I was asked by a friend what recommendation I would give for a high-end notebook.
For him, CPU and graphics performance are more important than the question OS X or Windows (the fool!). Price was also an issue (of course). He was under the impression he would get more ‘bang for the buck’ purchasing a Windows notebook.
That intrigued me and I set out to compare (as close as possible) the prices for:
Apple’s 17″ MacBook Pro, Alienware’s Area-51 m9750 and Dell’s XPS M1730.
Here their configurations:
Apple MacBook Pro
Mac OS X
2.5GHz C2D
2GB Memory
NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT 512MB
200GB 7,200RPM HD
17″ 1920×1200 LED
$2,949.00
Alienware Area-51 m9750
Windows Vista Ultimate
2.33GHz C2D
NVIDIA GeForce 8700M GT
17″ 1920×1200 LCD
(all the other parts are the same as the MacBook above)
$2,963.00
(the same configuration as the Alienware above)
$2,809.00
Looking at these numbers, I did recommend to get the Apple… mainly because of the build quality, the better portability, the LED screen (instead of LCD), and design. (For completion’s sake – when getting the Apple one has to add the cost of Windows Vista as well – OEM versions go for ~$190 for Vista Ultimate)
But, I also mentioned this system – mainly if he had any more money to spent, he could go with a Dual SLI graphics card setup and a RAID HD setup. Apple doesn’t anything like that:
Dell XPS M1730 (Fully pimped edition)
Windows XP Professional (no drivers for Vista yet (haha!))
2.8GHz C2D Extreme
4GB Memory
NVIDIA SLI Dual GeForce 8800M GTX 1GB
400GB (2×200GB RAID) 7,200RPM HD
$4,729.00
So if performance is the only goal, spend the money and get the biggest pimped out Dell you can afford. Software is also worth a mention – the Mac versions of some pro software is likely to be not as optimized as their Windows counterpart (AliasWavefront Maya, 3D Studio Max, Avid, etc…). So it’s worth checking into that as well.
But now we would enter a price range where a power desktop would be in the cards… oh, let’s not go there 
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