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Post by pierrepressure on Oct 21, 2021 14:22:22 GMT
We're thinking of buying one as a Christmas present for our eldest so that he can play a few of his favourite games on whilst at the same time do his schoolwork on (LOL, ROFL,etc).
Sadly, we're not made of money and can probably afford something around £900 after a bit of financial support from his gran.
Does anyone have any recommendations? He's heavily into FIFA and Fortnite so it doesn't have to be a beast of a machine, the money we have isn't going to cater for that, but something that runs fairly well and can run some newer games would be ideal.
A PC is out of the question too as we have zero space at the minute.
Any suggestions?
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Post by Phattso on Oct 21, 2021 14:26:59 GMT
You can almost certainly get an RTX 3060 based Laptop for close to that (£1000 comfortably) but it'll be on a so-so 1080p screen and with slow support components, and relatively humble RAM. Here are some examples. |
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Post by Phattso on Oct 21, 2021 14:39:26 GMT
On the plus side: 3060 laptops are easier to actually buy than 3070 or 3080 - it took me SIX MONTHS of refreshing store pages to get my laptop earlier in the year.
Not sure how likely 3060 laptops are to sellout by Christmas, but there's a certain amount of sense in waiting to see what Black Friday deals are out there this year. You might be able to get way more bang for your buck and push up to a 1440p screen, more RAM, better GPU, etc. for the same money.
Food for thought, at any rate.
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Post by pierrepressure on Oct 21, 2021 14:42:08 GMT
Those are some pretty great examples, thank you!
I'm not sure he'd even notice the slower components either, he's mostly used to using the PC's at school which are not great.
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Post by pierrepressure on Oct 21, 2021 14:44:30 GMT
On the plus side: 3060 laptops are easier to actually buy than 3070 or 3080 - it took me SIX MONTHS of refreshing store pages to get my laptop earlier in the year. Not sure how likely 3060 laptops are to sellout by Christmas, but there's a certain amount of sense in waiting to see what Black Friday deals are out there this year. You might be able to get way more bang for your buck and push up to a 1440p screen, more RAM, better GPU, etc. for the same money. Food for thought, at any rate. There is a slight chance we can bump up the cash too, depending on work performance but I'd rather not rely on that. Waiting for Black Friday is also another good shout, I think I'll take the gamble and wait until then. |
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Post by Deleted on Oct 21, 2021 16:14:34 GMT
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Post by pierrepressure on Dec 2, 2021 13:26:43 GMT
Ended up going for the Gigabyte G5, i5 processor, 16gb ram and 3060 graphics card.
It was usually 900 quid but with work discount plus some vouchers I managed to get it for 600 quid. Checked some reviews and they said it was alright (sold it to me well) they did warn it was noisy but my God it's giving me flashbacks of the PS4 Pro I had. Playing with a headset is a must then.
Downloaded Fortnite so he's got something to play straight away at Christmas and created a steam account so he can treat himself with the gift card we bought. I stopped all animations that Windows throws at you to keep the machine running as best it can and also downloaded a program called Razer Booster which is supposed to help with game settings as both my son and I haven't really got a clue.
Anyone have any other advice to ensure we are getting the best from the machine? Sure I read somewhere to download MSI afterburner for overclocking but not sure about the safety aspect of it.
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Post by Deleted on Dec 2, 2021 13:36:03 GMT
Assume you've got rid of any bloatware like McAfee, Teams and Office?
I'd not overclock unless you need to or you've read plenty that says the chip you've got can (especially in a laptop where cooling can be a problem).
Stick with Windows 10 for now over 11 as that's resportedly slightly slower.
Aside from that, I'm not all that switched on with PCs anymore.
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Post by dfunked on Dec 2, 2021 13:44:16 GMT
If anything you'd want to use afterburner to undervolt it, not to overclock. Really not worth messing about with it though, it's not something that you can just run and away you go, it needs lots of careful tweaking.
Downloading the latest graphics drivers is worth a shot (and worth doing regularly as the ones Windows update provides are usually ancient)
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malek86
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Post by malek86 on Dec 2, 2021 14:57:36 GMT
Best thing to do is to go into the start-up settings and disable... well, just about everything except for the absolutely essential stuff.
I wouldn't bother with overclocking, these laptops are usually pretty hot as is. And if he's only going to play FIFA and Fortnite, the base clock 3060 is already more than enough anyway. Also yeah, make sure you update the graphics drivers with the most recent ones from the Nvidia website. Everything else should be okay.
One thing is to make sure, from the Nvidia control panel, that certain specific games (ie. the ones you care about) will use the 3060 rather than the integrated GPU in the Intel processor (which is crap). I think it should be fine by itself, but I remember when I had my laptop with Geforce 820M, that some games for whatever reason didn't use the discrete graphics card until I specifically set them up from the control panel. Of course, we're talking seven years ago. I'm going to assume Windows has improved since.
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Post by Deleted on Dec 2, 2021 15:53:56 GMT
It has for the most part, but I've noticed with my laptop, I have to go into device drivers to disable the integrated AMD Radeon GPU in order for a game (or emulator) to detect the Vulkan driver on my Nvidia RTX 3070. Seems to only happen when running programs in Vulkan, which I thought AMD had developed, so it's a bit odd that I have to disable the integrated GPU but nevertheless, that's the only time I encounter anything like that.
Might not be an issue on Intel though.
Just in case the boy ever gets the need to try out Quake II Ray-Traced or the Dolphin emulator to play some old Gamecube games.
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Post by pierrepressure on Dec 2, 2021 19:13:44 GMT
Haha that might be something for his old man to try 😆
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Post by ibenam on Dec 22, 2021 22:19:51 GMT
Anybody selling a thinkpad - have a budget of around £200- £250
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Post by Trowel 🏴 on Dec 24, 2021 14:23:32 GMT
Is there a sensible way to migrate from an old laptop to a new one these days? Or are we still writing down a list of things to do clean installs of and hoping nothing is forgotten?
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Post by dfunked on Dec 24, 2021 14:32:23 GMT
I always just install stuff as I need it. Tend to do clean installs every now and again and put stuff like Office, Dropbox, 7zip, notepad++ on straight away, but anything else can wait.
Chances are a new machine with a SSD will only take moments to install anything.
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malek86
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Post by malek86 on Feb 21, 2022 9:51:21 GMT
So, with my having to move soon, I'm in the market for a new laptop. Unfortunately I'm too cheap to get a gaming one, and I don't think I'll have that much time for games anyway. Still, I would like to buy something that would let me get some light gaming done in occasion, without making it the focus of the purchase.
I've found an HP Pavilion 14s with 4500U, 8GB DDR4-2666 and 256GB SSD for 500 euro. Memory looks a bit tight, but at least it's dual channel (plus it's removable, so I could upgrade if needed). Hard drive could also be better, but I'd make do. The Vega 6 iGPU should be enough for 2013-2015 era games, although I guess Destiny 2 would top at 30fps, assuming it doesn't crumble under its own memory requirements first. Build quality also seems decent, aluminium chassis, IPS screen and backlit keyboard.
The alternative would be an HP Essential 255, which for roughly the same price would give me a 5500U with Vega 7 and 8GB DDR4-3200, which sounds a bit faster. But this model has a plastic case, non-IPS screen, no backlit keyboard, and the memory is soldered with no extra slots. Plus it's single channel, I'm not sure if that would make a big difference. It seems the cooling system is also worse in this model. So I dunno, it might actually end up slower. And well, it's 15 inches, so it would be heavier.
I'm inching towards the 4500U. I kinda wanted to wait and see if any Ryzen 6000 model comes out, but it probably won't happen before I have to leave, and I don't wanna risk losing this deal. If I don't find anything else within the end of the month, I'll probably bite.
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malek86
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Post by malek86 on Feb 26, 2022 18:37:11 GMT
In the end, I decided on a compromise: I went over my original budget to get a gaming laptop, but the cheapest one available. That turned out to be an Acer Swift X 14" with Ryzen 5500U, 8GB LPDDR4X-4266 and GTX 1650 4GB GDDR6. This kind of card barely qualifies as gaming-level nowadays, but for my needs and budget, it's more than enough.
The price was not that bad either. For this price, all else I could find were 5700U or i7 models with integrated graphics. Even a model with a Geforce MX450 would have cost me either the same or more, for half the performance. I'm not usually a fan of Acer, but it seems pretty okay so far.
I'm running a few benchmarks just because I can. Wanna see how the card compares to my desktop RX 480, and also to the integrated Vega 7.
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Post by Phattso on Feb 26, 2022 18:48:29 GMT
It should at least run quietly! Hope it does what you need it to.  |
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malek86
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Post by malek86 on Feb 26, 2022 18:53:47 GMT
It does get audible when running heavy stuff, but I'm used to my desktop which is a whole different level of noisy, so this barely registers for me.
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malek86
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Post by malek86 on Mar 29, 2022 22:20:38 GMT
Ok, so I just got done playing Elden Ring for an hour on this laptop.
I can tell having just 8GB of RAM does hurt a bit. The game stutters more than on my PC, and alt-tabbing back to desktop takes a while. That said, it runs okay. Having 12GB listed as minimum requirement seems a bit too prudent.
On the other hand, 60fps is generally out of reach for the GTX 1650... even dropping down to 720p and low details, it just isn't stable enough in open areas. But I've found that the Nvidia control panel has a half-vsync option that works much better than the AMD one, so I went with that. At 30fps, it plays well at 1080p and medium details. Frame pacing also seems surprisingly okay. I'm used to AMD's crappy framerate limiter, so it looks like Nvidia did a much better job here.
I've also tested Destiny 2 a couple weeks ago. At 720p and low settings, it keeps a decent 60fps, although it drops to 30-40 in the busiest moments of six player activities like the Wellspring. Again, this doesn't happen too often, so it's quite playable. The game does have a weird issue with audio having a slight delay (doesn't happen in Elden Ring so I doubt it's the hardware). I mitigated it by disabling all kinds of audio optimizations, it's far less noticeable now, but you can still tell it's there. Bungie said the game is not officially supported on laptops, I wonder if that's got anything to do with that.
Anyway, I guess this thing just barely qualifies as a gaming laptop. For the more modern games, it's effectively a 30fps device, though 60fps is sometimes possible with hefty sacrifices. Last gen games are much more likely to get to 60fps. Good enough for me overall.
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