Moving jobs in just over a month, and my new boss has asked me what kit I want, and has given me a £1200 ex-VAT (£1440 incl-VAT) budget with Insight for a new laptop. I'm querying if it has to be a laptop (everyone seems to get them for work these days) as I've always had desktop workstations (my current rig is a Scan 3XS build with 3 x 24" displays), but I'm preparing myself for the good old "company policy" response. My workload is going to be that of a typical sysadmin, so VirtualBox VMs, source code repositories, terminals and multitasking - I'm unsure if the company uses Exchange or Gmail (they've just been sold by Microsoft, so I'm guessing Office365). Spec-wise, I'm guessing quad-core will be out of the question (every laptop I've found so far has an i7-5500U stuffed inside it), but 8GB or 16GB of RAM would be nice. SSD is an absolute must, 256GB of larger ideally. Pretty much a "mobile workstation". I'm trying to tear myself away from the 15" Retina MacBook Pro, because I'd love to be able to daisy-chain DisplayPort monitors but (AFAIK) the MBPs only support DP 1.1a, not DP 1.2. Any suggestions?
I've read good things about the Dell XPS 13, which is in your budget. 512GB SSD, 8GB RAM, i7 (albeit a dual core, hyperthreaded one) and 3200x1800 screen. The SSD is M.2 so could be upgraded in the future, however the RAM is soldered. For me that is a deal breaker but might not be the same for everyone.
It doesn't seem that the 5xxxQM chips are at all in laptops yet so we've had to get Dell E5550s with the 5500U chip and 16GB ram... And honestly they aren't that bad. Couple it with a decent SSD, advanced dock, two external monitors and you'll be happy I reckon. Having said that I'm unsure if you can get this on Insight!
I use a dell m4800 for work. I have ran (I think) 3 external displays along with its own. Nice keyboard, touch pad is fine but I don't use it. It has 4 cores and 8 threads. (its a 3 or 4 thousand series intel cpu) There is room for multiple hard drives and up to 32GB of RAM. Its not the most mobile of things, but it's as close to a desktop as you can get in a laptop. I have a similar type work load to yourself and it just eats through it frankly. It hasn't skipped a beat since I've got it. Edit: I'm sure you have thought of this already but if your supplier doesn't have the laptop you want on their site they could probably source it for you if you contact them
any other requirements, battery life, size etc. I got my laptop from these people, and this might be sort of what your after 15.6" 1080p IPS screen (also 3k and 4k screen options). i7 4720MQ (quad core). 16GB RAM (with 2 slots free), GTX 965m, 1TB HDD (with another 2.5" bay spare) 250GB m2 ssd (and another m2 spare) for £1054 inc VAT has 2 miniDP and HDMI (dp 1.2 according to these specs) I got a cheaper model, and happy with it, not the smallest/lightest, and had some slight issues with the amount of time it took for them to ship the order. should also add that I re-pasted the GPU/CPU and got much better acoustic performance (still gets hot when gaming (90c on CPU, 75c on GPU) but outside of gaming loads most of the time the fan is inaudible.
Thanks, though I'm fairly sure I need to use Insight, and work would take a relatively dim view on squandering their cash on a gaming-spec machine Plus I would personally like the guarantee of a full manufacturer's warranty from a reputable marque like Dell, Lenovo, HP etc rather than what looks to be a custom-build
that it can play games in incidental, could always spec it with 980m.... also trying to drive three (4 if you include laptop screen) monitors off the intel graphics sounds painful not sure what their business warranties are like. but might be worth enquiring at least. also gonna just smirk quietly about dells being reliable (and HP for printers, not used PCs by them so cant say anything there) [edit] cant say I was looking for it specifically, but this asus popped up on scan, though it doesn't specify the DP version. and from waht I'm seeing only a few of the gaming laptops have DP, and none of the "business class" (they only need VGA for projectors anyway......)
Three monitors is fine unless you want to use the power for 3D. Hell, USB3 can drive 1080p displays for text-based work, but DisplayLink drivers for Linux are (or at least were) horrifically bad. My point is that known marques aren't going anywhere and as a business, we'll more likely have some "pull" with a larger organisation that is set up for B2B work (also the reason why we use sites like Insight rather than Scan/eBuyer). Having worked in industry for both large and small companies, the consumer RMA is rarely enough - most manufacturers provide on-site support for example. Every laptop I've looked at has either a mDP or HDMI port, and only Lenovos generally have VGA ports these days, especially in the Ultrabook market - not sure where you've been for the last few years? The XPS 13 looks pretty decent, I should be able to daisy-chain displays via DP 1.2 but I'm unsure if the GPU will have enough grunt for two FHD displays.
Might be worth seeing if you can convince work to spend at the dell business outlet. A lot more bang for your buck. Pretty sure I saw some real quad cores on there recently. Plus u get proper dell nbd warranty. (Always been excellent in my experience.) I almost bought the xps 13 but the soldered memory put me off. Have a look at the latitude 7440 / 7450. Good solid machines.
http://www.uk.insight.com/en-gb/productinfo/laptops-and-notebooks/0004625656-00000001 Your company pricing will be different, but spend the difference on a monitor* and a mouse and keyboard or something. *or 2 monitors and a ThinkPad OneLink Adaptor
The only quad I can see in your price range is the Macbook on that website https://www.uk.insight.com/en-gb/se...0&C=C-1015&lang=en-gb&SB=lpd&PS=10&P=15&all=y
If you're priced out of quad core and discrete graphics isn't a requirement, are you sure you want to be looking at workstation class laptops? This is coming from someone that has a beast of a workstation class laptop at the moment (Lenovo W540, specced to the nth degree) and can't wait until a new "lesser" laptop (T450s, also specced to the nth degree) arrives at my door on Thursday. Looking at the specs online of something like the W540 is misleading, everything about it is huge (apart from the battery life, despite a comical 100Wh capacity) - the power, the weight, the thickness, the footprint, the PSU, the noise and heat. It's just not a practical option for working on the go, or even transporting on a daily basis IMO unless you need it's capabilities in some way. And since the reasons you might choose a mobile workstation spec are off the cards, why not opt for something a bit more svelte with a similar spec? Take the T450s for example (for no other reason than having just ordered one I know a bit about the specs) - comparable in size with a MBP15, a fair bit lighter, can be specced up to an i7-5600, 20GB and 1TB+256GB SSDs, which is nothing to sniff at. In fact the only thing you list that would benefit from any more grunt than a entry-specced ultrabook is virtualbox, depending on what you're running - and there it's a far better option to spin them up in a lab assuming it's available, unless you need VMs on the go. Of course, if the laptop is going to live docked in the office at all times, feel free to ignore this
