Hi guys,

I'm getting back into my Carrara phase again (good to be back). I decided about six years ago to get off of desktop machines and become mostly a laptop user. What I learned about myself is that I'm actually quite Carrara productive when I'm sitting in front of the TV with some good snacks. Watching TV isn't very interesting all by itself but watching TV and modeling/rendering is much better for me.

So, since I'm that kind of person (and since I like to be able to throw my laptop in a backpack and go to my inlaws and render why they do whatever they do, etc.), I'm strictly a laptop dude. And to emphasize the point even more, I'm living in Japan now, space is limited and mobility has become triple important.

As some of you know, I like to render with all the settings jacked up pretty high. For example, that crazy pen image in my gallery took several days to render (given all the incarnations of it that I tried). And on top of that, I like to use raytraced depth of field and GI and I almost always have some stupid transparent object in the scene and all that means LOTS of render time.

I have a little money to burn and I'm thinking I need a four headed laptop. I looked on the Dell site and when you probe for those four headed beasties (with a 17" screen and number pad requirement), Dell pops up an alienware gaming laptop.

It's cool, it's fast, it's got graphics, CPU, and RAM power. I'm thinking that it's all good for rendering psychosis (although its a little geeky looking but I don't really care actually).

It's expensive (DANG!). So, before I go jump off a cliff and drop a bunch of cash, I thought I'd ask here and get some ideas from fellow rendering madmen like myself.

One other question, if I get this critter and then I go off and setup a render node on my current two headed machine, can I use all 6 cores (the four new cores and the old two cores)?

Let me know what you think.

-Kix