Gaming laptops?

[Moniker]

My current laptop has just about had it, so I'm looking to get a new one. Any advice for gaming-quality laptops? Budget is around 500USD.

[shmuppyLove]

My advice is: figure out how to raise your budget.

I'd consider $500 the bare minimum for a laptop, let alone one that is properly equipped for gaming.

Then again, what kind of gaming are we talking about?

[null1024]

$500 will get you something with garbage Intel video at best, or if you're lucky, a remotely decent AMD chipset that runs worse than it should to reduce power consumption. It'll at least have a decent CPU though [a $500 machine might net you an i5 if you look around], so if all you're going to bother with is N64 and earlier emulation [and hell, SSF runs almost fine with light compatibility on this $500 machine of mine from 2009/2010], you'd be pretty fine.

If you want to do any sort of actual PC gaming though, look to $700 laptops or so. Bare fucking minimum, if you want comfortable laptop gaming performance, you'll need quite a bit over $1000.

[Stormwatch]

>gaming
>laptop

Is this really necessary? Everyone says you can assemble a badass gaming PC for the price of a so-so portable.

[BryanM]

Discount PC is selling Duo 2.8 Ghz's for $300-400. Probably without slots for graphics cards. Because. Laptop.

I'd expect a so-so performance for World of Warcraft, and a solid one for Quake 3 and Unreal Tournament. If by some miracle you can get a PCI Express era card in one, it should be able to play Path of Exile or Guildwars 2.

Which will play like ass. But it'd run.

I heartily advocate using laptops as a emulation arcade and a type writer for that novel you've been working on.

You're better off waiting ten years for a new paradigm if your intention is to GW2 it up. By then, who knows. Maybe games will be so expensive to be made by humans, they quit pushing system requirements for awhile.

[drauch]

You could buy a used Dell laptop on ebay for 20 bucks if you wanted to play Quake III...

[Moniker]

Hrm... a rather disappointing view. I saw an HP laptop with nvidia 610M and dual or quad core for ~500 at costco awhile back, so I'd assumed tech had gotten much cheaper since I last went shopping. Either that's crappier than I thought, I was mistaken, or I missed a helluva deal. Haven't really tried for PC gaming in awhile, so I don't really know what's current.

I'd like to be able to play Source-powered games, at least. It being a laptop is pretty non-negotiable, given my lifestyle.

[BryanM]

This page gives an idea of how that'd perform. Its SC2 frames per second on the toilet "everyone has downs/is a turd" setting is probably optimistic.

I'd aim a bit higher than that for Team Fortress 2.

It's really a crap situation - a very binary "not enough juice" kind of deal. Anything under 30fps is unplayable poo; add in a dozen other players... better safe than sorry.

If you don't spend two solid days googling benchmark sites, double checking every spec, finally ordering something you're 75% sure will be good enough, and immediately kind of regret it in an ephemeral kind of sense, you're doing it wrong~

[gct]

The 610m isn't going to do squat for games. I would suggest looking for something with a 640m as a bare-minimum. I think these will start around $750.

My laptop has a 540m and it still struggles at higher quality settings.

[Astraea FGA Mk. I]

Don't get a laptop for gaming. I've made that mistake.

[Ixmucane2]

I'm also considering a "gaming" laptop, but they seem all huge and expensive. Note that you are going to blow your $500 budget on a 512 GB SSD unit alone.

The recently updated Samsung series 7 gaming model (warning: it looks EXACTLY identical to the obsolete previous model) has a very good backlit keyboard, a good third generation i7 processor, a good nVidia graphics card, a bright 17'' full HD panel and two hard disks.
However, customizing it with upgrades like 16 GB memory, or a SSD (without looking far, according to reviews the new Samsung 840 pro is even better than the great Samsung 830 I have in my office laptop), or a top of the line processor and graphic card seems hard or impossible.

Alienware seems to offer a more adequate customization range (and apparently slightly higher prices and a more immature look) in the same huge and expensive class. Judging mail-order only products is a bit difficult.

[shmuppyLove]

Either that's crappier than I thought

This.

[Krimzon Kitzune]

If you get a gaming laptop with a HDD that has a head parking policy, you'd better download CrystalDiskInfo to disable APM if you don't have the means to do it in any other way. Otherwise, enjoy your hellish micro stutters.

[Ed Oscuro]

The recently updated Samsung series 7 gaming model (warning: it looks EXACTLY identical to the obsolete previous model) has a very good backlit keyboard, a good third generation i7 processor, a good nVidia graphics card, a bright 17'' full HD panel and two hard disks.

But does it have a keyboard that will let you press down Control while pressing the arrow keys diagonally? And is the screen matte or gloss?

Most of these things are "optimized" for WASD.

[Astraea FGA Mk. I]

After owning many different laptops of varying size and purpose the only thing I would spend any amount of money on now is a macbook pro.
Everything else sucks, trust me.

[cools]

After owning many different laptops of varying size and purpose the only thing I would spend any amount of money on now is a macbook pro.
Everything else sucks, trust me.

They're nice machines, but I'd struggle without 3G (dongles or tethering are not as practical) and need to be running Windows - which loses all the power savings that OS X provides.

So no thanks.

[Moniker]

Any recs on build-your-own sites? I haven't been able to find one that seems reputable.

[Ed Oscuro]

After owning many different laptops of varying size and purpose the only thing I would spend any amount of money on now is a macbook pro.
Everything else sucks, trust me.

Let me guess, all Compaq, Dell, and Lenovo, right?

There are a few semi-specialty laptop manufacturers that are quite promising (I don't remember who I would have looked at, Puget Systems rings a bell, but I don't vouch for any of these having not used them), plus one can also go for OEM manufacturer with many name-brand laptops. A company like Asus has some features of both those in its offerings, but its massive scale and presence in almost every aspect of PC hardware design also means that an Asus machine should come in very competitively priced and fully-featured compared to other stuff.

The one thing I'll give Apple is that they strive for that middle-of-the-road reliability and they crank out so many copies of a model that service should be easy to come by, even years after the model is obsolete.

If you get a lemon, though, you're just sharing misery with many thousands (if not millions) of other users. At least together Apple users can get some satisfaction better than the "we didn't hear nothin' honest" responses one is likely to get from Wintop manufacturers.

I don't think that Macbook Pro models, despite the name, are very competitive with any good gaming-class (or otherwise) laptop from other folks though - although I will agree that those models are hyped up a bit more than they're worth, and gaming on one is not nearly as pleasant as using a good regular tower PC with a real monitor and comfortable keyboard and a mouse that isn't plugged in right next to itself.

[njiska]

After owning many different laptops of varying size and purpose the only thing I would spend any amount of money on now is a macbook pro.
Everything else sucks, trust me.

I hear ya. Love my MBP. Every other laptop I've had was a piece of shit. And the one's my friend's have bought in the past year are already faling apart while my MBP is basically flawless. You just can't argue with the build quality.

It not in the same class as alienware or Dell's XPS line, but it does a decent job with the Steam games I have for it.

[Ganelon]

I've had to use numerous Macs for work and have experienced a fair share of issues, from OEM hard drives becoming unrecoverable, to power supply wire fraying, to OS instability. Thanks to glitches with data transfer from an older MacBook Pro to a new model, my newer model randomly crashed every week or 2. Virtual machines require a lot of care to avoid data corruption; anybody who needs Excel for work should be warned that the Mac version is missing a lot of power user functionality. The rubber pads on the bottom quickly fall off. On the other hand, having used laptops of all major brands, I would say that MacBooks have by far the highest quality keys and trackpad; if basic functionality is key, then Mac in on another level, especially since you can almost ignore the threat of viruses. I agree that they're not enough for high end gaming.

For anybody interested in oldschool gaming, PCs are more convenient. I have a Dell XPS because it satisfied my criteria at the time: under $1200 (decent sales all the time at Dell), 17" screen, 1080p, BD-ROM, quad core, mid-range graphics card, and some more quantitative requirements on processor, memory, and space. I'm pleased with my laptop although it certainly didn't support the latest games at max settings and there are a few issues, such as LCD pixels dying and the power supply going kaput.

As for building a laptop, even low-end parts would likely still cost too much to play the latest games at a decent clip. This isn't the 90s desktop market where you could save $1000 by assembling everything yourself. Margins are pretty low for PC sellers now while parts still cost money.