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New Comp For Christmas... Help me make a good decision.
StevieHmself
Member Posts: 134
in Hardware
Let me start of my saying i know very little about computer hardware and what not.
I want to get a laptop that is able to run most games/mmo's at decent graphics. The HP Envy, has caught my eye. (Dose HP make top like Laptops?) I am open to any other laptop really. The Evny's size and weight seam ideal to me. Can the Evny run games well?
Playing EVE
Played Darkfall, Played Wow,
Comments
If you want a gaming laptop, I personally wouldn't buy anything but a Sager, http://www.sagernotebook.com/ . But if you are looking for a desktop, everything is going to be over priced unless you build it yourself.
East Carolina University, Computer Science BS, 2011
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Current game: DAOC
Games played and quit: L2, PlanetSide, RF Online, GuildWars, SWG, COH/COV, Vanguard, LOTRO, WoW, WW2 Online, FFXI, Auto-Assault, EVE Online, ShadowBane, RYL, Rappelz, Last Chaos, Myst Online, POTBS, EQ2, Warhammer Online, AoC, Aion, Champions Online, Star Trek Online, Allods, Darkfall.
Waiting on: Earthrise
Names: Citio, Goldie, Sportacus
Any laptop that you could conceivably buy for Christmas will be thoroughly obsolete about two weeks later. If you want a gaming laptop, get yourself a rain check for Christmas and wait for Sandy Bridge to launch in January. Get a Core i7 2720 QM processor when it launches in January. Vancouver might launch then, too. Whether it does or not, get yourself the fastest Mobility Radeon video card you can afford. Also get a good solid state drive and not a hard drive, so that it will be fast, cool, quiet, and not break when you drop the laptop. Hopefully you've got a budget of at least $1500 or so in order to get a nice gaming laptop--or at least nice for a gaming laptop, which is to say, really not very nice at all.
If you want a gaming laptop, assume that it's going to run hot enough that you won't want to touch the keyboard while gaming. Also assume that it's going to be heavy enough that it's a pain to carry around, and not going to work (or at least not going to be able to play games) while not plugged in to the wall. Assume it will have a short battery life, and also be noisy. Such are the sacrifices you make in order to get a gaming laptop.
If you want a gaming laptop that doesn't have those big drawbacks, you'll have to wait at least for AMD to launch Llano in mid-2011. Well, right now it's scheduled for mid-2011, but it keeps getting pushed back. Maybe AMD is having trouble putting a GPU on an SOI process. The CPU on that uses old Stars cores, so if AMD can't at least offer an aggressive Turbo CORE for games that can't use four cores, the CPU part might end up rather underpowered for gaming. If that's the case, then try Trinity in 2012, which will have Bulldozer cores. Or presumably that will get a die shrink to 22 nm in 2013, which should allow a lot more performance in the same power envelope.
There will eventually be gaming laptops that are decently nice and run everything smoothly at moderate settings. They're probably several years away, though, and AMD's first fusion APU on 22 nm (probably in 2013) is the first part that I'd hold out any real hope of being able to run a genuinely nice gaming laptop. Until then, if you're a gamer and don't already have one, get a desktop. But wait for Sandy Bridge on that, too.
I dont need to be able to run games on the highest fastest settings. At this moment i own a Mac Book Pro and i am comfortable with how it runs games. But i still feel like i could do a bit better for a similar price/size.... And have it not be a mac so i can play more than 5 games on my laptop.
Playing EVE
Played Darkfall, Played Wow,
You can work around a modestly powered video card by turning down video settings. You can't do that for an underpowered processor, which can leave a game choppy and awkward to play even on minimum graphical settings. And do you really want to buy a new laptop that runs the games you play today, but completely chokes on something you want to play a year from now? Wait for Sandy Bridge and that won't happen.
If you don't mind turning graphical settings way down, then you could perhaps ease up on the video card requirements somewhat. But a gaming laptop will still cost you in the range of $1000 or so. The price on that won't come down meaningfully until Llano, which should launch in mid-2011, unless you want to get hardware not intended for playing games and try to play games on it anyway.
If size and weight are a big deal to you, then you're probably not going to do better than Apple, unless perhaps you get something with new hardware that Apple hasn't gotten around to putting in their own machines yet. Apple loves tinkering with form factors, and it's one of the ways that they can try to convince suckers to pay twice as much for identical hardware.
I guess you really have to decide whether you want to shell out for a gaming laptop with all of its problems (hot, loud, unreliable, has to be plugged in, etc.), or get a lower end machine that doesn't run games that well and try to play games on it anyway. What games do you play? If it's older games or "free to play" item mall grinders with low system requirements, you can probably get away with playing games on a non-gaming machine.