Gaming Laptop?

[Manicm]

I know a couple of you guys are PC gamers as well, and tbh my last PC for gaming was a desktop sporting a Intel Pentuim Processor, geforce graphics card and allsorts of add on's.

Had a look round pc world today and nothing shouts at me as a gaming laptop, was looking at spending £500 maybe a little more if the spec deserves it Currently running a notebook which is ok for streaming stuff but its had tea thrown over it, and survived somehow, some of the buttons don't quite work anymore and time to replace it. My previous was a macbook which i would love to get again but gaming wise it wasn't much cop.

So any suggestions? or spec's i should be looking out for?

I will be using it for android emulation, video editting (just got a Hero HD3), photo editting, gaming, and i guess the OH will use it for internet shopping.

[radiofloyd]

I intend on buying a new gaming desktop but it will probably be later in the summer.

If you look at the steam store it has minimum/recommended specs for most games. I'll be aiming for a PC that at least matches the recommend specs for Rome Total War 2 and Bioshock Infinite, which are the highest I've seen. If you look at enough games you'll get an idea of what the current standard is.

They say pc gaming architecture is going to change a lot after the next gen consoles come out but I dunno, I can't be arsed waiting.

I have no idea where the best place to buy one is though.

[DANGERMAN]

you'd be a lot better getting a desktop for gaming rather than a laptop, but sometimes you just need a laptop. Chances are most new laptops will have the cpu and ram you need (quad core and about 6 gig - not that you really need 6 gig yet), it's the graphics card that's the problem.

to be honest I couldn't really advise you what card to look out for, only that it will be a mobile card so not as good, I know some of them are pretty decent nowadays, but how you'd go about finding a laptop with a decent card in it I don't know. Hendo seems to be pretty happy with his though

[Manicm]

Had a nosy at the Dell/Alienware laptops seem to be top spec, starting at £799 a bit more than i wanted to pay, and when did dell buy alienware? missed that somewhere.

[spatular]

alienware are overpriced i believe, dell are alright though imo, there should be some non-alienware laptops on the dell sight with dedicated graphics. haswell - intels new processors are out soon - they are supposed to have pretty good built in graphics - not sure how they compare to dedicated graphics cards though.

[Sly Reflex]

Video editing is fucking terrible on a laptop. I don't know if it's a power consumption thing or what, but it's less than ideal. My missus uses laptop has a better CPU and more RAM than I have, but it really struggled with rendering.

Like Ben, I'd recommend you go for a desktop. Chances are that the things you do on the move won't correlate with how you are going to use those features you are looking for. For those features you are likely going to sit in the same place, so you might as well anchor that shit down and utilize all the benefits that come with having a desktop system.

The only way I would recommend a laptop is if you happen to have an illness or something that prevents you from sitting in a chair comfortably.

[Manicm]

Its more space is an issue, when a woman moves in you tend to have less of your own space. Saying that i could hook it up to the tele, thats not so much of a chore like it used to be thanks to hdmi!

[DANGERMAN]

I get why you'd want a laptop. I'd have thought there would be money to be made selling decent reasonably priced laptops, and even a site that tells you what to expect performance wise, but apparently not.

If you do go for a desktop you could always get a wireless keyboard and mouse

[Sly Reflex]

Not ideal if he wants to use it for gaming though. Latency is quite bad on wireless mice.

[Uncle Dokuro]

Your going to have to spend more if you want a gaming laptop. If your going to go Alienware don't get one with the Windows option, but the Ubuntu option, it's cheaper (Free) and you can go out and get a OEM copy of Windows 7 (According to RPS you can find a OEM copy in the U.K. @ £40) .

Right now I use a laptop for gaming I have no issues with it what so ever it plays the games I need it to play flawlessly and I have no latency with my wireless razer mouse, but this summer I'm building an 8 core, 32 GB DDR3L, Titan beast of a desktop that will devour the power of the sun.

If you only have £500.00 to spend Rock Paper Shotgun has a good article for building a desktop that is as good as a PS4/Xbox One (They claim it's better than).

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/06/14/build-a-next-gen-pc/#comment-page-2

If space is an issue you could just build a similar gaming rig to the RPS one above, but with a Micro-ATX case. You get all the advantages of a desktop (upgrading). While also getting the space saving advantages of a laptop.

If you're still dead set on a laptop, get you'll have to raise your budget buy at least £500.00.

[RoboticMonk3y]

every time I see "gaming laptop" I read it as "practical sports-car", granted technology has moved on a lot, and you can certainly get a lot of performance out of laptops these days, but you can also build yourself a stonking pc, with the leftover cash to buy a netbook and fulfilling both needs of a portable machine to poke a the internet, and a heavyweight editing PC.

but at the end of the day, it's your cash man, if you see a laptop you like and you have the dollars, jump in...

[Pikman]

I have a core i7 laptop (it's a Dell Precision M6500) that I could do with selling, just been reformatted, running Win 7. Pretty sure its quad core, might have 8GB of RAM but I need to check. Let me know if it's worth me looking out the powerpack and getting the spec for you.

[Manicm]

The laptop is easier to game on, due to oh watching the main tele, one of the reasons im going for a ps4 vita combi. The other half doesn't mind my gaming habbit but don't want to push it. Just been given the green light for a wii u on the condition i don't order an xboxone.

Wildejon, howmuch did you want and what sort of spec etc?? have to wait till payday before i do anything but still exploring the options.

[Pikman]

Haha. Good deal as long as you didn't agree to not ordering a PS4 also!

I will hunt out a power cord tomorrow and fire it up to grab a spec, cost £2k about 2 year ago so I imagine its still half decent

EDIT: Dell M6500, Core i7 920XM Extreme (4 cores at 2 GHz). 12 GB RAM, Nvidia Quattro FX M2800 graphics card.

[retroed]

Ok, I know that this isn't a 'gaming laptop', but what kind of stuff could this run? I'm not expecting BioShock Infinite here, more Indie titles.

http://www.ebuyer.com/434004-hp-pavilion-ultrabook-c5r84ea-abu

[DANGERMAN]

this is what the graphics chip is capable of (scroll down to the fps per game)

http://www.notebookcheck.net/Intel-HD-Graphics-4000.69168.0.html

the ram is fine, I can't think of too many games that would require more than that (certainly not anything you'd be able to play). The CPU I don't know, duel core 1.8ghz isn't great, but I checked the minimum specs for DMC and that requires a Core 2 Duo 2.8ghz, which I had in my now 8 (?) year old desktop, I'm willing to bet that the i3 in that laptop is better than the core 2 duo

The laptop runs at a lower resolution anyway, but you'll be able to play indie stuff, I wouldn't be surprised if you could play Portal 2 tbh, but you're best asking someone with similar specs to see what they've managed to get running

[retroed]

Cheers. My current Acer laptop has an Intel Core 2 Duo T6600 / 2.2 GHz ( Dual-Core ), so how would this one compare? Apparently the Intel 4000 graphics outperforms my ATI HD 4570, too.

Someone said it will run Arkham City at 30fps on medium settings. Really?

[DANGERMAN]

well the display is about 720p so it's saving some power there, Batman isn't the most demanding game, and maybe it's the effects on the higher settings that make it anything like demanding, but I'd have thought 30fps (in outside areas at least) was optimistic, but I don't know. I wouldn't be amazed if it was capable of more than you'd think, it's a new laptop running stuff built for 7 year old hardware

I don't really know much about cpus tbh, anything I know I've picked up form Spatular lecturing me about threads

[spatular]

Cheers. My current Acer laptop has an Intel Core 2 Duo T6600 / 2.2 GHz ( Dual-Core ), so how would this one compare? Apparently the Intel 4000 graphics outperforms my ATI HD 4570, too.

Someone said it will run Arkham City at 30fps on medium settings. Really?

Ben's link says it'll run at 45fps! (edit2 - i could be reading it wrongly tbh). personally i don't really know, but would assume an i3 would be fine for less graphcally intensive indie stuff at least.

edit - i can only appologise from any thread lecturing that may have occured.

another edit - don't know how reliable this is but not much difference in cpu's:

http://cpuboss.com/cpus/Intel-Core2-Duo-T6600-vs-Intel-Core-i3-3217U

[retroed]

Thanks. I think I'm going to leave it for now, but it's good to know that I don't have to spend a fortune to have a similarly specced laptop to what I currently have.