Low spec laptop

synthie

synthie

synthie

Associate
Joined
22 Dec 2010
Posts
23
Hello,
I'm looking to buy a laptop for my 12 year old son who's into gaming but not the latest games, i.e. Minecraft, Plants vs Zombies Garden Warfare and similar.

Budget is low, about 500 quid (I live in Germany and prices in the UK seem to be pound = euro for the same laptop, sorry guys...)

I've been looking at the following:
Acer Aspire E5-771G-36MJ 43,9 cm (17,3 inch HD+) Notebook
Intel Core i3-4005U, 1,7GHz,
4GB RAM,
500GB HDD,
Nvidia GeForce 840M,
DVD

The Geforce 840M seems to be the best in that price bracket unless I'm should go for something else? I assume that the i3 is enough for now, RAM we could up if and when necessary and that the gfx is the most vital part right now.

Thanks for your help in advance!
 
I can play MC modded on a i5 460M + GT 420M + 8gb RAM @ ~35 fps on Linux, so a i3-4005U + GT 840M + 4gb RAM will easily handle these games.

You will need to force JAVA via the Nvidia control panel to use the GT 840M as it will default to using the iGPU.
 
Thanks for the answer, that's good news.

CEUOTC said:
You will need to force JAVA via the Nvidia control panel to use the GT 840M as it will default to using the iGPU.
Click to expand...

What do you mean with that? I guess I need to somehow tell the notebook to use the nvidia card instead of the one on the mobo?
 
Alternatively there's this one:

Acer Aspire E15 (15.6 inches)
Intel® Pentium® Quad-Core Prozessor N3700 (2.4 GHz)
1TB hard drive
4GB RAM
NVIDIA GeForce 920M 2 GB

I think the Geforce 920M is about 25% faster than the 840M but I'm not sure about the Pentium CPU. It's also only 15", what do you think?

EDIT:
Got it the wrong way round (the 840M is faster) so this laptop is out
 
Last edited:
synthie said:
Thanks for the answer, that's good news.



What do you mean with that? I guess I need to somehow tell the notebook to use the nvidia card instead of the one on the mobo?
Click to expand...

I will post some pictures on how to (stuck in work atm) however if you google it, you should be able to find plenty of information on how to select a GPU to run for a given program.

It's all to do with Optimus which switches the GPU or iGPU on depending on what is running (ie games, or just browsing the web).
 
Info quite thin however try:

"Right-click Minecraft.exe before launching it and select:

Run With: > High-Performance Nvidia Graphics"
 
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