Scan.co.uk Custom Spec Laptops

As a techie I get a lot of people asking me for advice on what to buy, and more often than not, which laptop. Everyone always wants the same thing - a laptop that they are going to occasionally game on, but mainly use for work and portability when they're not at home.

The issue is tho, they always want to spend under £1k (usually under £800) but still want something that they can "occasionally game on". The hard truth is whether you intend to game on it once a month, or once a day, if you get a cheap laptop with inbuilt graphics, your not going to play much other than maybe LoL and WoW at under 30fps on minimum settings - not really worth doing.

I personally have bought my last several laptops from the USA, as their is a lot more choice over there, and even after paying import tax, you often save hundreds. For example, a little over 2 years ago I bought an Asus G73-JH. I had it shipped to the UK and paid import tax on it, and the price came to about £1300 including 3 year global warranty. The UK version of the laptop retailed for £1650 and had half the hard disk space.


Thanks to Scan, there is now a UK service I will seriously be considering. They are offering a range of laptops, fully customised, at very reasonable prices. Whilst by no means the first company to offer this, I haven't found any other website that could offer a machine I would actually buy for a reasonable price, and now, I'm pleased to say I have.

Scan is offering 3 base models:

1. A compact and light laptop with a 11.6" screen, starting from just under £600 inc. VAT
2. A standard sized 15.4" laptop, but with a 1920x1080 screen, starting at just over £1000 inc. VAT
3. A 17" desktop replacement, starting at £1260 inc. VAT

Now I know after looking at those prices your going to think "nothing special there...." BUT, the standard spec is not the weakest of the weak components (the 15.4" standard GPU is a 670M!), and you have the option of removing windows and installing it yourself, saving almost £100. The 15.4" and 17" both have an SSD and hard drive included in that price.

I priced up a 17" with a 7970M GPU (the second fastest mobile GPU that is currently around), with an ivy-bridge i7 3610QM, 8GB corsair 1600MHz ram, removed the SSD it came with and removed windows 7, and set the Hard Disk to 500GB.
For that spec the price was just under £1050.
That is phenomenal value!


For the average user that wants a compact, light, semi powerful laptop - the base model 11.6" one weights less than 2kg, but still comes with a GTX 650M.
You install windows yourself and your looking at under £520 for a truly portable machine that you can actually play the odd game on when your at your mates / visiting home from uni!

See the range and configure your own spec here:
http://3xs.scan.co.uk/Category.asp?S...rCategoryID=48