Advice for a gaming laptop

ShawWellPete

ShawWellPete

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I am thinking about a new gaming laptop for my son's birthday present. Does anybody have any suggestions for a good gaming laptop for under £600 or is that an oxymoron? He want to play games from Steam such as Day Z?
 
GPU: Make sure it's in at least the Mid Range sections of:
http://www.notebookcheck.net/Mobile-Graphics-Cards-Benchmark-List.844.0.html

CPU: Matter of preference, i5 maybe?

Cooling: Cooling is very important, gaming stresses out componenets and generates a lot of heat in a laptop.

If you can push the budget, then whilst these aren't everyone's kettle of fish, and it's often touted that they are "just dells but more expensive", this is what I use for gaming:
http://www.dell.com/uk/p/alienware-14/pd.aspx
 
Alienware without a doubt, have come so close to buying an M14X R2 so many times I've lost count. Yes there are others out there, but only a few which offer the cooling required by a gaming rig. Only reason I didn't get one is due to me using the PS3 more and trying to steer clear of PC gaming as I had forgot how problematic it could get lol
 
I bought my gaming laptop from PC specialist. Cost circa £2000 but still runs well without issues.
 
Why a laptop desk based will be cheaper and give more upgrades in life options
 
It's for my 14 year old son who is at boarding school. Needs to be a laptop and he'll probably drop it and break it so it needs to be a reasonable price!

I don't think he expects to play the latest games at the highest settings, but to be able to play must games on Steam at mid settings.
 
That looks pretty good. The screen resolution is a bit high at 1080 (ideally, you don't want the native screen resolution to be too high, since for games to look good, you want to run in native resolution for the screen - it's a lot easier for a mobile graphics car to drive a game at 720p than 1080p), but that's not a huge problem unless he wants lots of MSAA )

I'd also seriously think about swapping out the 1TB hard drive for a 128Gb SSD. The upgrade is only £5 in options, and does mean storage is much more limited, but in games and general use the lappy will be MUCH faster.
 
Achitophel said:
That looks pretty good. The screen resolution is a bit high at 1080 (ideally, you don't want the native screen resolution to be too high, since for games to look good, you want to run in native resolution for the screen - it's a lot easier for a mobile graphics car to drive a game at 720p than 1080p), but that's not a huge problem unless he wants lots of MSAA )

I'd also seriously think about swapping out the 1TB hard drive for a 128Gb SSD. The upgrade is only £5 in options, and does mean storage is much more limited, but in games and general use the lappy will be MUCH faster.
Click to expand...

Thanks very much, I had to get something ordered before his birthday so annoyingly it is too late to order the SSD!
 
One issue with the SSD would have been that it'd likely be full once he met his first Steam sale. Obviously you don't have to have everything installed at once but constantly downloading-installing-deleting-downloading-installing (swap downloading for copying if he backed the game installs up onto an external drive) is really tedious even if you've got a fast internet connection.
Plus the 120GB SSD I use as my Windows drive is over half full even though it's barely got anything on it. I intentionally put space-hogging stuff like photos, music, games, downloaded installers and the vast majority of my software on my other drives - even my Windows user profile is on a different drive - but it's still down to 48GB remaining. Steam and DayZ comes to about 15GB and they're both going to get bigger over time.

The faster boot the SSD brings is nice but the space soon goes.
 
I thought I would come back to this post to point out that the has been a series of problems at DinoPC. I have returned the laptop twice for repairs and both times it has come back with different faults. In the 3 months we have had it, it has had 3 weeks of use. I'm now trying to get a refund!

Any suggestions for a sub £800 laptop that is pretty good at running games and is reliable!? please do not suggest getting a desk top.
 
Well, last year we bought a Toshiba Satellite L855-15U 15.6-inch Notebook for the eldest.
It plays WoW, Team Fortress, Minecraft okay, but does tend to overheat a bit in the summer (probably because she refuses to use it on a hard surface, it's often on the carpet - no doubt rammed full of dust). The youngest has an earlier windows 7 version of the same, which works okay, especially since I had it apart to clean dust out if it.

Neither are stil available, but a quick look on amazon for Toshiba Satellite returned plenty, and for under 800 notes you can get them with NVidia gfx, for example:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/...tailpage_o02_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1#productDetails
which scores higher on:
http://www.notebookcheck.net/Mobile-Graphics-Cards-Benchmark-List.844.0.html
than our older ones.

I can't recommend this specific model, but we have 3 Toshiba Satellites of various ages and they seem pretty well put together.
If you can stretch a little further, I would still point you in the direction of the Alienware I mentioned in post 4. I've had mine for about a year now with no real complaints.
 
Well, Gigabyte used to make good motherboards, but I didn't realise they made laptops now.
Reviews on amazon seem okay, but I'd be tempted to look around for other reviews too.
Spec looks good, but I couldn't say what the build quality is going to be like, or whether there is sufficient cooling to allow you to use the gfx card to the limit.
I'd be tempted to ask on some gaming forums. Steam maybe? Or do overclockers have gaming sections on their forums?
 
Achitophel said:
That looks pretty good. The screen resolution is a bit high at 1080 (ideally, you don't want the native screen resolution to be too high, since for games to look good, you want to run in native resolution for the screen - it's a lot easier for a mobile graphics car to drive a game at 720p than 1080p), but that's not a huge problem unless he wants lots of MSAA )

I'd also seriously think about swapping out the 1TB hard drive for a 128Gb SSD. The upgrade is only £5 in options, and does mean storage is much more limited, but in games and general use the lappy will be MUCH faster.
Click to expand...

128GB isn't enough for a gaming machine. Titanfall for instance gobbles upwards of 50GB. Best bet would be a hybrid drive like the Seagate momentus XT if you want most of the general OS performance benefit without the cost of a big SSD.
 
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