Advice please on what type of Laptop or PC to buy for chess!

[Teargarden]

Please chess friends I need some advice on what Laptop or PC to buy for my chess analysis! Could you please help me in my choice Thankyou!

[hyatt]

How are you going to use it? While traveling? Plugged in or on batteries? Does weight matter? Physical size? Screen size? Operating system?

Lots of information needed to offer any serious suggestions...

[Jeremy Bernstein]

How are you going to use it? While traveling? Plugged in or on batteries? Does weight matter? Physical size? Screen size? Operating system?

Lots of information needed to offer any serious suggestions...

I just bought a PC based around the 3770K processor. Yes, it's last year's tech, but it's also 1000 EUR cheaper than a 3930K.

Here: http://www.ebay.de/itm/Multimedia-PC-32 ... 893wt_1210

That plus a new graphic card and I'm good to go for a while.

jb

[hyatt]

My laptop is fixing to become a mac airbook. Get too many microsoft files sent to me, and openoffice is not quite keeping up well enough. Will be interesting to see how this works, but at least the airbooks run bsd unix, so it starts on a good O/S platform...

More later, after it arrives and I use it a bit...

[Jeremy Bernstein]

It also depends a little bit on what you want to do. I've been using my Macbook Pro with a Parallels VM containing a Windows 7 install & all of my chess software for years. The VM approach is great, speed is generally very good (and I have an SSD in the laptop, so it's even better than most), and I get to have my Mac (work/life) and PC (chess) worlds next to each other. Three problems: First, I'm splitting the processor between the Mac OS and the VM OS -- my particular MBP has 2 physical cores and 4 logical cores due to HT. So I'm not really able to take advantage of multi-processor engines in the VM. Means longer analysis times/lower depth at fixed analysis times. Second, space -- the VM occupies a finite amount of space on my Mac HD, and I have to share it with my other stuff, so there's a constant battle there. Third, chess analysis is very processor intensive. When I turn on HIARCS, for instance, and all 4 logical cores max out, that's it for my already fairly fragile battery life.

For those reasons + an unexpected tax rebate, I decided to buy a dedicated desktop PC system. I'm generally analyzing my own OTB/internet games, so it's not a huge amount of crunching going on all of the time, and the system I'm getting is overkill for my purposes. But that's probably good, since I won't have to be upgrading it over and over again in the near term. A 4-core machine isn't top-of-the line right now, but I can't really justify spending over 600 USD on a processor right now.

Anyhow, maybe you should explain a bit more what exactly you're hoping to use your new system for, what software you've got, etc. I'm sure there are people here who have plenty of good experience to share, if you can give more info.

Jeremy

[ernest]

Here: Multimedia-PC-32-GB-Ram-Intel-Z77-I7-3770K-120-SSD-2TB-HDD

What do you put on the 120GB SSD?

[Jeremy Bernstein]

Here: Multimedia-PC-32-GB-Ram-Intel-Z77-I7-3770K-120-SSD-2TB-HDD

What do you put on the 120GB SSD?

The OS and probably my reference database for ChessBase.

jb

[Teargarden]

Thankyou for your responses chess friends,what I want is a PC or Laptop for Chess analysis,I am not up to speed with all the computer wordings! How many chess engines can you install on a PC or Laptop? And can you play Engine vs Engine? On one PC or Laptop?

[simonhue]

I just bought a PC based around the 3770K processor. Yes, it's last year's tech, but it's also 1000 EUR cheaper than a 3930K.

jb

+1

On ebay (without the HDDs - assuming you want to move those to the new PC) you can get this config (3770K/32G) as cheap as 600 EUR.

If it about laptop/mobile solution - I'm thinking about the upcoming Microsoft Surface Pro tablet that would be able to run any PC software on it (Like chessbase, any engine, etc.) - sounds appealing to me.

[Sean Evans]

Please chess friends I need some advice on what Laptop or PC to buy for my chess analysis! Could you please help me in my choice Thankyou!

Intel Third Generation Quad-Core i7 with as much RAM as you can get.

Cheers,

Sean