New Laptop advice

thebunker

thebunker

thebunker

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Joined
25 Apr 2011
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19
Hi,

I’m looking into to getting a Laptop, and i was wondering if someone more knowledgeable that could recommend one for me.
My price range is £500 – 600.
While gaming won’t be my primary use it would be nice to have a machine that will play current games and upcoming games (such as Rome 2 or age of wonders 3).
I’m not sure if my requirements make it feasible, whenever i have been looking at laptops with dedicated graphics cards the price seems to shoot up.

Hope you can help me

Thanks,
 
I would think you should ideally look for a laptop with at least i5 32xxM (2 cores 4 threads) CPU and a GT650M graphic, but it would push the price to close to up to £670-£700. If you got your own OS and if the custom PC has the option to remove the OS, it could give some saving with the cost of the OS reduced/removed.

The MSI GX60 currently have an promotion running with £100 cashback (till the end of this month I believe), and with it priced at £830-£860 (depending on where you get it), it would only be £730-£760. That laptop has one of the fastest graphic chip around the 7970M, which will be more than enough to handle the nature res of 1920x1080. However the biggest downside of this laptop is that for the CPU it uses the budget Trinity CPU A10-4600M 4 cores 2.3GHz, with boost to 3.1GHz (load/stress/temp dependent), which is actually even slower than the desktop's aged Q6600...so it would frequently bottleneck the 7970M if the game was a CPU demanding one. There's not much you can do about improving the frame rate if the CPU is what holding the frame rate back, but with the 7970M being bottlenecked (GPU not using 99% usage), it would mean it would gives your plenty of headroom for turning up the eyecandy (just avoid turning up graphic settings that are also CPU dependent (i.e. shadow).

If you must find a capable laptop that's not above your budget, I would suggest try googling "3XS Graphite LG5". It is a 11.6" laptop and GT650M graphic as standard, plus the option for customising the parts a bit such as upping the CPU from i5 3210M to i7 3360QM (which I would strongly recommend if you don't mind upping your budget), and also the option to remove the OS if you don't need.
 
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My desktop only has vista, so i'd probably need to get it with an OS. I Probably should have mentioned that, thanks for the advice. is the GT610m no good? that's the card i have seen most offen (other than intel).
 
thebunker said:
My desktop only has vista, so i'd probably need to get it with an OS. I Probably should have mentioned that, thanks for the advice. is the GT610m no good? that's the card i have seen most offen (other than intel).
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The GT610m wouldn't be much quicker than the Intel graphic to be honest. Even the GT650M would struggle for the newer/more demanding game if not turn some graphic settings down, which is why I suggest that the GT650m should be minimum.

The "3XS Graphite LG5" laptop I mentioned is under £600, and has a i5 3210M CPU and GT650m graphic and with Windows 7 OEM included, the screen is however 11.6" (not sure if it may be too small for you) with 1366x768 res (which in a way could be a good thing as the GT650m should manage this res nicely, and CPU might actually become the limiting factor for frame rate instead). The screen is however only average, as I read that the viewing angle ain't the greatest (but for a screen this size I would think most people would sit directly in front of it anyway); but you have to bare in mind that with this kinda of budget you really can't expect too much.
 
thebunker said:
Lenovo IdeaPad Z585 - £399

the price is very low which would infer lack of quality, but as i'm less familiar with AMD how comparable is it?
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Depending on which Z585 it is. I would think for the model with the A10-4600 and HD 7670M graphic it "could" do reasonably well, but I don't think it is the £399 one you quoted (think it would be pretty much cost almost as much as the "3XS Graphite LG5" I mentioned above. However the crossfire performance is only as good and reliable as the driver support and the games themselves:

http://www.notebookcheck.net/Review-Lenovo-IdeaPad-Z585-Notebook.83889.0.html
"Thanks to the middle class graphics solution, even current games, such as Battlefield 3 and Anno 2070, are fluently playable at medium settings. Both games run with an average of 30 fps at 1366x768 pixels. Older games, such as Trackmania Nations Forever or Mafia 2, can even be played with higher settings. The Acer Aspire V3-551G-10468G50Makk reached a similar frame rate, proving that the components in both systems work well together. The online RPG Torchlight 2 and the Toshiba Satellite L850-153 showed us the drawback of the dual GPU configuration. The Toshiba notebook comes with a single HD 7670M and should, theoretically, be slower than our graphics team. But this was not the case: at higher settings, the single graphics card managed 68 fps, while our test unit only reached 47 fps – a good example of the poor driver support."

And even if there's no issue with crossfire, the HD 7660G + HD 7670M is still slower than the GT650m.
 
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Thank you, your answers have been really helpful. definitely food for thought. What do you mean by driver support? is crossfire not very well developed/supported?

I'm moving to Australia so i have a lot of costs to be considerate of, so breaking my budget is a tough thing to do.

Would you consider the notebook check to be the best site to get reviews from?
 
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thebunker said:
Thank you, your answers have been really helpful. definitely food for thought. What do you mean by driver support? is crossfire not very well developed/supported?

I'm moving to Australia so i have a lot of costs to be considerate of, so breaking my budget is a tough thing to do.

Would you consider the notebook check to be the best site to get reviews from?
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Games are not really written to use more than a single GPU, and to get Crossfire/SLI to work, it is almost ENTIRELY depended upon AMD/Nvidia's driver support to get them working for games. The thing is since it is not natively supported by the games themselves, despite the graphic companies' best effort, the performance scaling with multi-GPU will always be a case of hit or miss (some games simply won't get much performance improvement on Crossfire/SLI. Generally games that has the graphic companies involved during development would have better Crossfire/SLI performance; for games which development that does not have AMD/Nvidia involved, multi-GPUs can be no faster, if not slower than a single GPU in some situations.
 
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