I'm trying to help out my brother with buying a laptop for my nephew. He has just started a uni course in Multimedia and Games design/development, and needs a decent laptop for doing stuff outside of lessons.
It's a 4 year course, and his tutor said that the more hardware demanding stuff wont be done until his 3rd and 4th year, so recommended either buying a basic laptop now and then another in a couple years, or a decent one now that will last him the 4 years. My brother/nephew wants to get a decent one now as he has the money for it now, and will likely only spend it on too much cheap booze at uni if he waits a couple years
Budget I think is up to around £1800, but they are currently looking at models around the sub £1500 mark. Some examples of the kinda thing he has been looking at :
MSI GT729-253BK-E
ASUS G70S-7S007C
Dell XPS M1730 (the middle one)
He has been looking at plenty other models, such as those by Sony and Acer etc, so is quite undecided on what to go for at the moment. Last time I bought a laptop was about 3 years ago and it was only for simple development work, not games and games development, so I am quite out of touch with the latest offerings.
He lives in Ireland, but is also looking at uk online stores. Any suggestions of what would be a good spec to go for, particularly in terms of processor and gfx card(s), and decent places to buy from. I have never used the laptops direct site that my brother gave me those links from, so not sure how reasonable they are.