Considering IFL90 bare bones

I'm changing jobs and have to turn in my nice macbook pro, so I have been on the hunt for a personal laptop that will handle some gaming.

The 15" size appeals to me for portability as I will eventually use an external LCD with it.

I have been reading alot on the IFL90 and checking prices...the bare bones price for this unit is awesome and I can save a few hundred bucks OR get way more bang for the same buck if I purchase the parts elsewhere and install them myself. The only thing on this model I wish it had was DVI.

I am leaning towards the higher of the two available screen resolutions (1440x900) it sounds like this would be a matte display which is ok for me as I get headaches sometimes with extended periods.

The best price I could find until last night was xoticpc but I recently found the IFL90 on avadirect.com for around $100 less. I have an email into them for the exact specs as they don't have configuration options like most other sites do. They have it listed for $636 which is great but I am waiting to hear back. Has anyone seen prices lower than this?

With my job change I will be getting reimbursed for some vacation days which comes out to a little over $1300 so that is the ball park I am looking at price wise.

Thanks

I think I'm going for it! I just added up the cost and it will be around $1135 with the following specs:

T7500
4Gb G.Skill memory
Seagate Momentus 100Gb 7200rpm hard drive

Barebones IFL90:
15.4" WSXGA GeForce 8600 GT 512mb
DVD multi drive

I could scale back to 2gb of memory and save another $78 making this beast very affordable at just over a grand...but I'm still tosing around the 2gig Idea and 64bit vista.

I feel as if I'm talking to myself today but I have another question.

I have found the IFL90 on the same site I am planing to purchase from with 256mb video memory option. This is half the dedicated memory and $100 less. My question is since BOTH the 256 and 512 can utilize "turbo cache" to reach 1gb is it worth it to go for the 512 over the 256?? At current spec I have my memory maxed at 4gig with the intention of gpu utilizing some it.

As the winter sets in I will play more games. My whole reason right now for even going for a laptop is we have basically stripped all "stuff" from our house while we try and sell it. We went from multiple PC's that I put built to just one that my wife primarily uses. Later on I will most likely be building myself a good desktop. I don't have to save extra money (starting a new job after next week!) but at the same time I still don't want to waste it. So if the performance is negligible between the 512 and 256 I might just save the 100 bucks or maybe use some of that and get the intel memory gizmo that is supposed to help performance.

Ok this time I'll wait for replies

I ended up ordering the barebones IFL90 from a place called avadirect.com it was over $120 less than xoticpc and avadirect included the dvd drive. I don't think I will mind the matte finish I do get headaches sometimes after extended periods. I'll probably end up buying an external LCD at some point also. I have 21" wide at work that is matte and its been great. I ordered all the other components from Newegg so I shouldn't have any issue there. I went for the full 4gb of memory and 64bit vista...see how it goes I guess.

Thanks! I think it will do me just fine. I am looking at what I ordered and it says WSXGA w/ glossy display. I'm thinking that means 1440 which is fine with me.

I got the 512mb, I had read a few things that said just as you mentioned about the difference in memory.

I was really really hoping my barebones would have been delivered the day before thanksgiving but no dice! I have all the components except the IFL90 itself! And all weekend it has been sitting at a depot not 30 minutes away from me. Oh well I will be able to put it together tomorrow and start putting it to use

Well the IFL90 arrived today. I really like it, its not flashy and blinged out but has a simple elegance that suites my taste.

Now the issues: it did not come with a dvd drive...yes I know this is a barebones but I specifically asked about this and was told that yes it would come with one. I also did not add a wireless card as I read that it had mini pci slots available and I still have an atheros sitting here I was going to use....WRONG. The IFL90 uses the mini-mini pci slots. Lastly for some reason I thought I had ordered vista x64 but it never came and does not show up on any of my order slips.

So this is great LOL! Guess I'll have to wait a couple more days for the rest of the parts.

I never got the dvd drive from the company, and when I used their online chat to talk to a CSR the person basically made me feel like an idiot because I was expecting the drive. I got fed up and emailed Justin at xotic, then called and ordered the wifi and dvd drive from him which should be here on the 5th.

I finally did get XP installed this weekend using an external drive...and discovering that I had to disable AHCI in the bios...still need to do some research on this but it is up and running with my basic needs programs...just need to find some time/energy to try some games on it!