Gaming Laptop sub £1750

[MatteH Oxford]

Hi All

I'm working away from home quite a bit, looking at a laptop to help pass the time, budget around £1750. The Predator Helios 300 Gaming Laptop, model PH317 looks the best so far, The place that sells electronic Indian food has one at £1600 with a 1tb mech, 512gb ssd similar specs to the OEM version which are:

• Windows 10 Home 64-bit
• Intel® Core™ i7-9750H processor Hexa-core 2.60 GHz
• 43,9 cm (17,3") Full HD (1920 x 1080) 16:9 IPS 144Hz
• 16 GB, DDR4 SDRAM
• 1 TB SSD
• NVIDIA® GeForce RTX™ 2070 with 8 GB dedicated memory

Ideally something around those specs i.e. 16gb ram, 2070 and i79750H CPU. This looks good value so far, anythin better?

I know Acer aren't usually the best of manufacturers but the lower spec model (in the same chassis/case) with the 1660ti gets good reviews.

Advice appreciated, I'm not really in the loop these days, especially laptops!

 

[Alexrose1uk]

Honestly, you're looking for roughly the same spec as I am after, bar I would be happy with a 512GB SSD + 1TB HDD.
I have been combing the pre-Black Friday deals coming up, and have to say I've been extremely dissapointed! There have been good deals in the £0-500,500-1000 market range, and some REASONABLE although I wouldnt say good reductions in the 2000-3000 range, but there seems to have been an absolute hole in the £1000-1500 market in terms of good deals on i7/non-maxQ 2070s, and the 1660Ti/2060s are barely better than the full fat laptop 1060 they replace.

Has been quite dissapointing. After 2 years with my current laptop I was really hoping to get a nice upgrade around now without paying silly money, and if anything, most of the stuff I'm seeing is the same as what I paid more or less in performance and for a similar price.

Am still hoping something will come up BF or CM, but yeah...might have to hold off until next generation at this rate!

PPS I had been keeping an eye on a HP Omen as not only has my current 17" Omen been my most trouble-free high end laptop to date; they are usually relatively competitively priced and have good, reasonable aftermarket warranty upgrades available.
Alas, nothing on the 2070 HP Omen 17 so far.

If the purple shirt listed Timespy score is accurate, the Omen 17 actually performs slightly better than the Predator - 6662 v 7115.

Makes me think the Acer is probably a MaxQ variant; I am trying to avoid those as they often end up power capped. HP is conservative with the power but typically they at least use the full fat version just slightly power limited in BIOS for thier 17" variants, which as can be seen above is still about 10% faster.

 

[Angerer]

All the HP Omen's I can find all have the Max-Q tech on their gpu's.

I am interested to see what you choose. will watch this thread. cheers

 

[Alexrose1uk]

The 15" Omens use MaxQ for power/heat dissipation reasons, the 17" ones generally don't.
One reason I'd always chose a 17" gaming laptop over 15", they have room for better cooling systems; and often an independent heatpipe and blower for GPU and CPU. The 15" models tend to have smaller cooling arrays and sometimes share the same cooler array between the CPU and GPU.

In these days of boosting GPUs and CPUs even a few degrees of cooling can change performance.

 

[Alexrose1uk]

Ok ordered the best I could find that was actually in stock! (some sites playing dodgy and basically pulling models so you can't use their own Black Friday offers on them... GRRRR).
Ordered 2, one for me and the wife, will set us back about £1575 each after the stores BF offer/discount and a bit of cashback

HP Omen 17 CB0006NA

• Intel Core i7-9750H Six-Core Processor
• 17.3" Full HD IPS 144Hz G-SYNC Screen
• Microsoft Windows 10 Home 64-bit
• 16GB DDR4 2666MHz RAM (2x8)
• 512GB PCIe NVMe SSD + 1000GB 7200RPM HDD
• Dedicated GeForce RTX 2070 8GB Graphics [note this is a Max P, NOT MaxQ model so should get around 7100 Timespy. My current laptop gets 3900 undervolted and overclocked so need I say more ]
• USB3 | HDMI | Bluetooth

I had been hoping to get below the £1500 mark, but was happy to get £125 each off the RRP, as the Omen's are already good value compared to many brands.

What do you think?

Now if OcUK does get them in stock on Monday like thier own page mentions they will, and they run a Cyber Monday deal on them which matches or beats this price; I will just cancel this order and order from OcUK as I'd have preferred to order there but none in stock and alas cheaper but not saying where as don't want to be unfair or break forum rules!

 

[Angerer]

Hi Alex could you give me more info on the deal please. Sending you a trust.

 

[Alexrose1uk]

Did you have any luck? I noticed the last one left had gone and theyve pulled the page as they probably dont know when getting more stock.

They do still have some good offers on max q models but given the performance difference can be substantial, didn't want that!

 

[Angerer]

Alex I am unable to make up my mind, so I will leave it for now.

Thanks for all your help bud.

 

[Alexrose1uk]

No worries at all. I am just psyched to get a full fat MaxP 2070 at this price bracket; everything else that isn't maxQ is another £300-400, and the performance difference can sometimes be substantial, to the point the MaxQ isnt much better than a full fat laptop 2060.

Once I've stability tested, I'll be doing some CPU UV and GPU OC testing and will hopefully end up with something ~2x as fast in games as the old machine, even after I tweaked it to hell and back Old machine is still powerful enough I should get decent resale value also!

 

[Alexrose1uk]

Managed to one up my original deal late last night. Just before Cyber Monday came to a close not long before midnight, HP opened up pre-orders on the machines direct with them, which meant I could apply thier own 15% Black Friday weekend deal, so will have to wait a little longer but now managed to get them for the equivalent of 1525 each, including extra upgrade to 3 year warranty, and potentially an extra £70-140 back via Quidco.

Happy as Larry with that given the specs, and the rest of the deals I saw this Black Friday. Absolutely trounces anything else with a full fat 2070, and not a MaxQ.

Take off the additional warranty, and the machines essentially cost ~£1450 each, which is absolutely the price range I was looking and expecting to pay for a machine of this specification.

Substantial value add of over £100 a machine extra off, especially if the cashback comes through (albeit I'm not expecting it because of other offers used...) and that price made a lot of sense to upgrade to 3 year warranty (which also had BF discount)!

ONLY downside is I now probably won't get the machines until end of next week/early the week after, but at that price of essentially less than £1450, potentially around £1400 per laptop before warranty upgrade; happy to wait a little longer!

 

[MatteH Oxford]

I was looking at that HP too, I've decided to go small form factor as I'm not flying anywhere and can fit an ITX case + monitor etc into a regular wheelie suitcase.

 

[ToLearn]

Hi well after my Medion x7851 dc jack broke couple of days ago and them telling me they don’t do it as a spare part and having trouble finding something that will fit to replace it with, now looking for new laptop the one you have got looks great for the money you got a great price cheapest I have seen now is £1598 but got to wait till between 12th to 19th for delivery it’s can I wait that long but don’t seem much else for that kind of money.

 

[Alexrose1uk]

Well, as the following factors came into play:
-They were going to be delayed by a few weeks whilst stock came in,
-Me and the wife uses ours a LOT,
-Intend to keep for 2 years,
-The way consoles are going in terms of CPUs(8 core next gen)
-Didn't want to hit xmas delivery issues
-Better resale factor
-HP agreed to carry across the 15% discount despite BF sales ending
-I was a little worried the 230w PSU on the 2070 model might not handle excessive power load if the CPU and GPU were stretched a little above stock settings, givem the pair of those would use around 180w alone

I spoke to my wife and HP, and we decided to put the money up to upgrade to the next model up (whilst retaining the previous discount and 3 year warranty) so for another 600 each [buying 2 machines so 1.2k total] or £2125 each, we are now getting the following:

I9-9880H 8c16th (vs i7-9750h 6c12th) which also has slightly higher turbo bins I believe
32GB DDR4 2666 (vs 16GB)
2080 8GB Max-P (vs 2070)
512GB SSD/1TB 7200RPM HDD (and has room for a second NVME SSD)
144Hz Gsync IPS screen
330W PSU (vs 230W)
3 year warranty.

A lot of money, but the specs are outstanding for the 2.1K, there's nothing I can find from the UK near it and across both machines, we're getting almost a total of £1000 discount off the normal selling price, too big a saving to be sniffed at. I couldn't find anything that comes close to rivalling this on cost to the parts in the machine, given how much Intel/Nvidia charge just for those main two components alone.

What has turned out as an extra nice upshot, is APPARENTLY the 2080 with the higher rated PSU machine is compatible with the higher power rated VBIOS from Alienware's m51 2080, and comes with higher quality cooling and VRMs for the GPU than the Alienware, so if you were willing to change VBIOS, UV the CPU to reduce heat/power there and potentially lock the CPU at a slightly lower clock speed, you can essentially go as high as something like 200W on the power limits of the GPU, and smoke ANYTHING else near this price point; essentially giving you a machine with a desktop equivalent 2080 onboard. I've seen timespy scores of over 10K being pulled from these machines which is amazing.

Gives me real excitement what I'll be able to achieve with a bit of CPU UV and GPU tweaking on the stock 150W VBIOS, as I'd rather not touch the hardware (bare dies - easier to damage) and would rather go for best compromise of GPU performance and maximum CPU performance; and maybe in future try say a compromise 170/180W vbios/repaste to something like MX4 [liquid metal/heatsink mods are not my thing on expensive laptops]!

Really excited now!
Due early next week!

 

[Kohaashi]

How does the cooling compare to the a51m?
I think the a51m is about 50% thicker than the Omen 17.

 

[Alexrose1uk]

Apparently for the GPU its actually better and has better VRMs. 6 v 5 (same actual VRM). Cpu cooling isnt as good as the gpu cooling, not sure how the a51m does there.

 

[Alexrose1uk]

Well to say the new machine is a little bit beasty is an understatement.
Got her out of the box this evening just to fire her up and make sure all seems to be working properly before I factory reset and get her the way I like her. Even just running windows updates, the CPU was floating around 4.65GHz.
No word of a lie, put it in performance mode in the Omen Command Centre and Firestrike overall score is ~19900 and Timespy score is ~9500, that's before I even consider undervolting or overclocking.

Does get pretty toasty and noisy but with this sort of performance... not surprised! UV should help a little here too.

 

[Kohaashi]

Well to say the new machine is a little bit beasty is an understatement.
Got her out of the box this evening just to fire her up and make sure all seems to be working properly before I factory reset and get her the way I like her. Even just running windows updates, the CPU was floating around 4.65GHz.
No word of a lie, put it in performance mode in the Omen Command Centre and Firestrike overall score is ~19900 and Timespy score is ~9500, that's before I even consider undervolting or overclocking.

Does get pretty toasty and noisy but with this sort of performance... not surprised! UV should help a little here too.

They’re some decent scores.

Have you done much tweaking to the machine yet? How is the LCD, any backlight bleed?

I am looking at possibly getting an Omen 17 to replace the a51m after the GPU has died.

 

[Alexrose1uk]

Not really unfortunately not had much chance with work. Hopefully next few days. Not even had chance to reset it yet; it's essentially still sitting there lol

Machine has a little bit of backlight bleed, but pretty much the usual these days for laptop gaming IPS screens tbh. Not noticeable when the screen isnt black. My wife's one is worse with a slightly damaged screen, but HP are collecting it tomorrow; after its received they'll dispatch a brand new one.

They don't make it that hard as long as you jump through the usual speaking to the tech support departments, getting a log and then submitting a DOA report. That being said, the response time is noticeably lower than my old machine's 120Hz screen so quite pleased there.

Bit of a pain but I'm fairly used to screens being the weak point on many laptops and easiest part to damage in shipping/storage even with decent boxes etc.

And with a 3 year warranty, if anything goes wrong, protected for quite a while

 

[Alexrose1uk]

Well got a little more chance now; CPU running at an undervolt of -125mv happily with no issues (via throttlestop, also set the turbo time limit to essentially infinite); which can only have helped CPU temps with lower volts (and therefore noise).
Will probably go further but need to test that. Cinebench R15 is currently sitting 1728 all core, 193 single core. CPU-Z bench say around 500-515 single thread, ~4600-4800 multithread IIRC.

What is noticeable though is in low thread workload games like WoW, my old 7700HQ would sit around 3.4-3.6GHz, usually the lower. This sits around the 4.1-4.3GHz region judging by MSI's overlay, so there's a good ~700MHz average clock speed increase for single threaded performance loads, and then all those extra cores for anything heavier, makes a massive difference in fluidity Seems to sit around 3.9-4GHz when I stick an all core load on so no complaints there.
32GB RAM also means very little unnecessary paging so alt-tabs etc are verrrrry quick and smooth.

What I will say however is the new screens are phenomenally better. I think HP improved these last gen after complaints from the gen I previously had.
Backlight bleed isn't perfect, but it seems to have some sort of adaptive backlight so its not that noticeable all the time. Colours are phenomenally rich at times, and the response time on the panel is apparently circa ~10ms compared to 40ms on the old ones, so its like motion blur has suddenly been turned off from low. Everything seems crisper and sharper in motion and especially noticeable on moving text.

Very happy there.

 

[Alexrose1uk]

Not touched the GPU yet but here we go, with the CPU undervolt in place
https://www.3dmark.com/3dm/42001421?
https://www.3dmark.com/3dm/42001625?