Desktop in a rig

What service is best to use for OTR Laptops?

 

I build lots of these. It certainly can and is done all the time. But several of the answers you have gotten bring up most of the legit points.

Liquid cooling is not a good idea in a moving platform. Modern gear runs cooler than ever and at lower power than before. It will be fine on air, especially if you are not overclocking.

But you said the magic words "top of da line gaming." When people tell me that, they actually mean "best gear I can get for PC gaming under $X dollars." If you have an unlimited budget, then you could spend about $4500 on the laptop or about $3000 on a desktop to build one that plays released games on Ultra and be futureproof for several years even if you have to set some things to "high" down the road.

If you do not have an unlimited budget then you could do a good gaming desktop for around $1400 - $2000, or a good gaming laptop for around $2000 - $2500. This would play all older games on Ultra, most new release games on at least "high," and be future-proof for several years on "medium and high" gaming settings.

If you are going the gaming laptop route then I would recommend something like the Asus ROG G751 to stay in the $2000 range or the Alienware 18 with an SSD for about $4 grand range.

If you are going desktop, then I would recommend building it yourself off NewEgg. If you are not a builder then there is a good article on Tom's to get you some ideas for prebuilts here: http://www.tomsguide.com/us/best-gaming-pc,review-2219.html

Do you have an inverter or an APU? Power is the big challenge on the desktop route, but not so much on the laptop route. A high-end gaming laptop will pull 300-400 watts while extreme gaming (not overclocked) and a high-end desktop will pull anywhere from 500 watts to 1000 watts depending on whether it has single or dual video cards (not overclocked.)

SSD is a very good idea regardless and the prices have come down dramatically.

If you take out the word "gaming" from the conversation then this post does not apply. You can get a budget laptop for non-gaming for $200 and a decent non-gaming laptop for $500.

Hope that gives more food for thought. But yes, desktops can and are in trucks. Need stable power and some space, good components, to be the most successful with it.

 

Get a laptop with a 100gb SSD, if need want a CD drive get a external, I hardly ever use mine anymore.

Then get large external HDD to store everything else on, that drive will last much longer & Seagate have a awesome wireless one now also.

This will keep your laptop cooler & it will run faster also.

 

Surge protector = cheap. A standalone UPS (battery backup) = $135 to $200 in the wattage rating you would need. Since you have a "huge amount of power available" then I would just go with a $20 or $30 surge protector. You could always get a UPS later if you found some compelling need for it out there. The other reason for a UPS would be if your truck engine (or APU) momentarily cuts the accessory power when starting or stopping (I've seen some do it and some do not depending on brand.)

So with that said, if I was going to do a gaming laptop, I would go with something like one of these (for price-verses-gaming-longevity) here is an excellent comparison and article at PC Mag

For desktops, my building philosophy on gaming machines when building is "one smidge below" the newest, fastest because the price curve jumps dramatically at that last step (i.e. THE fastest processor, THE fastest video cards, etc.) And I pick components that have great over-clocking "headroom" so that I can crank them up if needed down the road.

Here is a quick cart I just filled at NewEgg for example:

Antec Twelve Hundred V3 Black Steel ATX Full Tower Unbeatable Gaming Case
• $144.99

GIGABYTE GV-N970WF3OC-4GD GeForce GTX 970 4GB 256-Bit GDDR5 PCI Express 3.0 HDCP Ready G-SYNC Support Video Card
• $349.99

CORSAIR HXi HX1000i Power Supply (CP-9020074) 1000W ATX12V / EPS12V 80 PLUS PLATINUM Certified Full Modular Corsair CP-9020074
• $219.99

G.SKILL Trident X Series 16GB (2 x 8GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 2400 (PC3 19200) Desktop Memory Model F3-2400C10D-16GTX
• $159.99

ASUS MAXIMUS VII HERO LGA 1150 Intel Z97 HDMI SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX Intel Motherboard
• $199.99

Intel Core i7-4790K Haswell Quad-Core 4.0GHz LGA 1150 Desktop Processor BX80646I74790K
• $339.99

SAMSUNG 840 EVO MZ-7TE500BW 2.5" 500GB SATA III TLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD)
• $229.99

Free Game (choose) with this order
NVIDIA Pick 1 of 3 GAMES: Assassin’s Creed Unity, Far Cry 4, and The Crew (Up to $59.99 Retail Value)
• $0.00

Subtotal: $1,668.78
Shipping: $13.85

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The desktop build example above does not include a monitor, keyboard, mouse, or a copy of Windows. If you do not have those from a different build then figure about $2G when finished. But I am running 2 of those GTX 970 video cards on a 4-year-old motherboard and processor and it still absolutely rocks every current game I've tried including Far Cry 4 and Crysis 3 with everything on ultra at 1080p. You could always expand to a second vid card or more RAM later.

Just an example. I have no affinity with any site or brand mentioned here.

 

wonder what dieselboss is going to throw in for a operating system. and how much.

didn't see that in his specs sheet. LOL.

 

Aaaah, very cool! Now that I know the budget, it becomes easier. Here's some food for thought on your build:

- You may find yourself wishing for a higher wattage power supply if you are going with dual video cards. You have a 130 watt processor and those cards can do almost 250 watts each if really stressed. For $50 more I'd get like the Corsair 750 watt at least. Remember that it is only putting out the wattage that the rest of this system is demanding at the time. You'd be NOT stoked if you were experiencing random crashes during extreme video rendering because of a power supply.

- tough call between a socket 1150 and socket 2011 motherboard and processor for sure. Lots of web chatter arguing each. Personally I would go with an 1150 socket and the 4790K processor. (one of many comparison pages.) The socket 2011 board and processor that you have will allow 64gb of Ram (verses 32) and a higher memory bandwidth, but games aren't really memory limited at all at this point - they are GPU and Processor limited. The higher performance of the 4790K would be felt in gaming but the RAM difference would not be. Plus you picked 1333 speed RAM too, so the bandwidth is already choked a bit there.

- Two GTX 980's would not be faster (enough) to justify the price difference over two GTX 970's in my opinion - UNLESS you are going to do 4k. I am running two (of these) on an old X58 socket motherboard that doesn't even support PCIx 3.0 and it is still monstrous. And two of them was a huge framerate difference over one of them (almost double!) And they are dead silent and run cool. Lots of overclocking headroom.

- I also have that same SSD drive and love it.

- (again just my opinion) but you could shave over $100 by using the on-board audio present on most gaming motherboards. Although you could get some small separation or clarity differences with an off-board audio addition, you would not hear it unless you had some extremely high-end speakers in a room environment. Most on-board audio chips are very good now (not like the old days where we all bought secondary audio cards.) You could always add one later (easily) if there was some audio thing making you crazy, but I would bet against it.

Have fun man! I like your thinking.