I'm seriously tempted...

[robkelk]

... to spend $3000+ on a laptop.

Review of the Dell Precision 7530 and Precision 7730

An entry-level 7530 lists for $1200; upgrading to a 7730 and adding in all the bells and whistles bumps the price up above $3000.

I know the specs of Dell's current line of 1U rack-mounted servers, and a 7730 laptop with all the bells and whistles comes pretty darn close to them: six-core Xeon E-2176M CPU @ 2.70GHz, either 3-SSD RAID 5 array and 2TB HDD or 4-SSD RAID 5 array, 64 GB RAM (128GB if Dell starts shipping 32GB DIMMs). And with a NVIDIA GPU, this is a good gaming or 3D-rendering box, too. EDIT: Oh, and MIL-STD-810G ruggedization comes standard.

Does anyone know of any reason not to get one, other than the price?

[Epsilon]

How does it handle heat?

[robkelk]

Good question - and the Dell website doesn't have an easily-located answer.

Also: no optical drive.

(I played with the system customizer on the Dell website. I can't have the extended battery and a second drive, which is annoying in a chassis with four drive bays - what's the point of getting RAID if you can't rely on the box being available for hours? A high-end but not highest-end box with a docking station would set me back $5,690.34 Canadian after tax. A lower-end-but-still-impressive box with one HDD and no docking station would set me back $2,713.55 Canadian after taxes.)

[Labster]

People still use optical drives? My guess is that you'll use it infrequently enough that you don't need it internally; you can get an external one for less than $100 and use that when you need it.

[robkelk]

I have to buy the media in order to get the license to download audio from non-pay sites. I'm bloody well going to use what I pay for.

[classicdrogn]

Optical media is still useful for data backups, especially for backing up your system install in case you need or want to nuke it and start over. Being able to run your favorite flavor of *nix from a liveCD is nice too. I think they still sell games on physical media too, right? It's not all downloadables yet?

<--(Hasn't bought a PC game since Transformers: War For Cybertron...)