Should i buy the m9700?

All I have to say is you can't go wrong with the m9700. Im using mine as primarily a gaming machine and so far it has taken every game I've thrown at it with maxed settings at my native res. I've run Oblivion, FEAR, RoN and CS:S maxed out( although I run source at 1600 x 1200). While playing these system taxing games my GPU temps have never risen above 80 C and all the heat is blown out the back. All the control surfaces are cool to the touch. Wireless is fast enough to play CSS online with good ping, but thats with my airgo card,if you choose the standard card in sure it will still be reasonably fast.

My main gripes about the system was that I'm not too impressed with the the onboard sound. The front mounted speakers don't give enough sound depth and the subwoofer buzzes sometimes. I got mine with the ozma headphone and they rock, good 3d sound enough to tell where footsteps in CSS are comming from. For me the touch pad feels like its got too much friction. Other than that the system is perfect.

I got the same config which is maxed out. Its as good as you can get. Can't wait for BF2142 and MTW 2. If RTW was any comparison I ran a 8 way FFA battle with over 9000 soldiers on the field, my system didnt even flinch

If I were you I would wait a little while and get the 512 mb cards when they come out, or go the way of mALX. That would greatly improve performance.

Nobody really knows the score on the Turion X2 in the m9700 - the X2 requires a different socket to the plain ol' Turion, so it would require a whole new motherboard.. The cooling is probably too marginal to cope with a dual core CPU too - that's not to say it can't cool the single core perfectly well, however.

I have decided to wait until the X2 comes out for the 9700....its the next plausible thing for them to do...and my luck..I have waited 14 months to buy one and then I buy it today and next month they come out with the X2..so I am holding off until then...

I would say go for the bigger resolution screen, if you into gaming.

The screen won't affect performance, but you can scale down the higher resolution screen, you can't scale up the lower res screen...

I ordered the higher res screen (1920 x 1200) because SLI benefits you more the higher the resolution and settings. The higher the resolution, the better the game is going to look, but the slower the frame rate.

I understand the m9700 can play most current games at native resolution with the high res screen, so that's the way I went.

I'm sure the lower res screen is fine, costs less, and at the lower native resolution will give you better frame rates than the higher resolution screen. You can scale down the higher res screen, but the further you move from the native resolution, the less sharp the picture will be. This is usually only important with text and things like that, it won't noticeably affect the appearance of games if at all.

I would recommend going with the high res, my games have never looked better

I have the ML-40 2.2ghz, 2 gigs ram, and the 7800 in sli, all with the 1400 x Whatever screen, and I can assure you that any game you play that is currently out will look WA WA WEE! Currently I can play BF2, HL2, HL2 Lost Coast, and Oblivion all at 1280x1024 with EVERYTHING (including AA/AF [ bf2-aa 4x is max, hl2 aa 16x is max ]) and i run smooth as butter. And not just in single player, but in 32/64 player servers. With the "lower res" screen, I have no complaints.

LOL!

Darklink: wait another week for the 512 dual SLI on the 9700...

the m9700 rocks!

mine is in the shopp... just a problem with the connection to the screen

but even soo, i miss her soooooo much =)