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Looking for a Gaming/Gen use laptop.
FlamingFoxx
Member Posts: 5
Hi, I'm looking for a gaming laptop thats also good for general use, as in, it can play games at a decent graphical level (doesnt need to be AMAZING since I don't play anything too intense but definitely above average), is portable (screen size somewhere between 13 and 16 inches), has a good battery life (over 3-4 hours) and looks attractive (for reference my idea of attractive is along the lines of the Sony Vaio Z, Macbook Airs, HP Envy that kind of stuff).
In terms of price I can afford anything but I would rather not be spending over $3000 NZD ($2,470 USD).
In terms of graphics, it would need to be able to play Aion with pretty high settings, I have a desktop that accomplishes this on a core 2 processor so I assume this mostly comes down to graphics card?)
HDMI out is preferably a must have.
Doesn't need to have more than 4GB RAM.
Preconfigured/premade is preferable since I live in New Zealand and companies here generally don't offer complex customisation.
I'd prefer not to be called an idiot or anything, just looking for some honest decent advice on something thats going to meet my needs.
Thanks, Philip.
Comments
It sounds like you have a vague idea of what you want, with a focus on the form factor and performance, but not knowing how to get them.
The problem is that what you want not only does not exist, but theoretically cannot exist with anything similar to present technology. The basic issue is that higher performance means more stuff operating in parallel and/or higher clock speeds. Either of those mean more power consumption. There are trade-offs between performance and power consumption, and if you want high performance, then you're stuck with high power consumption.
High power consumption means high heat output. That means bigger heatsinks and more fans to clear the heat. That adds weight, and means you need more robust other parts in the build to handle it, and you need it to be stronger in spite of having holes for more airflow. That results in a bigger, thicker, heavier laptop, which is to say, less portable.
Now, there are some things that are possible to do in order to get relatively higher performance and better portability simultaneously. A modern AMD video card rather than Nvidia gets you an extra 20% or 30% or so performance in the same poewr envelope. A aluminum frame rather than steel or plastic can be plenty strong enough while being lighter. But there is only so much that you can do along those lines.
Ultrathin laptops such as the MacBook Air, Sony Vaio Z, Samsung Series 9, or the inane ultrabooks that Intel is paying laptop vendors $300 million to bring to market, because the laptop vendors won't do it on their own on the basis that no one wants them, have to go for very low power consumption in order to make the laptop so thin. For starters, that means you're stuck with integrated graphics.
Get a fast Sandy Bridge processor and that means Intel integrated graphics, which are a complete failure for gaming purposes. Intel graphics might tell you that you're running Aion on high settings, but it wouldn't necessarily look as nice as AMD or Nvidia graphics on low settings. Or the Intel graphics might not manage to make the game playable at all. OpenGL programs (loosely, if there's also a Mac and/or Linux version, it's probably OpenGL) sometimes completely fail to run on Intel's Sandy Bridge graphics.
An AMD Llano system would be better, except that 35 W is too much for an ultrathin platform, and the promised 20 W Llano dual cores aren't out yet. An AMD Zacate E-350 or E-450 fits the form factor, but that offers processor performance too slow to make some games run smoothly even at low settings.
The HP Envy is a different critter. HP did try to get decent gaming performance. With how thin the laptop is for that gaming performance, I'd worry about it running hot, though, and that can mean reduced reliability. If that's something you're willing to put up with, then it might well work decently for your needs.
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So, let's focus on the products that actually do exist. For starters, there isn't any magical rule that you can only have one computer. You could get a high performance gaming machine, and also a portable laptop.
Ideally, the high performance machine should be a desktop, if that works for you at all. You play games on your desktop, and then take the laptop with you when you need something portable. The combination of a gaming desktop and a budget laptop can get you better gaming performance (in the desktop), better portability (in the laptop), and a lower price tag (in total!) as compared to a single gaming laptop.
For a portable laptop, you can get a Zacate E-350 or E-450 in basically any form factor. That has a TDP of 18 W total for the processor, graphics, northbridge, and memory controller. Even the chipset only adds a few watts to that. So that means very low total system power consumption, and fitting it into an 11" form factor isn't hard. You can also get it in a 13" or 15" or 17" or whatever form factor, just because some people want something bigger than 11". It's good enough for most general use stuff (e-mail, web browsing, etc.), but many games will not run smoothly. Some games will be playable, though, and the performance will be in the same ballpark as the official recommended system specs for Aion. Zacate-based systems start significantly under $400 (US), and are available from a number of laptop vendors.
A bit higher end option would be a Llano-based laptop, which starts at around $500 US, and goes up to about $700 or so, depending on what you want. These use integrated graphics, with a total system power consumption about double that of a Zacate system. In the US, there are some decent low-end configurations from Gateway and Lenovo, some awful configurations from Samsung and Acer (a discrete video card that is slower than the integrated graphics!), some Toshiba laptops that would be decent except that they disable video driver updates, and an HP site that gives you some configuration options. This is still sufficiently low power to be pretty portable, and the hardware is far above the recommended system requirements for Aion. Essentially all games will run smoothly, but not necessarily at high settings.
If you want a high end, 15" gaming laptop, then a rebranded Clevo P150HM with a Radeon HD 6990M would be ideal. Clevo doesn't sell directly to the general public, but lets a bunch of other companies resell the laptops under their own name. A quick Google search didn't turn up any resellers in New Zealand, however. Games will run smoothly at high graphical settings, but it will be heavy and expensive, and the battery life will be short, even at idle.
One problem is that a discrete video card burns quite a bit of power at idle. It might only be 10 W, but that's a lot for a laptop at idle. If you get a gaming laptop that keeps the discrete card on all the time, then you're not going to get good battery life.
One alternative is to get a laptop with discrete switchable graphics, so that it switches between a discrete video card and integrated graphics. When you're not playing games, the discrete card can shut down and the laptop runs on integrated graphics. This greatly extends the battery life, though it doesn't make the laptop any smaller or lighter.
Discrete switchable graphics has some big downsides, though. One is that having to copy the frame buffer around means you lose several percent of your performance while gaming. Another is that driver updates are a nightmare, because they're sometimes unavailable. If you're waiting for a problem with the Intel integrated graphics to get fixed, you could easily still be waiting when you replace the laptop as obsolete. Another issue is that sometimes the discrete graphics don't switch when they should, and either keep the discrete card running when it should be shut down to save power, or don't have the discrete card kick in when you're trying to play a game.
If you can't get a rebranded Clevo P150HM, then MSI and Asus do offer some mid-range gaming laptops, with performance a little better than the HP Envy. But those cost you maybe half of the graphical performance, while only saving you a few hundred dollars, and not saving that much on heat and power consumption.
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In other news, the forums flagged this post as possible spam. I hadn't seen that before.
From my experience, that's only Nvidia's Optimus. You can set your laptop to use whatever card you want it to use and it wll not change regardless of what you're trying to do. With my 6870m on, at idle, I get about 2h 45m out of a full battery. When I turn it off, I get well over 5 hours. However, even when I try to game with the discrete card off, all it does is continue using the integrated graphics.
Thanks Quizzical, What are your thoughts on the Vaio Z though? Since it comes with a docking station which gives it better specs and then can be unplugged and used as an ultra portable?
If the graphics card on it is good enough then it will probably suit me just fine? The only games I really play are Aion and Guild Wars, and Guild Wars used to run fine on my old 2002 Win XP computer. The main thing it needs to be able to play is Guild Wars 2 when that comes out, but from what I can tell GW2 shouldn't be too graphically intensive.
Vaio Z uses video over usb... granted it's usb3, but it's still usb. their implimentation works fairly well, but it's definately NOT ment for gaming.
for your purpose, a pimped out HP A8 will be your best bet for battery life, but you arent going to get anywhere near the thickness or weight of a vaio Z
There are a lot of different ways to switch between a discrete card and integrated graphics, and they all have some serious drawbacks. There is, you manually tell it to switch, but the computer has to reboot in order to do so. That works, but is a major pain. There is, it will use the discrete card when plugged in, and the integrated graphics on the battery. That makes gaming on the battery an absolute no. There is, it has a list of programs that will fire up the discrete card, and if none of those programs are running, it will use the integrated graphics. And then you have to hope that you don't pick up something that should be on the list, but isn't. And they all make driver updates a pain.
Now, discrete switchable graphics isn't intrinsically a bad idea. One driver trying to control graphics by two different vendors is hard to do right, though. Perhaps someday AMD could make an APU with integrated graphics, and then also a discrete card, and switch between them based on the load. A single unified video driver that can see and control both the integrated and discrete graphics has some big advantages. First, AMD would have to make a good laptop processor, though, and Trinity may or may not be that, but it probably won't be competitive with Ivy Bridge on the CPU side. Nvidia might eventually be able to do something analogous with an ARM processor, but that's quite a ways off, and Windows for ARM doesn't exactly have a huge installed base of games, partially because it doesn't exist yet.
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"Thanks Quizzical, What are your thoughts on the Vaio Z though? Since it comes with a docking station which gives it better specs and then can be unplugged and used as an ultra portable?"
That has only Intel HD 3000 graphics built into the laptop. That's not a gaming laptop. Period. Full stop.
If you use the power media dock, then it has discrete Radeon HD 6650M graphics available. That's a little faster than Radeon HD 6620G integrated graphics, but as you might guess, it's not a lot faster. Maybe 50% faster or so. Having to use the power media dock takes away the portability and the stylish form factor, too.
But there is still the problem of getting the monitor signal from the video card to the laptop. It uses a USB 3.0 port, which isn't meant for monitor signals. There's enough bandwidth that it could conceivably work, but I wouldn't count on it working flawlessly. I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if it has some serious latency or image quality problems.
A dual core processor will more or less work for gaming. You can do a lot better than that for a lot less than $2000, though.
Two SSDs in RAID 0 isn't a good idea, either. Especially when they won't say what the SSDs are. RAID will disable TRIM, which means that some SSDs that might otherwise be pretty good could lose a lot of performance as time passes. That's a big problem, and it could easily take weeks or months to surface, so you won't know if anything is wrong right out of the box.
If you get an ultrathin laptop like that, you're paying a fortune for the form factor, not for the performance. Because you don't get very much performance.
"The only games I really play are Aion and Guild Wars, and Guild Wars used to run fine on my old 2002 Win XP computer. The main thing it needs to be able to play is Guild Wars 2 when that comes out, but from what I can tell GW2 shouldn't be too graphically intensive."
You don't want to get something barely good enough to run today's games, and then in six months, pick up something new that you weren't anticipating, and find out that it is completely unplayable.
Again, though, why do you need a gaming laptop in particular? Why not both a gaming desktop and a portable laptop that will only run some games well? A Llano system for $600 or so will easily run Guild Wars at max settings, and probably run Aion pretty well, though I'm not sure how high of settings. Guild Wars 2 will probably run pretty well at moderate settings, but that's just guessing.
I have to manually switch between the cards, but it does not require a reboot. The screen turns black for a few seconds and then I'm good to go. It will allow me to game on the battery if I so choose (not for long though, as you'd imagine) and I can also use the integrated card to save electricity when I'm doing random stuff (ie. writing this post).
With this method, I don't see any real issues. If something does go horribly wrong with Intel's drivers, I can just stay on the 6870M and still get a decent enough battery life. However, if I'm only on the integrated card for word processing, email, etc. when I'm on battery, then I don't see where there would be a problem.