[Quiet Man Cometh]

Is anyone here familiar with Lenovo?

[Espy]

my previous rig was a lenovo ideapad. ran nicely. really friggin heavy, though, at over 7 lbs. didn't run as loudly, but the fan blew right onto my mouse hand, which was super fun. it also had...overheat issues (as in, 90+ C when gaming). and at the end of its lifespan, blew a friggin capacitor.

[Coda]

I'm good with ASUS. They've never given me trouble.

Lenovo used to be IBM. They're usually considered business laptops instead of gaming laptops, but they're robust enough.

Intel currently outperforms AMD but for a gaming workload (which is, as mentioned, primarily GPU-constrained) you're not likely to notice a significant difference.

[Suzerain of Sheol]

Probably my favorite thing about mine is that it not only NEVER gets hot, but it does so completely silently unless I, like, decide to run two demanding games simultaneously (which it still handles pretty adequately, which is.... nice, I guess, albeit impractical).

I don't know if the awesome cooling system carries over to the lower-end ROGs, though. I know it's part of why mine is so insanely heavy.

[Espy]

Hm... One of my friends just recommended this Acer rig, which looks nice...?

[Coda]

Oh, wow, that IS a good one. I would have liked something better than a 1050 for a dedicated gaming machine but that's no slouch and the price tag is really good for what it does.

[Espy]

What GFX card do you prefer?

And, hm... How much better than a 960M is a 1050? (I'm a little sore that I bought this current rig a couple months before the 10 series was released...)

[Coda]

A 960 and a 1050 are REALLY close. Benchmarks have the 960 doing marginally better in some games and the 1050 doing marginally better in others. Like I mentioned before, I've got a 960 (desktop, not M) and I can run Overwatch at high/ultra settings.

[Quiet Man Cometh]

I'm finding myself moving back to the ROG series as I look around more. There are a bunch of different models on the STRIX it seems. I'm currently looking at the HERO edition, which is advertised as a MOBA rig (as opposed to the SCAR edition for shooters. Not sure what G-sync is, but that seems to be one of the differences. The STRIX HERO is a $2000 computer (CDN) but as said, I've decided I'd rather overspend on good computer, than underspend on one that's not quite good enough.

As a note, nearly everything I look at seems to have (or have upgrade options for) the 10 series video cards. I have to go out of the way to find a 9 series. Older laptops are usually sold out or "no longer available."

[Den]

...That rig that Espy's friend recommended is a goal for me now. Though i'm not sure whether I want the beefier rig or the 256 SSD one...

[Coda]

Well yes, the older laptops you'll have to find refurbished because nobody's keeping them in current stock -- they went on clearance for Black Friday.

G-Sync is a new display technology that's part of the monitor itself that allows a dynamic display refresh rate. Basically it means that whatever FPS your GPU can push out, that's what the monitor shows, instead of being stuck at 60fps and sometimes drawing the same frame twice.

If you've never noticed a problem with frame rate fluctuations or horizontal tearing, you aren't going to care about G-Sync. Yeah, it looks nice and smooth, but you're used to not having it, so you won't miss it.

The reason it's more important for FPS than MOBA is because competitive FPS games have a lot more full-screen rotations that really make FPS fluctuations more visible and they're more sensitive to input lag because a few milliseconds can mean the difference between a headshot and a miss. That said, you have to be a super-high-end player for that difference to come across as anything but feeling like it's just a hard shot to make in the first place.

So... yeah, don't waste the money.

[Quiet Man Cometh]

Just the difference in price between the Scar and the Hero made me think there was something particular about it.

Went with the Hero Edition ROG Strix. There's about to be a big hole in my bank account now, but I'm pretty okay with it. (The purchase, not the hole. That will have to be fixed by the end of the year.) Ordered it through Newegg, which is a Canadian online distributor that apparently my brother has dealt with before. I bought this laptop from NCIX which went belly-up not too long ago. The Amazon link from Asus itself seemed to be for a different computer and we didn't trust it. Too many RoG's with similar number strings.

All in, unit, shipping, and taxes puts it at $2200, which is the same price I paid for my current one. Minus the keyboard issue that I had to ship this thing out for, my Stealth has been pretty good. Not sure if the new ones are of the same quality though, from what my stepbrother is telling me. He's the one who helped me find this.

Now comes the task of cleaning up this thing for my sister's birthday. She already knows she's getting it, but I'm going to put a bow on it anyway. ;)

[Coda]

Newegg isn't specifically Canadian. I bought some of the parts for my current gaming machine from Newegg. :P (The rest came from Amazon or Fry's Electronics.)

[Espy]

Hey Quiet, toss me a link for that laptop?

[Quiet Man Cometh]

Ah. Well if they ship from here and deal in CDN currency than I'm happy. I could actually have driven to the store it's shipping from, it's only 40 minutes from me, but since we used my brother's card and he'd be the one to have to go get it.

Link is here, Espy, if you don't mind ASUS' loud and obnoxious scroll down page.
https://www.asus.com/ca-en/Laptops/R...-Hero-Edition/
I got mine with a 1060. There appear to be a pile of different possible set-ups. When I looked it up again on Newegg, I got several hits but all over what I paid.

[Quiet Man Cometh]

So I'm streamlining my files and such to get my comp ready to transfer and I recall being told ages ago that doing a lot of moving/deleting/etc. would leave little phantom gaps and such that defragging what supposed to take care of. Is this still a thing? I'm still running on the assumption that a fresh install is better than moving stuff from one drive to another, so I'm trying to minimize what I move over.