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Laptop GFX cards

JBuk

JBuk

JBuk

Soldato
Joined
28 Nov 2002
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Location
Cumbria
My aging ipad has seen better days and I’m starting to think about a replacement and I’m considering getting a laptop instead

It would be for general browsing etc but I wouldn’t mind playing a few games now and then, what sort of spec gfx card should I be looking at?

To put things in perspective my desktop has a 980ti which is still sufficient for a lot of games albeit some newer games need the settings lowered

I would be happy with something that’s better than that but it doesn’t need to be top of the range as id rather keep the budget down
 
Well a desktop 5050 is around +50% of the 980ti, and around +15% of the laptop 5050.
So even a 5050 laptop would be around +35% of your 980ti, 5060 would an even more noticeable jump.

The only problem with the cheaper 5060 laptops is the 16GB RAM limit, and generally being soldered, so no increasing it yourself.
 
Budget is the key here.

Entry level pick for me would be Intels B390 iGPU comes with the X7/X9/G3e chips in a laptop or gaming handheld, it would be about 10-20% faster than a 980Ti but comes with modern hardware for scaling and framegen puts it around an Nvida 4050 level but without VRAM limiting issues that happens on 8Gb dedicated cards these days, get 32Gb as mentioned, 24 as a minimum. Beauty of this is IGPU it will game on battery where many dGPUs in laptops do not.

A laptop 5050 should have no performance deficit to a desktop one as they both unusually have the same chip and RAM speed, most laptop chips generally offer lesser power (GPU unit config) chips with same name but not in this case, I had a 5050 in my LG gram though it was a power capped one (can’t remember if it was 45 or 65w) due to being a Thin and light and it gamed really well but you will have to manage settings more so for the VRAM limits, it can drive decent quality.

Here is B390 vs 5050 in timespy you can see graphics score level between the two 6.8k vs 8.3k, bare in mind my 5050 was power limited, a full power 5050 (non TDP capped) is probably nudging 10k I think an average 980Ti is about 5.5k on graphics score front obviously you can run this on yours and see.


But you can get some laptops with 5060 at a bargain rate if you don’t mind cheaper chunkier ones, they will only have 8Gb VRAM. Again with laptop graphics the important thing is the sustained power limits etc so you need to do research for the laptop you choose to see what it is offering, we live in a world where a well specced 5070Ti can outperform a T&L 5090, so chip name is rarely the full picture. Same for the iGPU actually, my laptop has B390 with 7500 ram and my other B390 have 8533 and 9600 RAM, higher number generally = better for an iGPU as memory bandwidth matters for graphics, though not everything, I am hardly slumming it with 7500.

In a laptop I would be looking for a 5070+ with 12/16gb VRAM personally but budget is +++ that said if you have more VRAM system RAM can drop to 16Gb if it helped bring something in budget in these RAM constrained times.
 
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Thanks for the replies , I have been looking at a few laptops and my budget needs to be less than £1k

most games would be a few years old with the exception of Balderd Gate 3

The laptop will be more general purpose but have the ability to game
 
Any of those chips will do the job on Baldurs gate, blimey I can emulate PC on my phone and play Baldurs gate at 30-40fps :D

for £1k you will find a 5060 will likely only be 16Gb but that is just the times we are in, it'll still be leaps ahead of what you are used too.
 
JBuk said:
Thanks for the replies , I have been looking at a few laptops and my budget needs to be less than £1k

most games would be a few years old with the exception of Balderd Gate 3

The laptop will be more general purpose but have the ability to game
Click to expand...

There's a few in OC at around £1k with 4060, 5050 and 5060 GPU's, all are faster than your 980 Ti, but be mindful of the processors as I found when looking for a new laptop that some of them have 5060/5070 but not very good processors.

ASUS V16 V3607VH NVIDIA RTX 5050 16GB 16.0 WUXGA 144Hz Intel Core 5 210H seems pretty decent for a reasonable £949.99, but mind it's only 512GB storage (there's always a caveat! lol).

If you are a member of a well known wholesale warehouse, there's some good offerings there as well.
 
If you can hold fire until Black Friday, you often see some decent clearance deals around then of this years models of gaming laptops, as they'll launch new models early in the new year. Worth waiting rather than firing now with no discount or offer to be had, you're only 2 months off and you'd be kicking yourself if you see the same machine for a dramatically lower price, or a dramatically better spec for the same price as spent now, unless you NEED to move now :)

What I'm saying is keep your eyes open for offers, deals, clearances, last ofs between now and then, and go when you see a good one, don't buy at full price so close to BF weekend, whether the actual biting point is sooner or later.
 
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I think with the jump in price and reduction in spec of the new models due to sourcing in these times there will be little reason to discount old stuff.
 
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The same thing could be said last year as the rampocalypse had already begun, it still happened though. Companies need to switch up models etc, sometimes simply due to large scale retail contracts.

I'm not saying the deals will be as good as they've sometimes traditionally have been, but I'd be surprised if there is nothing.
 
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