I Need Recomendations For What To Buy For My Setup!

[PP Mguire]

Thanks Abo, that HP laptop is basically perfect. The only thing I might be concerned about is thermals.

The reason I want such a good processor is because I plan on getting an egpu. It would really suck to buy an amazing gpu and not harness it's full potential because my cpu is holding me down. Also, I'll be going into college with a focus on game design in computer science, so I'll be using programs like Unity and Unreal in the classroom. I want to be sure I can run those at low graphics settings without the egpu. For example, if I want to work on a physics behavior for an object in Unity, I can turn off all textures, lighting effects, etc. and still test out my code smoothly. Then I can test the game with full graphics load when I get home and plug into the egpu.

Although I'll consider my question successfully answered, I'd still love to hear any other reasonable suggestions! Also, once I do get this setup going, I'll definitely start a thread to show it off

The processor speed is the least of your concern when dealing with an eGPU. Latency and minimal bandwidth from the 4x lane is. Another thing with having a high end laptop is maintenance doubles as you need to keep those heatsinks completely clean constantly since you plan to take it with you a lot.

Any moderate quad or hex i7 will do the CPU justice, the 4x lane on the other hand not so much.

 

[AWESOMENINJAWARRIOR]

Mguire you have a good point, even if I have an external monitor I will probably only get 4/5 of the power I could be getting from an egpu. On the other hand, I could much more easily overclock the egpu, and not using the internal gpu could help with cooling.

But you're right, it won't be as fast as a desktop computer.

The only thing about desktops is that you always need a monitor where you go...and they're big, even if I use one of the "portable" cases. I guess I'll reconsider whether I can do without a laptop...

 

[carnageX]

I had a gaming laptop for about 2.5yrs out of the 4.5yrs I was in college. It was nice if I wanted to play games at somebody else's place, and was nice in regards to the portability of power (was pretty overkill for programming, but having the portable power was nice).

BUT - they're heavy, unless you get something like a Stealth or a Razer Blade. My gaming laptops were pry around 11-13lbs, and add in the power brick (because battery life sucks on big gaming laptops), plus any books I needed...I was easily hauling around 20lbs on campus. And it was a PITA sometimes.

A couple I wish I had, were a smaller laptop at times, as well as one with a nice Wacom digitizer that you could do handwritten notes on (handwriting helped me learn better from my notes rather than type).

That said, like I stated previously, having the portable power was nice.

 

[NerdyKiddo]

If you want a very fast powerful gaming laptop Razer has your back. They are very small and portable and super fast. You can get the RTX 2060 with a 9th Gen Intel® Core™ i7-9750H 6 Core (2.6GHz/4.5GHz) and about a 6hr battery life. https://www.razer.com/gaming-laptops/razer-blade/shop
Although your budget is $2,100 I would highly recommend going for the RTX 2070 version in full HD 144HZ for about 2,300. I would highly recommend looking into it!