A Few Quick Laptop Questions

The Crowing One

So, this coming week I'll be starting a new job that will include a rather sizable amount of travel. With going on the road so often and a nice chunk of newly disposable income, I've been wanting to purchase a new laptop to replace my old Inspiron 6000 laptop with something a little more modern. This is a purchase I'll be making, ideally, in the next six months and certainly later rather than sooner. I know my way around computers, for the most part, and have built a number of desktop rigs. Laptops are another story. With a desktop rig if I screw up and purchase a sub-par part, I know I'll be able to replace it eventually. With a laptop, this isn't really the case so I'm more paranoid than usual about not short-changing myself on specs.

Mostly, I need a machine that can handle older games easily. While at home I have my xbox and my PC where I do most of my gaming, but the Inspiron really isn't up to the task for gaming on-the-go. It can run something like Deus Ex (original) or Knights of the Old Republic with minimal-but-noticeable stuttering, but it overheats like an oven pretty quickly.

I've been doing a bunch of window-shopping recently, and I'm hoping to be able to keep the purchase in the under-$400ish range for the sheer fact that I don't feel like I need something cutting-edge, as I have a plenty powerful PC at home already.

My benchmark is something along the lines of needing to be able to run games like TF2, older RPGs (KotOR, NWN, etc.), or Dreamfall while hopefully also being able to run more recent games like Mass Effect (the first one) if possible. If I can run games from 2007/8ish and older, I'll be very happy. The latter example is less important, but I also feel like I'm setting the bar somewhat low. I've been considering a few things, and am mostly looking to clarify a few things. I don't think I really need more than a dual-core PCU, but the GPU is another story. I'd like to get a dedicated card, but I'm uncertain how important that would really be as they drive the price up quite a bit and I have really found it difficult to get a good grasp on what, exactly, one card can do as opposed to another.

If you were to look at $400 laptops, what would you suggest? is there a minimum GPU for what I want? is the dedicated card a necessity for certain things? Mostly, I think I want to find out what the real cut-off and general expectations should be in that price range, which I know is very low.

darkmayo

My work laptop I had just a year ago was running left4dead , civ 5 etc without much issues, that was a HP elitebook 8440p. So if you check the specs on that something similar should do you just fine.

The Crowing One

That's exactly the sort of thing I'm looking for, as I've found it difficult to get a straight answer on where my line should be for what I want. That particular model looks to go from the $800-$2,000 range depending on specs. I'd consider it to be way more than I need, most likely.

darkmayo

yea that is a business class model, so they tend to be a little beefier and more $$. While I do like HP hardware, with the company making changes to the consumer model divison for hardware i'd be wary (until specifics are known) of buying HP consumer gear.

you could probably step it down a bit for specs and find something that will do the trick for your needs.

MushroomStick

I'd look at ASUS laptops if I were you. I doubt you're going to be able to get a dedicated GPU on a $400 laptop though.

The Crowing One

Lets see if I can refine the question a little. A friend of mine also has an old Inspiron 6000 for which the only difference is the presence of the Radeon X300 dedicated GPU. He can play TF2 (good benchmark, I think) no issues, though not at full specs of course. My dedicated GPU-less Inspiron 6000 laughs at the concept of being able to run TF2 at all.

Is even a low-end dedicated GPU something that I'll want if one of the primary uses will be gaming? Are there situations where an integrated GPU could possibly provide a better experience and longevity?

MushroomStick wrote:

I'd look at ASUS laptops if I were you. I doubt you're going to be able to get a dedicated GPU on a $400 laptop though.

Asus have been consistently a brand I keep coming back to for bang-for-your-buck, and the low end dedicated GPUs I've seen are around the $400-$550 range, which I could swallow.

schuss

Spend 5-600 and get a decent consumer machine with a GPU. I have an inspiron that does most things fine, and I beat the shit out of it.

Draygo

I find the HP laptops especially the pavilion lines tend to have more issues than the others. The brand I've been picking lately is lenovo, usually solidly built and they do have the options you require for performance. Dell laptops can be hit or miss, either you get a good one that lasts forever, or it starts to have issues about 3-5 years down the line.

Side story, my brothers dell went to Korea, Iraq, Germany, Colorado, endured all sorts of shit and still runs to this day. My mothers which is the exact same model died 3y later completely, from being used in the house.

ASUS is a good bang-for-buck brand, tech support is ok, RMA things pretty easily if they break.

Lenovo which is my preference atm, has pretty good tech support if shit goes wrong. They will send you the box to ship it to them (side note, so does hp, but hp's tend to break more often by experience), and generally get it back to you relatively quickly.

One common thing for all laptops is hard drive issues can crop up within 3 years. Not really the fault of the manufacturer, but the fact that the hard drive came with your laptop means it isnt covered at all by the manufacturer of the hard drives warrenty (which is typically 3y) instead your covered by the 1y warrenty of the laptop itself. No matter what laptop you get I do reccommend you pick up the +3y from the website of the laptops manufacturer when you register it. For the $ its worth your while, if something doesnt break in 3, it shouldn't break for a while.

Also considering you are a computer person the following is easy to replace on a laptop:
Hard drive
Ram (sometimes located under the keyboard, varies by model).
Wireless network cards
keyboard
optical drive

somewhat difficult (requires removing case screws and seperating the plastic)
screen, usb/power board, cpu, cpu fan, motherboard

As far as graphics, you will want an ATI or Nvidia chipset in your laptop if you want to play games with decent framerates.

MushroomStick

Draygo wrote:

Side story, my brothers dell went to Korea, Iraq, Germany, Colorado, endured all sorts of shit and still runs to this day. My mothers which is the exact same model died 3y later completely, from being used in the house.

The best explanation I can come up with for this sort of story is that the mother may have been using the laptop top in bed, resting it on the covers, blocking the air vents, thus regularly running the machine extra hot - and the brother has probably been more responsible and sets his laptop down on a table.

Essee

You really, really do want a dedicated graphics card of some sort if you're going to do pretty much ANY kind of gaming. You'd think that after all this time, the Intel integrated cards (and others) would have gotten better to the point where there wouldn't be many glitches and they'd just be underpowered, but no. You see all these myriad graphics issues on forums all the time, where someone is asking why they're having some random issue with backgrounds not showing up properly or wrong textures or something, and it almost always turns out the person has an integrated graphics card. I don't personally know why this is such a big problem (it's probably simply to keep parts costs down for the manufacturer), but that's why laptops with integrated cards do cost more and are more desirable for gamers. It's ridiculous that an OLD, crappy dedicated card will still have few issues and probably better performance than an integrated card... but that really seems to be the case. (EDIT: I mean, if I'm wrong, someone please correct me, but I've been mostly keeping up with this stuff for years, and this is true as far as I can tell.)

I personally have had a great experience with Sony's VAIOs, but if you're after one, try to find an open-box return or factory-refurbished one (or spot some other sweet deal), as they are frequently a good bit pricier than they need to be. I've had two VAIOs thus far, and both have been really great for their time. In case you're wondering, I didn't stop using the first VAIO because it died-- still works. I had THOUGHT I killed it by being an idiot and spilling milk into it (after which it still worked just fine) and then tea six months later (after which it wouldn't turn on again). My mom, on a whim, recently took it to a repair shop that apparently managed to clean up its insides better than I did, and sure enough, it's working just as well as it used to, although it's fairly dated by now. Their newer keyboards are likely even more crumb/liquid-resistant because of their design (keys are flat and have very little space between them and the frame, and are embedded into the frame), although it'd be hard to remove the keyboard now if something did go wrong despite that. Anyway, I've been able to play games that were modern at the time pretty well on both. The absolute most recent games can't have all their bells and whistles maxed (my VGN-FW590GTB I'm currently using is more than two years old now, which doesn't help), but I can still play most of them and have things look nice enough at 60 FPS, or sweeter but not at 60, whichever you prefer.

The Crowing One

Fantastic. Thanks.

I was getting the strong impression that even a this-moment-released integrated card would be less effective for gaming purposes than even an older, but dedicated card. Since I'm not looking for anything amazing (gaming a bit while on business trips) I'm sure I can find an older, less expensive machine that will meet my needs. I'll take a breeze through some machines and see what I can come up with. If anyone has any specific suggestions, I'd appreciate it. I'd like to just get a machine that can play pre-2007ish games.

This one looks great.

krapst78

The recently released integrated graphics will be good enough for what you want to do. At the price range you specified, you will be looking at a notebook that has an Intel Sandy Bridge I3-2310M CPU or an AMD A-Series A6-3400.

The Intel Sandy Bridge i3 has an integrated Intel HD Graphics 3000 chips. The Intel HD Graphics 3000 will give you performance similar to a Desktop AMD Radeon 5450. This link shows some of the framerates you can expect with this integrated chip. It seems to do pretty well with games based on the Source engine.
http://www.notebookcheck.net/Intel-HD-Graphics-3000.37948.0.html

Here is a deal for a notebook that has that cpu/gpu for $399 after rebate.
http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=631877&SRCCODE=LINKSHARE&cm_mmc_o=-ddCjC1bELltzywCjC-d2CjCdwwp&AffiliateID=Es5Ekr9eEBk-NTSHvi983Ej3VHMfQIjOOw
It's an Acer which is not really known for their stellar build quality, but it should get the job done.


The AMD A-Series A6-3400 has an integrated AMD Radeon HD 6520G gpu. It should perform slightly better than the intel HD 3000 gpu for games but has a weaker CPU (for games that are limited by the CPU). This link shows you the framerates you can expect. Unfortunately they don't have any benchmarks for any Source engine games, but you can probably expect a 10% improvement over the HD 3000.
http://www.notebookcheck.net/AMD-Radeon-HD-6520G.55734.0.html

Notebooks with this CPU generally go for over $500, but if you are patient, you can find deals for under $400 like this one (recently expired).
http://www.techbargains.com/news_displayItem.cfm/268580
HP usually releases similar coupons throughout the month, so you'll want to keep an eye on the deal sites. The one drawback is that HP has pretty horrendous quality issues, but you will be getting a whole lot of bang for you buck there.