Open Forum: What's the Best Laptop to Run Second Life?

Since it's Cyber Monday, I bet many SLers are looking at discounts on the latest laptops, thinking about an upgrade. Question is, what's the best laptop for running Second Life at optimal levels? If you have suggestions, please post them in Comments below. I may run an NWN Amazon discount for the most popular choice. Here's some suggested parameters:

• A laptop under $2000, ideally less than $1500
• Less than 2 years old
• Must run the official SL viewer well, not just a 3rd party viewer

I wish I could recommend my Alienware M11x laptop, which I love and bought last year for under $1000, but the latest updates to the SL viewer do not play well with its Nvidia chip. (I took the above screenshot with the Imprudence third party viewer.) Lindens tell me a fix to this problem is coming soon, but until that happens, I'd shop for another model. But which one would that be?

Comments

[adec]

My ASUS G73SW-XA1 runs SL pretty well at max settings.. I tend to only run at full everything when taking photos though, then drop it down for faster fps during normal walking around..

[Hamlet Au]

Cool, how much you get it for?

[adec]

I think it was about $1300 earlier this year from Amazon.

[Scarp Godenot]

I would choose between the ASUS G74Sx A1 and the MSI 780R. These are both serious high end gamer models. The MSI has better sound, a bit more connectivity with eSATA, slightly less heavy, and longer battery life. The ASUS has better cooling and a glossy screen vs the matte screen of the MSI. Both have the same NVIDIA 560 M graphics card. The MSI has a 3 year US and Canada warranty and the ASUS a Two year worldwide warranty.

[Thadicus Caligari]

HP dv7-6157nr can be had for $1099 today with 1080p screen and Radeon 6770m 2Gig. Oh and i7 and 8Gig ram too.

http://goo.gl/gmLAQ

[Todd Borst]

Hamlet shouldn't need to upgrade the laptop he has just to run SL well. My laptop runs all the latest games just fine as well, but when it runs SL, my cooling fans always kicks into overdrive.

I tend to not want to stay in SL for long due to the hardware strain from the heat.

If Linden Labs really wants to lower the barrier to entry for SL, this should be far more important than their interface tweaks.

Part of the reason I don't recommend SL to non-gamer friends is simply because it will run like crap on their computer.

[Hamlet Au]

I hear ya Todd. It's totally demoralizing when my Alienware runs a new high end game like Deux Ex: Human Revolution just great, and then when I launch Second Life, which is 8 YEARS OLD, all I get is a laggy, grayed out mess.

[Orca Flotta]

Much has been said about the differences between high end games and SL. I hope I don't need to repeat all the technical stuff here, but it should be clear even for non-geeks that SL just can't run as smoothly like any game.

So for now I will just repeat my usual old argument: To run SL on a satisfying level you need the bestest hardware/connectivity, period. That means a high powered desktop system.

Laptops, even gamer lappies, will never be more than a compromise.

[The Commizar]

How about the high end 15" MacBook Pro with the AMD Radeon HD 6770M with 1GB GDDR5 Graphics card? That's just shy of $2K with an educational discount.

[Catten]

I run SL on the Alienware M15X and I'm not too happy with it. Even at low settings the fan and heat goes into overdrive, and while I can get some 50fps at max settings, it just isn't worth the heat and noise, so I tend to run it at 15fps in stelth mode. I could have saved lot of money buying a cheeper laptop that could run it just as well at those settings.
Won't reccomend the Alienware for SL use, it just gets too noisy and if you run it long enough and it gets too warm, computer will simply freeze. Sollution is to get another noisy and heavy cooling pad to go with the already heavy laptop and suddenly it feels more like a desktop.

[Mitch Wagner]

Stay far, far away from Macs if you want to run SL well. Lots of bugs and glitches.

[Valentina Kendal]

Boy Mitch, I so don't get that comment. I run Phoenix and Firestorm (Sorry no Viewer 2/3) on a five year old Macbook Pro all the time and never crash, and only rarely do I ever see anyone or anything grey. Now it isn't at the highest end of graphics for day to day use (I enable all that only when taking pictures), but still, far from 'buggy' or 'glitchy' in my experience. When I do switch to the highest graphics settings (antialiasing on, all shaders, all reflections), it's slower, but still no grey or crashing.

[DMC Jurassic]

Hamlet, on a six-core 1100T AMD 990FX using 2 x 580 GTX in SLi with the Second Life 3.2.4 (245787) project viewer:

Nvidia control panel 3D management settings:
Prefer maximum performance; Vsync-Off; Threaded optimization on.

And at the Sci Fi region with Shadows, Windlight, and Ultra Detail, Anisotropic Filtering & 8x Antialiasing, 512m Draw Distance, we are seeing frame rates up to 50FPS and a solid 25FPS in dense areas of the build.

The upcoming "Sci Fi" region inSL(tm) has been optimized for shadows and 90% of the architecture throughout the build utilizes 8x8 textures to reduce GPU memory texture load and keep constant texture caching to a minimum.

I can report that finally inSL from our latest testing with the Nvidia 290 series beta drivers, that SLi multi-gpu appears to be working to provide SL a much needed performance boost (whatever Snowstorm DEV group has done, I hope they don't change or break it ;)

I hope this gives you some idea of SL performance towards the higher end range of modern PC configuration.

No doubt Intel cpu performance for a similar SLi configuration would be even higher.

www.scifipc.com
www.sciencefiction.info
science fiction / sci fi
groups + regions Second Life

[Arcadian Vanalten]

I've heard the MAC thing, too. I was debating switching over, and every last one of my Mac-user buddies (which was several) warned me off of 'em. Valentina hit the nail on the head when she noted that hers works well, but it's 5 yrs old. Newer ones just flat don't play nice w/ SL.

I wonder if part of the problem is, as Hamlet noted, that SL IS in fact 8 yrs old. Maybe it needs a more dramatic overhaul than simply the viewer refits to perform decently? I'm not a computer guru by ANY stretch of the imagination, but is it based on old, outdated tech that can't handle its current evolution?

It's come a long way and outperformed expectations for its longevity and stability as is; I can remember when there were predictions that it would irrevocably crash and have some major meltdown if concurrency ever exceeded 25k, which seems silly now. Heck, there were times when logins were rationed to prevent overloading the servers, which seems to have resolved somehow. However, I wonder if w/ all the workarounds, we're still building skyscrapers on a foundation designed for a modest tract house.

*prepares to be flamed by more knowledgeable computery types*