£1600 gaming laptop spec, overkill/underperformer/massive gaps?

[JohnnyR]

Hi,

The following is a slightly edited copy of an email I just sent to PCS enquiries, but thought it might be worth posting here too.

I bought my current laptop for about £1200 five years ago.
I was expecting to spend about £1500, but I get carried away.
I can afford to spend >£2k, but that's not the same as wanting to. It's a £erformance:longevity consideration.
I'd like a new laptop to last a similar length of time (up to 5 years).

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My gaming laptop has started to slow down, and I'm thinking about replacing it.
I'm mostly considering MSI (GT72S) and PCSpecialist (Octane 2 and Defiance 2) options.

Currently I have:
MSI GT683DXR 15.6"
Processor: i7-2670QM 2.2Ghz
GPU: GTX 570M 1.5GB
RAM: 8GB
HDD: 1.5TB (RAID0) 7200rpm

I use it for everyday computing, work and gaming.
The top 3 games in my Steam library by hours used are:
Total War: Atilla (suffers long load times and slow down/input lag in large battles)
Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim (little bit of lag and stuttering played through TV, but maybe normal for Skyrim)
Life is Feudal: Your Own (long load times, bad input lag and stuttering, screen tearing a couple of times)

Using them as a guide, I'd want to be sure that a new laptop could easily run them and their successors:
Total War: Warhammer
Elder Scrolls 6
Life is Feudal: MMO

I'd prefer a 15.6" to a 17.3"

I'd come up with the following 4 example set-ups.
(looking at these specs probably isn't necessary for the first 10 of 14 questions I ask at the end)

Cheap Defiance 2
http://www.pcspecialist.co.uk/quotes/defianceII-15/OHgY2QE5a5/

Expensive Defiance 2
http://www.pcspecialist.co.uk/quotes/defianceII-15/4Wtp32X8b5/

Cheap Octane 2
http://www.pcspecialist.co.uk/quotes/octaneII-15/xMKoMuHyCW/

Expensive Octane 2
http://www.pcspecialist.co.uk/quotes/octaneII-15/2o45xVkebW/


Couple example MSI GT72S (the competition)
[links removed - steaky360]


They are all expensive laptops, as are the GT72S configurations.
I'm wanting to make sure I'm getting it right before ordering one, and have a few questions.


1. How upgradeable at a later date are Octane 2 and Defiance 2?
E.g. can I add ram sticks / swap out the GPU?


2. The help button by the M.2 SSD drives talks about Smart Response Tech auto assigning commonly used files to the SSD.
Can I disable this and manually assign them instead?
I want my OS and Steam (games) on the SSD.
Don't want SSD to be a SmartResponse holding pen.


3. Cheaper Defiance model has RAID option, which is not listed with Octane.
Is RAID an option / standard on Octane?


4. For both the Octane and the Defiance,
If I get 2 identical HDD, will they run in RAID0, and do I need to do anything to set it up?
If I get 2 identical M.2 SSD, will they run in RAID0, and do I need to do anything to set it up?


5. Can I have both HDD and SDD RAID0 setups on the same machine?
Is there space for them, and will it suffer in other areas, e.g. overheating?


6. My understanding is that RAID0 essentially runs close to {drive speed*number of drives}. So a single 2kMB SSD is still better than two 500MB SSDs in RAID0.
As the best SSD drives aren't selectable in pairs on the Defiance, this means I'm better off with a single very good one than two inferiors.
On the Octane I can select a pair of very good SSD drives in RAID0.
Is this correct?


7. Screen referesh rates are listed as:
Octane 2 = 48hz
Defiance 2 = 60hz
Is this a fixed refresh rate, or is it changeable?
For example MSI GT72S can switch between 40hz and 60hz, overclockable to 75hz.


8. The Defiance 2 has no G-Sync option.
Both GPU options for the Octane 2 include G-Sync.
Correct?


9. Whilst researching MSI GT72S I read that G-Sync doesn't work well at 60hz and below, and that the screen needs overclocking to 75hz.
You are offering G-Sync on a screen that runs at 48hz.
Will it work?
Will it make a significant improvement?
Does the GPU out-stripping the screen refresh rate increase or decrease the need for G-Sync?


10. Do the OS and hardware come fully installed and ready to go?
How much set-up and activation is required at my end?


11. Are there any obvious bottlenecks, inadequacies or missing essentials in the set-ups I've listed?


12. Am I going completely overkill, and won't notice and performance difference between the top and bottom specs listed?


13. Any advice on how I could change the spec to save a few £s/boost performance, without too much compromising on performance/price respectively?
For example, a cheaper, non-Raid0 HDD in the expensive Octane would knock ~£50 off.

14. £ for £, how do MSI and PCS measure up overall?
Is either thought far superior to the other?


Thanks,

Johnny

 

[Oussebon]

If you could consider upto £2k, the Octane II Pro would seem the obvious choice. You can see one in the review section @£1900 http://www.pcspecialist.co.uk/reviews/ They're ordered by date and that review's dated 29th Feb.
The main advantage being that it has a desktop GTX 980 and not a mobile 980M

There's not a great deal of point going for a RAID setup just for gaming. RAM should be fairly upgradable. A single good M.2 SSD would decimate game loading times compared to HDDs in raid. The GPU and CPU probably won't be. (at least, not cost effectively)

 

[JohnnyR]

Thanks for the reply Oussebon.

I'm not a massive fan of the 17.3" size of the Octane 2 Pro. I move around a lot and would be using the laptop for work, so lots of putting it on little coffee tables and stuff, where theres already barely room for a mouse with the 15.6" size.
I'll have another think about them though.

Also, the £2k isn't what I want to spend, its what it creeps up to.
I started off expecting to spend about £1500, but when I see a good upgrade for another £100, its a big performance boost for a small £% increase, which might mean upgrading less often and actually saving over time.
The Pro version is about £300 more. Thats probably a good dal in terms of GPU prices, but its a lot of money to spend if I won't really notice the difference with the games I play (eg. perhaps they are more processor dependant).

All the MSIs make a big thing about SSDs running in Raid0. You think that won't make much difference for games over a single SSD?
If the price were the same for one big as it were for 2 small SSD then presumably I might as well Raid them anyway.

I'm wondering what will be holding those systems back. For example, will 980m GPU be overkill alongside a 6820 processor. Does it need the 6700k processor to get the most out of it?
Like a weakest link in the chain sort of thing. Theres no point super upgrading one part that'll be held back by the others, just as it makes sense to not leave any part so far behind that it drags the rest of the system down.
There are 4 big difference I can see between the Defiance and Octane: screen Hz, laptop chunkiness, GSync and the processor.
If the processor is a worthwhile step up with the 980m then thats a reason to go for the Octane. I also prefer the thicker case.
I'd have thought the lower screen refresh rate was a bad thing though. 48hz sounds very low.
The Octane 2 (not Pro) comes with GSync. How will that behave on such a low Hz screen? Is it more or less necessary than it would be on a high Hz desktop machine (presumably what it was designed for).

 

[Oussebon]

You think that won't make much difference for games over a single SSD?
If the price were the same for one big as it were for 2 small SSD then presumably I might as well Raid them anyway.

If you have 1 drive and it fails, you're stuffed. New drive, new install time. If you have 2 drives in RAID 0 and 1 of them fails, you're stuffed. New drive, new install time. So you're kinda doubling your chances to be stuffed for performance gains that you often won't notice and will make 0 difference to FPS. Obviously you back up data so you shouldn't lose that either way, but to my mind it's making a system more vulnerable for no real advantage to loading times

The RAID-based configurations undoubtedly scored the first touchdown given exceptional sequential results, but the game didn't end there. Individual SSDs regained ground in the tests that followed, even posting better scores in some of them. Random I/O performance is a good example. Striped drives are certainly better equipped to push more IOPS, but only when you're stacking commands more than four high. Jumping up to a queue depth of 32, 16, or even eight is really uncommon in a desktop or workstation environment. As a result, the performance differences are far less pronounced in the real world.

One SSD on its own scores again in the contrived tests we put together. The performance differences when we boot up and shut down Windows 8, then fire up different applications, are marginal at best and not noticeable in practice. Single drives actually manage to outperform the striped arrays some of the time, even.

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/ssd-raid-benchmark,review-32689-13.html

And anecdotal but doesn't surprise me in the least:

I'd say no. I have 64GB of RAM so I decided to make a RAM drive with it (32GB). Benchmarks achieved up to 20GB/s bandwidth. I installed a couple games including League of Legends and Skyrim on it and could not tell any difference from my SSD except that Skyrim loaded areas a second or two faster. It's definitely not worth what it costs to RAID 0 compared to practically any other upgrade to your computer.

https://www.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/2lz5o7/does_raid_0_with_ssds_affect_performance_in/

(eg. perhaps they are more processor dependant).
will 980m GPU be overkill alongside a 6820 processor. Does it need the 6700k processor to get the most out of it?

The short answer is that in games you are almost always going to be GPU bound, even at 1080p - as long as you're playing on high settings and as long as your CPU isn't actually a piece of junk. MMOs are the main exception to that rule, where even high end overclocked CPUs can be the limiting factor in situations involving lots of players (out in the world on your own, it's still the GPU in things like WoW).

For Attila:
http://www.anandtech.com/bench/CPU/1296
http://pclab.pl/art61577-8.html
http://uk.hardware.info/reviews/603...d-with-23-gpus-test-results-full-hd-1920x1080

So you can see that while at 'performance' settings where less load is placed on the GPU, the different CPUs make more of a difference. But, at the cranked up settings there isn't much to set CPUs apart. Certainly not as much as would set a 970(m) and a 980(m) apart. And who buys a £1500 gaming computer to not crank the settings up? That's not to say there's no benefit to a 6700k, just that the GPU is still a bigger deal. Especially as mobile GPUs are weaker than their desktop counterparts and you'll hit the limit of what they're capable of sooner.

Also, here are some benchmarks for the CPUs like 6820HK and 6700K: http://tinyurl.com/hv3eeht There's a difference, but it's not huge.
Whereas a 970M, 980M, and full 980: http://tinyurl.com/jff55jf Visible difference between 970M and 980M. But the 980 desktop gives 33-50% more FPS over 980M depending on the game and settings.

I can't comment on g-sync I'm afraid, outside my area of google-fu