Desktop vs. Laptop

[Grauniad]

Anandtech has an article comparing the price/performance difference between laptops and desktops.

It's a pretty good, 3-page article with a lot of useful information in it. Well worth the read.

It has a useful, less than $1,000 gaming PC build (pretty much along the recommendations I usually make when people ask me about gaming PCs - with the Intel i5 processor rather than the hyper-threaded i7 processor).

There is a really good, if brief discussion of the benefits of SSDs and SSHDs vs hard drives.

The plat de résistance however, is in demonstrating the true superiority of hyperthreading in video encoding, and the incredible advantage the IVB-E processors with their improved memory access and more PCI-e lanes commands over the regular i7-models.

There are other performance graphs, and one should really read the entire article to fully understand everything.

[Grauniad]

For those interested just in the PC configuration, here is what Anandtech suggests:

[Kingo]

Thanks for posting. Will read!

[Blaze]

Why would they recommend Windows 8? I heard nothing but crap about it. :D

[Grauniad]

Why would they recommend Windows 8? I heard nothing but crap about it. :D

Still plays games and it's cheaper than Windows 7. :)

[lich98]

Why would they recommend Windows 8? I heard nothing but crap about it. :D

Still plays games and it's cheaper than Windows 7. :)

But you have to deal with the crap operating system

[Blaze]

Why would they recommend Windows 8? I heard nothing but crap about it. :D

Still plays games and it's cheaper than Windows 7. :)

But you have to deal with the crap operating system

Exactly, you get what you pay for, and I'd pay more to keep Windows 7. ::)

[Kingo]

Everyone hated the layout, which is why there was lots of crap on windows 8.

[theogeer]

8.1 is out soon and it will be a free upgrade from windows 8. For power users windows 8 is actually good once you get a bit of experience with it. There's no real major capability loss, and some of the changes are really good. For example, the new file-transfer dialog is great, I've been wanting something like it for years now.

8.1 will bring back the start button for desktop users and at that point the conversion from 7 to 8 will be pretty painless. 8 is also a bit easier on system resources since it was designed with tablets (and other lower resource) machines in mind.

For gamers there is some downside. Not all peripheral manufacturers have good drivers for windows 8 yet, and I have encountered some games that behave a bit oddly on windows 8. Running them in compatibility mode typically gets around any challenges however.

[TrickyDragon]

the startup time on my windows 8 machine is literally seconds <3