free to make any recommendations.

Regards,

Ryan

[Prasad]

Consider the Sager NP9150 or the Sager NP9170. In any case, fill up this form please.

[King Krish]

If you want a user upgradeable laptop, i would recommend the above or MSI GT70, i have just ordered the MSI myself. a release is now out with a gtx675. for about $2000 with choices of mods from sellers like gentechpc, xoticpc, powernotebooks etc. The Asus g75 will also be good but As far as I know its not user upgradeable for gfx card.

But fill out the form Prasad mentioned and you may here of other options to suit you.

[msjgriffiths]

Dell M6700 (unreleased). You can swap out the processor and graphics card (MXM 3.0); memory goes to 32GB (standard quad-core i7 limit with 4 DIMMs).

ATI EyeFinity can run lots of monitors.

I think the Thinkpad W530 solders the graphics card to the motherboard, but I could be wrong.

[knight427]

Does Dell white-list hardware in BIOS like HP.

[Valentin N]

I wanted to advice the one with i7-3930k cpu, where to AMD/NVIDIA cards can be installed.

[Fat Dragon]

Do you need a powerful graphics card just for running the multiple monitor setup, or will you be doing graphics-intensive work or gaming as well? As far as I understand (and that's not very far, to be honest), you don't really need a particularly powerful GPU to run a multiple monitor setup unless the work you're doing is the kind of work that requires decent GPU power in the first place.

[Darkshado]

Matrox doesn't really make any consumer graphics cards anymore, they've switched their focus to OEM long term support cards for Air Traffic Control/government/enterprise applications, video wall solutions and professional movie editing capture products.

They do still sell their Head2Go series of monitor extenders which might be another solution compared to AMD Eyefinity.

Multi Monitors Adapter for Laptops

Do you statistical programs use CUDA or OpenCL? That's another point to consider when choosing your graphics card.