Hi. I have FSX at home running on an i7 920, with GTX 260, 12 gigs RAM, Samsung 3d Monitor. Runs like a charm. I have FSX on an external drive.I have recently bought a 5th wheel for travelling south in winter, snow birding Canadian. While the rig is 33' and totally comfortable for being on the road, I would like to take my FSX along and be able to fly on occasion.My PC is just too big to handle storing and there is no convenient "office" space to locate all the PC stuff.This brings me to thinking that what I might want to do is invest in a good laptop capable of running FSX with good FPS. I can just plug in my mouse, my joystick and my external drive and be flying quite easily.So can anyone advise me on what I need in the way of a good laptop for flying with FSX?

Alienware are good.

This topic is brought to light occasionally and my recommendation is the Clevo 900f with the Mobile Fermi 480m and desktop class Core I7. Since FSX is CPU dependant its imperative to have the desktop class CPU and the 900f is the only one on the planet to my knowledge. I bought mine before the release of the 480m and I generally have been very pleased. The one downside of the 900f is the inability to clock the CPU through the BIOS, although you can enable Turbo Mode. Hopefully one day this will become a reality, but until then I would suggest going with the I7 960 or 980 if you can possibly swing it. This lappy is a beast at 12 LBS and for all intents and purposes is a mobile desktop replacement. It has a very thirsty appetite for AC power so think of the battery as a UPS good for about an HR at best. The other downside is the steep price especially with the Mobile Fermi. But it will run FSX with all of the popular third party software respectably well.

OK this is helpful, always thankful for you folks taking the time to provide information. I am obviously going to have to do some more research in this area.

I would check out the Asus G73 series. Got mine about 3-4 months ago. It is probably one of the fastest off the shelf laptops available... at a reasonable price. Think I paid around $1800USD for mine. Sure you can pay five grand easily for a faster, custom laptop but not sure what your budget is. The main reason I chose it over others was the specs of course(Intel i7-720, 8GB RAM, two 500GB hard drives, and an ATI 5870 video card with 1TB of dedicated memory, Blu-ray, 1080p LED screen at 17.3 inches, backlit disply), but really the design. It seemed to have the best airflow design of a laptop I've ever came across. Has never gotten hot, barely warm after an hour of flight simming. Also, it offered a two-year "accidental" warranty and regular wear and tear for three years for free! How could I say no to that?I use it for FS9 maxed out as I really don't fly FSX but I did have it running FSX with sliders mid to 3/4 and it seemed to work fine. Maxed out it brought the laptop to it's knees, ha! But that's good ol' FSX. I'm using it as an "in-between" PC until I build my new AMD 6-Core. Then I will probably put this up for sale. Have it connect to a 25" LED Hannsspree and it just luvs it.Just my 2 cents.

I would check out the Asus G73 series. Got mine about 3-4 months ago. It is probably one of the fastest off the shelf laptops available... at a reasonable price. Think I paid around $1800USD for mine. Sure you can pay five grand easily for a faster, custom laptop but not sure what your budget is. The main reason I chose it over others was the specs of course(Intel i7-720, 8GB RAM, two 500GB hard drives, and an ATI 5870 video card with 1TB of dedicated memory, Blu-ray, 1080p LED screen at 17.3 inches, backlit disply), but really the design. It seemed to have the best airflow design of a laptop I've ever came across. Has never gotten hot, barely warm after an hour of flight simming. Also, it offered a two-year "accidental" warranty and regular wear and tear for three years for free! How could I say no to that?I use it for FS9 maxed out as I really don't fly FSX but I did have it running FSX with sliders mid to 3/4 and it seemed to work fine. Maxed out it brought the laptop to it's knees, ha! But that's good ol' FSX. I'm using it as an "in-between" PC until I build my new AMD 6-Core. Then I will probably put this up for sale. Have it connect to a 25" LED Hannsspree and it just luvs it.Just my 2 cents.

well I was thinking that I would need to put down $2,000 for a good laptop. so this is in that range. But I want to run FSX and give it a work out so perhaps I will need to go a bit more.

I bought a studio 17 from Dell for £950 and am setting up withvery good frameratescpu = i7 720QMgpu = 560v ram = 4G 1333Mhz2x320G 7200 disksDisplay : 17.3in High Definition+ (1600X900) TL Multi Touch you can press buttons in the VC on the screen.I run REX2, GEX, UTX, FSdiscover + VFR photo for most of the UK.max everything except water = 2x medium traffic : I am still tweaking - so this is currently off except for cars, ships, etc at 20%I get 30fps locked with basic tweeks (HIMEM and affinity mask),but this is free flight away from big airports as I am still tweakingREX2 with heavy clouds. Tonight I will try JFK.It is quite a clean system with little crap-ware, i use msconfig tokill various stuff, and use mydefrag to heavily defag the FSX disk.It runs quite cool - am using to "realtemp" to check the core tempsand they run to about 55C at full load which is not too bad.Just don't talk to sales at Dell :(

I am still wallowing around in this decision. Saw a dell flying in my local paper on the weekend. There was lots of low end stuff, mostly for back to school, kids. Your suggest sounds like what I would be looking for or need to keep me happy while on the road. Thanks.

I am still wallowing around in this decision. Saw a dell flying in my local paper on the weekend. There was lots of low end stuff, mostly for back to school, kids. Your suggest sounds like what I would be looking for or need to keep me happy while on the road. Thanks.

You have to go to their web site - I have Europe GEX/UTX and also photo of UK so I did some testsat heathrow.No traffic, things at max except water at x1 : 30 limited20/20/20/20/20/20 traffic with UTX/GEX gave be 13-15 after about20-30 minutes of flying and traffic started to appear. With thephoto textures this was 18-20. 18-20 was OK, but I would rather go for higher planes and no road,ships etc. This was also with the default traffic as I have notyet got a traffic addon - I do have an old fs9 trafficX but itis a port and not a propper addon so does not work well. Temperatures 65/72/65/60 on the 4 cores : so about 20-25C offTmax and stable. I still have not finished tweaking this system, I only offer thisas a level of performance at this price.

Last post FYII installed ******* Altuve's FSX.CFG file last night for the high endmachines on this installation and got very good results. Limited to 30 fpsREX2, GEX, UTX, FSdiscovery, (also JF photo scenery option - but this is lighter on the usage).Fair weather @ max cloud coverage10 meter mesh (from the photo scenery)Scenery, textures and everything set to maxHeathrow with 30/30/0/0/0/0 traffic gives 30 locked with occasional drop to about 20 (though this is only FSX traffic and for 1/2 hour).I can use 2x mid water + everthing set to max for inland flying with lakes (very nice).I cannot use 2x water (only max 1x high) flying over the sea as itgives micro-stutter. (pity)I use limited 30 for now since a laptop does not have such goodcooling as a desktop. I got a max temperature of 61C on all 4 processors - less than with the normal fsx.cfgI don't like application setting of AA and AF so found I was stillable to use 4x AA and 4x AF on the card which gives acceptible results. (I think those were the settings). There wereno problems with graphics card processing the textures.I understand the implications of running the graphics card this close..... I also need to get a temperature from the GPU.I understand it comes down to price - this is a bench mark for you.Hope that helps.

Alienware M15x

thanks for the updated info.

I'll put my word behined the Asus g73 seriers too!! i own one and haven't even looked like turning on the desk top lol