Quick laptop check - is this any good?

[VanceIX]

 

starcraft said:

VanceIX said:

Ah, gotcha. What manufacturers are relatively reasonable there overall? Sorry, not too knowledgable of the PC market in AUS.

Not a problem. Unfortunately, it doesn't matter who you buy from in Australia laptops are way over priced. But most warranties are not international, so where we do import a lot of parts wholesale for PCs, for laptops we pretty much suck it up in case we wind up with a busted laptop and hundreds in shipping costs to get it fixed.

http://www.metabox.com.au/store/

This retailer does custom laptops with a reputation for solid building and I am currently looking at buying from them. Spec for spec I can get about $3-500 cheaper than the lenovo website. Will it have all the nice trimmings of a Lenovo touchpad? Maybe not. But we just get so screwed on price that at some point you have to say enough is enough.

If you're interested I'd be more than happy for you to have a fiddle with the site and recommend something better.

At this stage I have two options I am looking at (both are way over my original budget, which makes me think I'll go with the cheaper one, and maybe even cut something from that).

Metabox Alpha W355SS  ($2076 AUD)
Standard Metabox Design
15.6" FHD (1920 x 1080) LED Matte 95 Gamut
Nvidia GeForce GTX 860M with 2GB GDDR5 VRAM
Intel Core i7-4710MQ Processor (6M Cache up to 3.50 GHz)
16GB 1600MHZ Memory
Plextor 256GB M5 PRO XTREME SATA3 SSD
1TB 7200RPM HDD
Intel 7260 AC Dual Band Wireless
DVD +- R/RW DL
Windows 8.1 64BIT
2 Year Platinum Metabox Onsite Pickup
Standard Insured Delivery 4-7 Days

Office Home + Student 2013

 

Metabox Alpha W355SS-CTG02 ($1843 AUD)
Standard Metabox Design
15.6" FHD (1920 x 1080) LED Matte
Nvidia GeForce GTX 860M with 2GB GDDR5 VRAM
Intel Core i7-4710MQ Processor (6M Cache up to 3.50 GHz)
16GB 1600MHZ Memory
Plextor 256GB M5 PRO XTREME SATA3 SSD
1TB 7200RPM HDD
802.11ABGN / Bluetooth
Blu-ray Reader / DVD +- R/RW DL
Windows 8.1 64BIT
2 Year Platinum Metabox Onsite Pickup
Standard Insured Delivery 4-7 Days

Office Home + Student 2013

Hmm. This is actually a pretty good deal that's a lot cheaper than those and should be more than satisfactory

 

Metabox Alpha W650SJ ($1,374.00 AUD) Standard Metabox Design 15.6" FHD 1920 x 1080 Matte Super Slim IPS LED Nvidia GeForce GTX 850M with 2GB GDDR3 VRAM Intel Core i7-4710MQ Processor (6M Cache up to 3.50 GHz) 8GB DDR3 1600MHZ (No mSATA Installed) 1TB 7200RPM HDD Intel 7260 AC Dual Band Wireless DVD +- R/RW DL Windows 8.1 64BIT 2 Year Platinum Metabox Onsite Pickup Standard Insured Delivery 4-7 Days

No SSD, but those are technically uneccessary overall (even though boot time is much, much faster with SSDs). The graphics is perfectly fine (the 850 should eat up any modern game you throw at it on at least high). You only need 8gb of memory, no need to pay for more. Blu-ray readers are also essentially worthless, unless you have a large collection of movies, and even then you should stick to a traditional blu-ray player.