<p>Any opinions, especially on the difference between the Quadro and the GeForce for gaming?
I am also thinking of adding an external monitor for use in my dorm.</p>
<p>If you can afford it go for the W520. It has an almost perfect balance between weight, battery life, and power. That graphics card will eat games and professional software alike. The keyboards are legendary (typing on a Thinkpad keyboard now :)). The ONLY downside is cost.</p>
<p>Ah an F 3D. I have an F11 - these things may still (sorta) apply to you: </p>
<ul>
<li><p>The Vaio vents out the side. This is common, but on a laptop where the alpha keypad is offset to the left and you actually plan to use it on your lap, you’ll find it exhausting into your left leg often enough. </p></li>
<li><p>The paint will probably fade off in heavy use areas (like the palm rest). May not be an issue on the F 3D since it’s… black.</p></li>
<li><p>Battery life on the F11 is approximately 2 hours - 2.5 for light web browsing with the screen on lower brightness and 1.5 playing crysis. Not much difference lol. </p></li>
<li><p>The F11 has a damn good keyboard - it’s 95% of a MacBook Pro’s keyboard, and pretty darn good (I’ve had thinkpad keyboards, they are fine too).</p></li>
<li><p>The trackpad on the F11 does feel nice, but do not be fooled - it’s a piece of *@#% Alps model that has the worst Linux driver known to man </p></li>
<li><p>Sony laptops are seldom successful at running OS X</p></li>
<li><p>You may find the power supply causes the lights to flicker at certain times (particularly those when the computer is on, battery is charged, and nothing is being done on the computer). It’s a really weird feature of the power supply. :</p></li>
</ul>
<p>I was going to say the same thing, I have no idea why so many people use laptops as a desktop replacement, the whole point of them is to be portable, where you don’t need to spend a lot of money. At the price of that Lenovo W520 you’re considering, you could buy a gaming desktop that has far more power than that laptop, and still have money left over to get a cheap laptop/netbook.</p>
<p>This makes sense when you’re talking about a mid-priced laptop, but when you get over $1000, it really makes no sense to get one laptop. At about that price point and above, a desktop + cheap laptop combo is by far the best option.</p>
<p>Not hardly, a nice DIY or even factory build will go well over $1000 very fast depending on what you want in it.</p>
<p>For some reason when it comes to builds people always forget things like Windows licenses and a decent power supply, or love the “I’ll just pull it out of my old computer” excuse :S</p>
<p>Get a desktop and a cheap netbook… Im on my 2nd HP mini as the last one died on me in the steam room. It is great to have a cheap little computer with long battery life that you dont have to worry about.</p>
<p>A Shuttle small form factor simplifies DIY builds, college students can get $10 Windows 7 licenses fairly easily, and some of the later Shuttles can take double width graphics cards with no problem… I’m typing this on a pumped-up Shuttle as we speak.</p>
<p>Many schools have deals with Microsoft for academic discounts - check with your school’s IT or bookstore. Most of the larger schools have similar deals ($10 download and $20 buy disk).</p>
<p>I’d recommend just going with a laptop/desktop combination.
Bring the laptop when you fly and endure low graphics gaming.
intel’s HD integrated graphics and sandy bridge and arrandale can run a lot of games on low settings.</p>
<p>Quadro is not a gaming GPU.
Get geforce or radeon.</p>