[jyl]

Short version: I'm shopping for a laptop. I'm thinking of splashing out for a Xeon. Tell me I'm stupid and save me some money.

Long version: Laptop will sit on a desk, driving four external monitors (more would be nice). It might get moved between home office to office office, but it's not for a road warrior. It will be used for trading and investment stuff, so basically a local market quote-data-charting-app (Bloomberg type), a few web portal apps, a dozen or so browser tabs, some Excel workbooks of the few-thousand-rows with formulas-in-most-cells type, stream video in the background, miscellaneous business apps, etc. Not gonna render video, do CAD, or game. Some research suggests I need a decent discrete GPU, at least 16 GB RAM, a mid-range CPU, a 512 GB SSD or maybe two as RAID. The GPU requirement seems to put me at the border between business laptop and workstation laptop. The workstation models have the option of Xeon CPUs. I've never had a Xeon machine. Curiosity and the bigger-must-be-better mentality lures me to consider it. The added cost is not nothing but not prohibitive either. So WWYD?

Alt version: should I just forget the laptop and buy a desktop?