GregJ Posted October 25, 2017 Share Posted October 25, 2017 Hey all - it's been a while - currently on the road a lot - with 14 clinics to manage and ensure that we are not killing people and providing quality care is quite a responsibility; as you can imagine not a lot of free time to fly. However, on a night like tonite - I have a few minutes but am not at home - thus my topic. Anyone fly using a laptop? If so specs/brand would be helpful....researching a variety of brands at present budget is around 1600usd and if I ask my wife nicely - up to 2k. Thoughts Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Doug Sawatzky Posted October 26, 2017 Share Posted October 26, 2017 Hi Greg Have a look below. Cheers Doug Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
GregJ Posted October 26, 2017 Author Share Posted October 26, 2017 36 minutes ago, Doug Sawatzky said: Thanks Doug...should have thought to search that out.... Hi Greg Have a look below. Cheers Doug Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Triplane Posted October 26, 2017 Share Posted October 26, 2017 You might want to go to www.dell.com and take a look at the Alienware 17 Gaming laptop. I think they are a good match for P3D/FSX. They are fully configurable and priced right around what you're looking to spend. Whatever you decide be sure it's a laptop designed for gaming. Cooling is a problem on any laptop and as they heat up they will throttle back to keep from overheating - and that's really bad news for something as CPU-intensive as P3D. The gaming laptops cool better than most and that will minimize heat-related performance drops...........The Other Doug Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
paulb Posted October 26, 2017 Share Posted October 26, 2017 A company that I have bought from in the UK is scan - https://www.scan.co.uk/ I realise that you do not live in the UK, but it might be worth your time to visit their site. They do produce gaming pcs and it will give you a useful description of the spec that you might wish to buy. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JimmiG Posted October 26, 2017 Share Posted October 26, 2017 Should work fine on a laptop. Mobile Pascal nearly match their desktop counterparts, so if you go with a 1070 or 1080 you should be good on the GPU side. I would suggest not going with a 4K screen unless you can live with downscaling to a lower resolution in sims/games. At native res, that's simply way too many pixels for anything except a 1080 Ti (Desktop) to drive. 1920x1080 or 2560x1440 (or Ultrawide equivalents) would be better for a gaming laptop, and with such a small screen, the pixel density is still much higher than regular desktop monitors. With the CPU, watch out for so called "i7" CPUs that are really just dual-core with Hyper-Threading: https://ark.intel.com/products/codename/82879/Kaby-Lake#@mobile You'll want a "real" Quad-Core CPU for P3D. Of course, once Coffee Lake mobile and Ryzen mobile come out, the core count on laptops will hopefully increase. Having a 6-core CPU on a mobile platform would be a big advantage in some applications, but P3D works fine on quad-core, too. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Stratocruiser Posted October 26, 2017 Share Posted October 26, 2017 I can confirm that the Alienware 17.3" laptop does run P3Dv4.1 very, very well. I have all the Orbx scenery installed and am running almost all the sliders maxed out. It uses the Intel i7 with 16gb of memory and the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070 card. I use a Logitech Extreme 3DPro stick with twist handle for the rudder and it has a throttle and several push buttons. I also use a mouse and have a second monitor plugged into it. I have the mouse, stick, and headset all plugged into a USB bus and everything runs really smooth. Getting high frame rates of 50's to 80's with all this going on, except at KLAX and KSEA where they fall down into the lo and 16GB w 20's, but again very, very smooth. Walked into Best Buy back in May and took it home, set it up and never have had a problem. I bought it to take on the road during the summer months while visiting children around the country. The only thing it lacks is a large SSD. It is only 125 GB. But the regular hard drive is one TG, so I have P3Dv4.1 installed there. Now for home, I also walked into Best Buy and came home with an iBuypower model 931 with i7 -7700K and 16GBmemory with the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080. I run two 23" monitors, CH Products yoke, throttle quad, rudder pedals and all the Orbx scenery with all sliders maxed out and get frames rates in the 80's to 100's, except again at KLAX and KSEA where the fall down into the 40's. Anyhow, take a look at the stuff at Best Buy. There are several other gaming laptops and desktops available. Howard Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Maurizio Giorgi Posted October 26, 2017 Share Posted October 26, 2017 I use also my laptop HP for this purpose. Specs below, i use anyway only FSX with that and it runs decently in DX10 mode. Not a game laptop but the sim can be run good with some compromise. The issue with laptops that are not specifically designed to play with high demanding games like a sim is that usually the hardware inside prevents the overheating reducing automatically the processor frequency used in that time, so depending the condition you may experience loss of performances respect to when you started the simulator. Intel processors uses the turbo to increase the processor frequency when requested, but at least on my laptop, The HP cool sense monitors the overheat and when this happens you notice that processor works at 60% of his capability, so in this condition the performance drops Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jester945271 Posted October 26, 2017 Share Posted October 26, 2017 Hi Greg, I use a laptop to fly and as Paulb stated above I got it from www.scan.co.uk The laptop I got is the 3XS SLI Cyclone. The SCAN 3XS lab is the custom build lab and I heartily recommend them. My SPEC is as follows Intel Core I7 7700K CPU 64Gb RAM 2 * GTX 1080 GPU A ridiculous amount of storage, my day job is cyber security and I do a lot of work on virtual network design and I do a lot of stuff using my own VM's thus having loads of storage. I also fly with the Oculus and have just started using flyinside. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
porsche Posted October 26, 2017 Share Posted October 26, 2017 I've been using laptops since 2002 using FSX and now P3dV4.1 on a MSI GT73 with I7-7700, Nvidia 8 gig 1070, m.2 drives, 16 gigs ram etc. When home I plug a 34" Dell ultrasharp curved monitor in and it works very well. there is machinery well past this one in horsepower if your budget permits - see post above. Laptops have worked well for me over the years. My only suggestion would be buy as much horsepower as you can....you'll get a much longer service life where flight sims are concerned. One I bought in 2008 I paid $4k for which is a lot of money but I ran that machine till 2012 just fine. I replaced it simply because technology had moved along so much and the performance jump at that time justified the purchase for me. Dave Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Posted October 26, 2017 Share Posted October 26, 2017 For budget under 2,000 USD, laptop with 1060 6GB like my MSI GT72VR does the trick with x64 flight programs Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Stratocruiser Posted October 26, 2017 Share Posted October 26, 2017 I should mention that most of my flying is in mid size mid complex aircraft like the Manfred Jhan C-47v3, so I do not know how it would work with complex aircraft like the PMPG stuff. I do fly the A2A Connie though and that is also very good with my laptop. I am also almost always running Active Sky wx and do a lot of Multy Player flights on line with DC-3 Airways and again, no loss of framerates. Howard Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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