32GB Laptop Required

BillHicksRIP

BillHicksRIP

BillHicksRIP

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I use a lot of virtual machines and may have to be on the road shortly so I'm looking into a 32GB laptop. I mainly want it for running VMs but will need to for general surfing and work-related activities.

Required: Decent sized SSD
Required: Large addional internal HDD
Required: 15/17" screen
Required: 32GB RAM
Required: VT-d and VT-x CPU
Nice To Have: Good graphics card for limited gaming

My budget is either up to £1600, or around the £2000 mark, as I can claim back the VAT if over 2K, but around £1.5k was what I was hoping for. The one that seems to fit the bill really well is the Acer Aspire V3-772G which has an i7-4702MQ, 256GB SSD and a (5400rpm) 1TB drive and a GTX 760M. The spec for this one is 6 months old so I was wondering if there's any newer chips due to filter down in the next 3 months I should hang on for?

Any recommendations appreciated. Thanks.
 
We looked at building a super stonking laptop to show demos of the software we use. These VMs use a lot of memory, a fair chunk of disk space, but not so much cpu unless they're running processes.

When we specced it up and looked at how the laptop would perform running more than one of these VMs at a time, we opted to get a normal laptop, with a decent mobile internet connection, and built the VMs in the cloud instead using the rainforest AWS.

The beauty of it being, most clients we took this to, we could power up the VM as needed for the demos, and shut them down when done - and we only paid for uptime and a meagre amount for storage per month.
 
That's not a bad idea but I need to upload software to the VMs for new builds and patching which would kill me over mobile internet. I carry the software on a portable drive and update when on my home network, so I think I'll have to stick with seeking out a laptop with large onboard RAM.
 
Sure, it depends on your needs. We found downloading software from Oracle to our cloud servers happened way faster than we could ever achieve downloading to our own company HQ though.

If you need to upload from the laptop to the VMs, then local VMs may be your only option.
 
As above.
Recently put out a few M4800s with i7 4800MQ/32gig memory/Quadro K2100M/256gig SSD. Very impressed with the performance, and thought the build quality seemed really nice.
Fair weighty though, but I'd guess most will be with the specs you are considering.
 
From what I can gather, the MQ chips dont do VT-d, only the HQ iterations. Just weighing up how much I really need that on a laptop. Probably not at all now I think about it.

Nice spec on this one for £1400.

Processor Type Intel i7 4702MQ Quad Core CPU
Processor Speed Up to 3.2Ghz x 8 Threads (Turbo Boost)
CPU Specification 2.2Ghz Standard Clock - 6MB Cache
Hard Drive 1 Seagate 1TB Solid State Hard Drive
Hard Drive 2 1TB Hard Drive (For Storage)
Graphics Processor nVIDIA GeForce GT 750M + Intel HD 4600
Graphics Memory 4GB Dedicated on Card + 4GB Turbocache
GPU Specification 384 Unified CUDA Cores / DirectX 11

Optical Drive
DVD / CD Re-Writer Drive

System RAM
32GB DDR3
RAM Speed 1600Mhz - 128 bit - 25.6GB/s

Screen
17.3" LED Backlit HD+ - 1600 X 900

USB Ports
2 x USB 3.0 , 2 x USB 2.0
 
i7-4700MQ doesn't have VT-d, but 4800MQ and above does, all variants of HQ chips do too.

i7-4702MQ doesn't have VT-d though, not sure how important that is it, but I'm not sure if you really need it since you want a laptop, since VT-d offers hardware PCI passthrough, are you planning on passing through the dedicated graphics card to one of the VMs? (not even sure if that works on laptops, I've seen Quadro/FirePro cards do that, but not GeForce cards)

Also, 1600x900 on a 17" screen makes me cringe, it can be an issue if you're going to be running multiple VMs.
 
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