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LF a Budget Gaming Laptop ($1200 and under) Help!
Guys I'm not really the most technical dude when it comes to PCs or Laptops.
I buy my stuff from Dell, Gateway, Alienware and always run at stock (no overclocking).
I have a decent Desktop but now I need a Laptop and am having a really hardtime choosing one.
I would like to keep the price below 1200, have it come with a OS preloaded and I guess since i want the damn thing to play games for a 3-4 years atleast on medium settings (down the road) it would have to have atleast 4 gigs of ram, a 1gig video card and a quad core processor.
I've looked and looked, I've seen a few on the alienware site and the Dell site but before i commit i figured I would ask people more knowledgeable than myself.
maybe you guys got the skinny on a solid gaming laptop in that price range.
Any help would be awesome!
thanks.
Comments
Maybe something like this would be good for you
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834220700
Intel Core i7 720QM(1.6GHz)
4gb DDR 3 Ram
Geforce GTS 360M with 1GB DDR5 VRAM
500gb HDD
$1119.99 with Free Shipping from Newegg
Or theres this one with a bigger screen and an ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5730 the rest of the specs are pretty much the same.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834220702
WoW those look great. Im a bit worried about the feedback thou.
Tons of failures, they run really Hot and seem to be running at amuch lower Fps than one would expect from those specs.
Thank you for the link.
Anyone else got anything?
Edit: I don't mean to sound picky i just worry when i read about hardware failures or shady preformance.
I see those specs and I know they will be fine for my games like Eve online, Starcraft and steam games like Mass Effect 2 and GTA4. One comment said BC2 ran on low settings at 20-30 fps. to me that worries me. I need this thing to run games for atleast three years to avoid buying a new one early and avoid wife aggro.
If its already running BC2 (a three month old game) on low settings how will it run Fps games in two years?
Playing: Rift, LotRO
Waiting on: GW2, BP
The trouble is that you need a computer that can run games at full settings now, so in 2 years it will run games at medium settings. For $1200 in a laptop you cannot really get a top end machine, you can only afford a mid spec machine. This will only run games on low settings in 2 years.
A $1200 desktop would do it fine, but not a laptop really. The trouble is heat and power issues which games create, really laptops are not made for gaming. Saying that the best one based on hardware I could see was this one, no reviews though.
For starters, there is no such thing as a budget gaming laptop. You can pick any two of those three, but can't have all three at once. Or at least not yet. In six months or so, it will be possible.
Some really big questions:
1) Do you need it to be a gaming laptop in particular? Or could you get a cheaper laptop for whatever you need for mobile purposes and use your desktop for gaming? Don't expect gaming performance on a laptop in the same league as what you get on your desktop. If that's practical to get in a laptop, then you'd get far more bang for your buck with a cheap laptop and using the remaining budget to upgrade your desktop.
2) Does it have to be right now? This is just about the worst time to get a gaming laptop that you could pick, as some really revolutionary things are coming very soon. Most important is AMD's upcoming "Llano" APU early next year. That chip will have both the CPU and GPU in a single die, which means no need for PCI Express lanes to communcate, and they can share the same memory without the integrated graphics having bandwidth severely by a HyperTransport bus. Global Foundries' 32 nm HKMG SOI process is expected to offer huge improvements in performance per watt. It will probably offer gaming performance about on par with what egg linked above, while having a vastly lower power draw and costing several hundred dollars less. We don't know exactly what Llano will consist of, but it will probably mean the introduction of the first gaming laptops that aren't completely horrible.
Also, we're going to see some big improvements in solid state drives shortly. Samsung, Hynix, and IMFT have all recently started production of 25-27 nm flash memory that should offer double the capacity for around the same price tag as the older generation of flash memory. Intel and Indilinx have planned refreshes of their products, most likely to use this flash memory, later this year. I'd expect the SandForce and Marvell controllers to adopt it sooner rather than later as well, but haven't heard any rumors about this. And then next year (and likely early next year), Intel will launch its Lyndonville SSD controller, and Indilinx will launch Jet Stream. Either or both of those may bring huge performance improvements. At the very least, they'll be the first times that a company that previously made a good SSD controller had a chance to go back and build a new one to try to improve on their previous effort. Why does this matter? See point 3.
3) How much storage space do you need in the laptop? You probably don't need very much, as you can store most things on the desktop to free up space on the laptop. If you don't need a lot of storage space, you can get a solid state drive for a laptop instead of a hard drive. A good solid state drive is vastly faster than a hard drive, and will make nearly everything you do on a computer feel a lot faster and more responsive. Rather than constantly sitting there waiting for your computer to grab information off of a hard drive, an SSD it can just go get it and not make you wait.
SSDs have other huge advantages for laptops, too. First, they use virtually no power, and typically under 1 W most of the time. This improves battery life and reduces heat, which improves reliability of other components. Second, they don't have any moving parts, and hence no moving parts that can break--so when you drop your laptop, it won't damage an SSD, but could kill a hard drive if it has one. Third, they're completely silent, which lets you be free of the annoying hum of a spinning hard drive.
The big drawback of a solid state drive is that they're expensive in $/GB. Still, you can get around this by going with an SSD of small capacity around 60 GB. If you do that, then the price tag isn't such a huge jump over a laptop hard drive, as laptop hard drives tend to be expensive, as they have to fit the drive into a smaller form factor and put in a bunch of stuff to try to protect the drive to give it a good chance of surviving if you drop the laptop.
-----
If you really need to get a gaming laptop right now, you might want to back away from the quad core processor requirement. If you really insist on a quad core processor, the Intel Core i7-720QM or 740QM is the thing to get. AMD needs power gating and some sort of turbo boost in their processors to make their quad cores decent for laptop use.
On the video card side, Nvidia doesn't have anything competitive at all for gaming laptops. If you insist on an Nvidia card, you're looking at about 40% more power draw for the same performance as if you went with an AMD card. That's how parts overheat and die, unless you decide you don't need much performance.
A Mobility Radeon HD 5650 or 5730 uses AMD's "Redwood" chip paired with DDR3 memory, so it's basically an underclocked (desktop) Radeon HD 5570. A Mobility Radeon HD 5850 or 5870 uses AMD's "Juniper" chip paired with GDDR5 memory, so it's basically an underclocked (desktop) Radeon HD 5770. Sometimes the 5850 is paired with DDR3 rather than GDDR5; avoid those. Anyway, those are the only decent options for a video card in a gaming laptop at the moment, as everything else has either too low of performance or poor performance per watt.
I'm a Musician so i'm on the road a good part of the year.
Honestly I just want the damn thing to run my MMOs (EvE and GW2/TOR when they release), Starcraft 2 (with up comming Campaigns) and maybe a random steam game(BC2, ME3, DA2) stuff like that.
If the damn thing can run my games on a low settings with shadows off (ill do it if i have to) then im ok.
Right now the laptop i have doesnt meet the SC2 requirements (CPU is too slow) so i need something new.
Only reason im going for quade core is due to me not wanting the thing to get outdated so quickly.
I saw a gateway laptop for 700 with a core duo, 4 gigs of ram and a 1 gig Radeon card but i have no idea if that damn thing will last for 2-3 years playing games while on the road.
I should have explained all this before I'm not trying to get bleeding edge graphics out of the thing i just want it to play the stuff i have which is EVE, GTA4, FO3, Oblivion and SC2 <----- thats basically all i play on PC the rest is on console.
Hell... I'm sure a Core Duo, 2 gigs of ram and 512 Radeon Card could play all of the crap i own on mostly high settings lol.
Playing: Rift, LotRO
Waiting on: GW2, BP
Find an Asus. I picked up one for $900 at Best Buy a few months ago and it's awesome.
The only downer is the resolution is 1360x768, so not the highest out there, but it runs Crysis, EQ2 and Vanguard all between medium and high settings.
Get an Alienware the cheapest model is $1000 and it literally runs everything perfect. My younger brother just got one.
Link
That one? It looks good. I was worried Alienware would be expensive due to its brand popularity.
What do you guys think.
Playing: Rift, LotRO
Waiting on: GW2, BP
It's nice but an 11.6" screen seems a bit small.
Alienware's machines (Clevo, right?) are good laptops, but you get less for your money from that brand than anywhere else. Honestly, the best machine you can buy right now for less than $1200 is pretty much the second one Viddster linked, the MSI-E7405, which pairs a Core I5 430m with a Mobility Radeon HD 5870. It gets decent battery life too to a 17' machine (2.5 hours, give or take). I was considering getting one myself not too long ago.
Another option is the newly refreshed MSI GX640-260US. It comes with a faster Core i5 450m, a smaller package (15.6') that keeps good screen resolution (1680x1050), and has a DDR5-equipped Mobility Radeon HD 5850, which is just a downclocked mobile 5870 with a hair less performance (10%-15% maybe?). The only flaw on the GX640 is high GPU temperatures, but MSI ships it with a 3 year warranty, so that more than balances out the high temps. Aftermarket thermal grease like IC Diamond also helps out quite a bit (the stock stuff in these laptops is pretty miserable), and some places like Xotic PC will put it in there on the GPU and CPU for a pretty minimal increase in price.
You'd be MUCH better off dropping an extra hundred dollars for this over that.
http://www.bestbuy.com/site/Asus+-+Laptop+/+Intel%26%23174%3B+Core%26%23153%3B+i7+Processor+/+17.3%22+Display+/+6GB+Memory+/+500GB+Hard+Drive+-+Black/9741729.p?id=1218165344675&skuId=9741729
Alienware M15x: Intel® CoreTM i3 350, 15.6-inch WideHD+ 1600x900,Up to 3GB2 Dual Channel DDR3,250GB3 SATA II hard driv, NVIDIA GT240M GeForce @ $1200
Asus Intel® Core™ i7, 17.3" High-definition widescreen LED-LCD (1600 x 900), 6GB DDR3 Triple Channel RAM, 500GB 7,200 RPM HDD, ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5870 @ $1300
If you really need a gaming laptop right now, I'd probably go with the MSI one that viddster linked:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834152196
The Asus one that Skeaser links does have a better processor. It also has mismatched memory channels, which is a completely idiotic thing to do, though the processor probably isn't fast enough for it to matter. If you want to go Alienware, you're looking at paying several hundred dollars more for comparable hardware.
If willing to pay more, you could try something like this:
http://www.cyberpowerpc.com/system/Xplorer_X6-9900_Notebook/
That would give you the option to upgrade to a good SSD, which the prebuilt options generally don't offer. The 64 GB Corsair Nova is probably the best value option there, if that's enough capacity.
Really, though, you're not going to fit both a Clarksfield (Intel quad core processor) and a Juniper (video card) into a $1200 budget. And if you don't get those, then you could save several hundred dollars and a lot of heat and power by waiting six months or so for Llano. Like I said, right now is a terrible time to buy a gaming laptop.
I personally just bought this laptop MSI GX740-235US and i love it. It's got a slightly faster CPU then the other MSI laptop they're linking for another 50 bucks Putting it at 1199 an 17 for shipping. Its fast, quite up until a bout an hour of real gaming and fans kick it up a notch but still not to bad but it doesnt get melt your palms off hot.
Well, Rockgod. My advice to you would either be to look into the Alienware laptops which I know have a lot of power, or wait. I'd emphasize waiting more than going to Alienware now. If you want to be able to play future games with higher settings, then wait until those games are closer to release. This way, you'll probably get more performance than you would now, for even less than what you would spend to get a lesser performance machine now.
When it comes to technology, computers especially, my logic is: "Buy it when you need it."
Wait for now, spend less later. Unless of course your traveling situation stresses you to get it sooner than later.
Yea.. I too set out for a great " gaming" laptop- but it is sad to say, tech just hasn't made that happen yet. Laptops are plagued with problems and in their current state cannot even remotely compete with the power of a desktop. Would be better off spending that on building your own desktop because frankly ALL LAPTOPS ARE CRAP. and they break and die and I keep breaking them.. Have a stack of them sitting here about to be gutted and made into drones. I also do not buy " prebuilt" anything- they always ripp you somewhere and mess with the bios and install a bunch of crap you don;t want on there.. when you build it yourself, you can make it soo much better for the money spent. LOL
Laptops in the current state should not even be in the " gaming" catagory at all..