Ostriig on 24/9/2010 at 13:30
The HP already has a 7200rpm HDD, no change needed there, it's the thousand pound Asus which ships with the 5400rpm. As for SSDs, they're just way too expensive still. To put a small one in addition to the standard HDD, if the chassis has a spare bay, might be an idea worth flirting with while accepting a tradeoff to battery life, but having to use one as the only storage would be murder. At what appears to be a roughly (
http://www.aria.co.uk/Products/Components/Hard+Drives+%28SSD%29/) £2/GB ratio, a decent 200GB on the portable would cost as much as my old Acer altogether.
I wonder though, more as an academic point I guess, would using a 7200 instead of a 5400 significantly affect battery life? Or was it heat that drove Asus to equip that high-end machine with the latter type?
Renzatic on 24/9/2010 at 17:53
Quote Posted by Ostriig
I wonder though, more as an academic point I guess, would using a 7200 instead of a 5400 significantly affect battery life? Or was it heat that drove Asus to equip that high-end machine with the latter type?
It'll affect heat and battery life, but not so significantly that any laptop maker has to go with 5400RPM drives to keep the the things running longer than 45 minutes or bursting into flames. On a random I pulled these numbers out of my ass guesstimation, I'd say that a 7200 RPM will cost you an extra 5 degrees F in heat, and 20 minutes of battery life during regular use.
And the reason that laptop doesn't have a 7200 RPM option (which is stupid) is because it's marketed and geared as an entertainment PC. Watching movies and listening to music on a 7200 RPM drive doesn't offer you any significant advantages over a 5400, and it helps save a tiny bit of battery life. It's a dumb move on Asus' part, but I guess they're just providing only what they think most people will need with that particular model.
Ostriig on 24/9/2010 at 20:52
Thanks for the info, that makes sense. Further digging on Google's giving me answers all over the place, people are suggesting different losses ranging from ten minutes to half an hour. Dunno what to say, half an hour's nothing to sneeze at.
Gonna have to look around and see if I've got any shot at unloading my Extensa for some 200 quid, then maybe I could bring the Asus into the cards. I've seen comparable units up on Ebay for that kind of money, though I've never used Ebay, and a couple of second-hand online buy sites have given me hypothetical quotes in the 120-170 range, I figure they'd expect to make a fair bit on top of that. Suppose I've got two Unis I can put the word out in, but I'm skeptical on that.
Ostriig on 29/9/2010 at 20:03
Okay, allow me to ask for advice once again on this issue - I'm scraping together the money for the Asus N53. I mean, fuck it, I've got a couple of kilos I'd like to lose anyway, right? But now, since we're talking about a whole lot of Queen's money, I really wanna make sure I make the best of it. So here's the deal...
The only current model available is the N53Jn, and I went in to see one of these live and it's pretty fucking sweet. However, I hear rumour that Asus is to soon expand the N53 series with another three models with variations on the specs, including among the options a rockin' GeForce 425M as well as full HD screen. Now, that graphics card is very attractive for future-proofing purposes, since it supports DX11 and Shader Model 5. So, provided the rest of the specs are on par with the current N53Jn, and hypothetically, in a best case scenario, it's only marginally more expensive then it would be very appealing.
But the key issue is the screen. It's not the dot pitch, or some full HD snobbery that makes me consider it, I've seen the standard 1366x768 and it's fine. What makes the other potentially attractive is the "larger space" for web, not sure how else to put it, and also the possibility of some improved viewing angles, we'll see. On the downside, though, one immediate shortcoming is that if I want a sharp image in games I'll have to run them on the higher native res. The other thing I'm concerned about is, at long last, my question with this post - would this higher res screen on its own draw significantly more power, would it noticeably reduce battery life compared to the lower res one? I'm not talking about the power going through the GPU for games, just about regular work, text editing, coding, and web browsing.
Oh, and of course, in the event that anyone knows anything about the upcoming N53JF/G/Q please do share. :)
