Nooo come back, come back I tell you! *waves fist in the air*

Only kidding Tom.

Stuart, I have done as you asked and looked on the internet.

These are the 15" laptops that Amazon sell. There is over a hundred of them. The Apple products seem to be at high end of what they sell. Can you tell me which of the others are so good that they relegate the Apple stuff to "mid range at best"?

Amazon list of 15" laptops

For the love of...CC, maybe have another read of what I've posted on this thread earlier.

Think you might be looking in the wrong place.

Try here :

http://www.rockdirect.com/viewNotebook. ... REME%20SL8

That is the worlds fastest laptop too. When that magazine in the States proclaimed the Macbook Pro the 'fastest' what they meant (forgot) to say, was it was the fastest they'd tested not 'the' fastest. Although I don't think that Rock was in production then, Rock were making laptops at that time also that made the MBP look like an EEE PC, speed and spec wise.

Still the battery life probably isn't so great and they are probably portable in the sense a wheelbarrow full of lead is portable, and how do you like your nuts ? Dry roasted ? They should rename those 'laptops', nomex bench tops. I'd take my Unibody Macbook over one of these, for the simple reason the battery lasts loads longer, its lighter and if I want to play games I have a gaming PC at home.

Could you tell which northbridge chipset(s) they used?

I've been curious to find out ever since they were launched, but for some reason nobody seems to have taken one apart - despite the fact that full teardowns of the, much harder to disassemble, laptops tend to appear within days.

It is X58 believe it or not. Technically speaking the 'Northbridge' is now what Intel call the 'IOH' or Input Output Hub. Where previously Intel branded the 'Northbridge' the MCH, Memory controller hub, on Nehalem the memory controller has been moved to the processor.

The IOH they are using is the 82X58 with a 1295 Flip Chip Ball Grid Array. A similar setup to what is used on the Core i7 desktop boards. In fact I believe now (although only seen inside an 8 Core), the 4 core is basically just using what looks suspiciously like a regular ole Core i7 Desktop board, which presumably (like previous Core 2 boards) also supports Xeons. Another exercise in cost cutting, along with its limitation to only run 8gb ram max. I think when the next Mac Pro comes out, further cost cutting will have taken place and I expect to see either, 'ASRock' or 'Tesco Value' on the board.

I would class the Mac Pro as a high end desktop...How many other desktops are out there which offer more than 8-cores, more than 32GB RAM, more than 4TB of hard drive space? OK, that last one is probably easy to out do...But you get my drift...

The MacBook Pro isn't necessarily a high end laptop, but it's sold as such and the people that buy them are very happy with them. Are they idiots? No, I know a guy who maintains operating systems for a living, he's no idiot when it comes to technology, yet he's still buying a MBP soon, because he likes the brand, he's happy with the quality he gets and he's happy with the way it performs, he likes the functionality of the laptop for the price.

The 8 Core is more or less high end, but the best vid card option is a bit old now, the 4870. They could have at least used the 1gb version as the 512mb verison is compromised somewhat. The 4 Core Pro as its been 'extra valued' is no more than mid range.

I must admit, I'm upset at the price increase since the new Nehalem chips have been installed, I was set to buy a previous 8-core for £1,500 then upgrade graphics and add wifi/bluetooth...But now my price jumps to £2,000 before adding things like wifi/bluetooth or a different gfx card...

Nehalem is poor value right now on everything from a desktop motherboard to an Apple or HP Workstation.

Isn't the X58 a single QuickPath Interconnect part, surely they'd need to use one of the dual QPI IOH parts to support dual processors? I'm also, assuming that I'm reading the Mac Pro spec page correctly, slightly curious about how they manage to get 40 PCI-E 2.0 lanes. Wish I had one play with...

40 lanes means 2 x16 slots and 2 x4 slots, adding up to 40 lanes total.

All X58 boards, even those with just one cpu socket, have two QPI's which can utilise two processors. As the X58 has two QPIs, it can directly connect to two processors on a multi-socket motherboard or form a daisy chain like connection (1st processor - x58 - x58 - 2nd processor - 1st processor). When used with the Intel Core i7, or other single cpu setups, the second QPI is usually unused, though, in principle, the second x58 might be daisy-chained also.

I think this is to aid overclocking for the 'Turbo Nutter' types. Having a daisy chained dual QPI on a single socket board can stop the frequency bouncing around with a greater delta between min and max if there is too little voltage to the PLL.

The upcoming Skulltlrail Board to replace the existing skt 771 Xeon board with also use X58.

http://arstechnica.com/hardware/news/20 ... on-x58.ars

You have confused me. You say Apple stuff is not high end but you don't give examples of things that are. I was only making the point that Apple sales are doing well at the moment and that means that sales for Apple computers (which are not the cheapest) are doing well. This must mean that computers at the high end of the spec. range still have customers.




You made a point of saying I was wrong, but you have been less clear as to why you think I am wrong. Can you spell it out a little more simply?

I must be really dumb, I can't even SEE a 15" laptop on that site.

High end laptops don't have 15" screens.