Most Powerful Laptop

[Jim Horn]

Depends on what is meant by "most powerful". Is your emphasis CPU throughput, screen resolution, amount of RAM, amount of storage, speed of storage, size and weight are no concern, size and weight ARE a concern, battery life is no object or is important, touchscreen is needed or not, since used for business a solid support network and immediate turnaround is available or of little concern...

All that said, the aforementioned Alienware units are up there. I had the pleasure of using a well loaded Dell Precision "portable workstation" (list was US$3600) two years ago - the 17 inch (43cm) 1920x1080 screen, fast i7 quad core / 8 thread CPU, 16G of RAM, 256G of solid state drive, Windows 7 Pro was remarkable. FPGA compiles that had taken 15 minutes on its predecessor ran in 2.3 minutes. From power-on to stable and useable desktop took 22 seconds total. And it would go 8 or more hours on a charge.

Of course, they're even better now (Moore's Law is our friend!). But for business or engineering use, search for "portable workstation" or "laptop workstation".

I'm in the market for serious horsepower as well but limited to a ~US$1k budget. The above isn't available for that price but it's amazing how close one can get.

Best to you in your search. Do let us know what you end up with if you don't mind.