How can any of you possibly play dwarf fortress if you fail to look past the exterior or something and look at the beautiful engine it's running.
That laptop has a processor that is much better than most computers have right now, a Intel Core 2 Extreme, and not a bad one either- 2.53ghz. For a lap top, that's pretty amazing. Not to mention it can also have:
Dual Nvidia Geforce GTX 280 2gb (each) with Sli.
17'' 1920x1200 res screen.
8gb of dual channel, 1333mhz ram
512gb (solid state) or 1tb 7,200rpm hard drive.
And a dual layer blu-ray player to go with it. The fact is, it's an amazing machine. It's better than a lot of comps and you can carry it where ever you go. Much like dwarf fortress. If you're going to play it, you have to get over the aesthetics; and for people who can't, you can get it in different colors, too. .
No, just no.
First of all, the QX9300 is a year old. It still costs $1000. You know what else costs $1000?
An intel i7, which can run at 3.2ghz. It's definitely not the most powerful option out there.
"Dual NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 280M, 2GB – SLI® Enabled" means two GTX280M's running at 1GB each. SLI doesn't give a flat increase in performance, it's more like a 0-40% increase or so (depending on software). It also has a voltage consumption of 150W. My more average 9600M GT, which can run recent games at medium quality consumes 23W, and it already creates a decent amount of heat. Imagine what 150 is going to do, on top of being huge and bulky.
Benchmarks have shown that having 8GB of RAM is actually slower than 4GB (dual channel) or 6GB (triple channel) is almost all cases. There's no game out there that would benefit from 8GB of RAM.
The SSD is all right (incredibly overpriced though). The oversized 1TB hard drive is just going to add weight, heat, and power consumption. They're also trying to sell RAID 0 without a dedicated RAID card (the good ones go over $200). Yeow.
Blu-ray drives on a laptop is way overrated. Rip it onto a portable hard drive, and you can watch it on anything.
All in all, it's a firebreathing, power-hungry ten-plus-pounder that will barely fit in a backpack. It'll also be plagued by its abysmally short battery life and be tethered to a wall socket anyway.
For that price point, I can build two desktops that are far more powerful, and still have lots of money to spare.