Damn nice!! For Christmas I bought my wife a gaming laptop and looked around at a lot of places. Friend always used ibuypower but they just couldn't beat the builds I was getting, and price that Xotic PC was offering, so I too went with them. Others I did check was cyberpower and the Lenovo Y series, which at the time had a smoking deal on a dual 650m nVidia SLI'd laptop. Ended up going with a Sager (Clevo) laptop from Xotic PC.
Mine ran just under $1500, with an i7, 8gb RAM, and 8970M radeon graphics card. At the time they were having a special to upgrade the graphics card, and the performance jump going with AMD versus nVidia was too good to pass up!
Their communication, and customer service were bad ass, and I'd recommend them to anyone looking for a gaming laptop.
For those of you who were interested in the Aorus rig I picked up a few weeks back, I have been running it through its paces lately to see how it works. First off, let me reiterate that XoticPC the distributor I used for the machine as well as for a lot of other high end gaming companies/ rigs (e.g., Razor, Alienware etc) were absolutely top notch. I would use them again in a heartbeat.
With that out of the way the Aorus X7 v2:
The good
- Screaming fast (SLI 860M netted deep 7000 scores in 3d Mark 11 for me - Their claims for 9000+ are not far fetched under ideal conditions as I was running a bit hot at the time - more on that later
- Beautiful form factor - I love the look of the machine, the shape, layout of the full keyboard and design plus the aluminum chassis make the whole package sexy as hell. Overall it is less than inch thick at its widest and about 6 lbs
- Excellent storage - 3 SSD 256 gig machines defaulted to Raid 0 plus a 1TB 7200 are impressive of a machine this size
- The keyboard - the Steel Series keyboard has an amazing tactile feel with just the right amount of 'click' to them. It comes with 5 macro keys down the left hand side and customizable back-lighting
- Peripheral ports - It has 5 USB ports as well as a full size HDMI out port
The Indifferent
- The screen is night and bright, which is good, with a resolution of 1920X1080 which isn't bad, but not 'top end' either
- The on board speakers are solid and can fill a good size room with no issue, but are not stand out in sound quality
The Bad
- Bringin the heat - Under low load, the machine is warm to the touch, under heavy load the little bastard will make my balls sweat from a half a foot away. A cooling pad is pretty much required tender to play visually intense games (e.g., Star Citizen alpha with its combination of intense visuals and unoptimized code will bring the whole laptop to the point where you will think they have used to the aluminum case as part of the heat sinking mechanism... and maybe they have
- Bringin the noise - Likewise, under heavy load (again SC alpha as my example) when both the graphics cards fans are ramped up as is the laptop fan, it is loud as hell. Under normal load though it is completely silent.
- Price - It was not a cheap machine ($2700 for the model I bought)
- Battery - Awful battery life. Not shocking, but basically you need to keep the adapter with you unless you are only doing something for 2 hours
Overall
- Overall I am extremely impressed with the machine. It looks good, sounds good, runs and feels amazing. I was expecting it to be hot under load (it is micro thin and running in SLI -- not sure how you could not see that coming) and the fan noise, while annoying under load is non-existent in all but the highest end current games so does not bother me too much. I have a good cooling pad though and would definitely recommend the same for anyone thinking about one of these machines as a primary computer. My only wish is that the battery were a bit longer life. I get why it sucks, I am just not happy about it!