Good/gaming laptop help

[Night Fox6928]

I decided against building a desktop, now i want a laptop. i found one im gonna buy from dell if i make it before the sale ends. 799.99$ 15.6 inch, i7 3.1 ghz, 6m cache, 8gb dual channel,1 tb sata hard drive, intel graphics 4000 (how good are these integrated cards on their cpus?)

but if i dont make it i need help finding another for 800-900$ preffereably only 900 with at least a 2 year warranty.

im shooting for at least 3.0 ghz cpu, and 8gb dual channel memory.

ps. wont be serious gaming, just multi window runescape probably.

 

[pooned]

Best bet is getting a dedicated graphics card. Will make a huge difference from those integrated.

 

[SASRT8]

remember there are a LOT of things that make your experience pleasant with a gaming laptop

processor: An I5 is MORE than enough for gaming, something around the 2.3-2.5ghz range will do you just fine. Games DON'T rely heavily on your processor anymore, it's a simple fact. Now, that doesn't mean that a basic Celeron will do just fine...you do need processing power, just not as much as most people think. I can get technical with you, but to keep it simple, any i5 processor will suffice for gaming, even their lower-end ones. For games, your focus NEEDS to be your GPU

RAM: more is better, right? well, not particularly. 8gb of ram is the perfect amount for anything you will want to do, very rarely will you ever find the need for more. Honestly, 6 gigs is enough, but 8 gigs will keep you prepared for some of the more memory-intensive programs that keep coming out. But where can you make a difference there, then, if 8gb is a good ceiling? Simple, if your laptop supports faster ram, then run the faster ram. 1600mhz RAM with latency timings of 10 or 11(pretty common) will keep you ahead of the pack for plenty of time to come. Some laptops can run 1833 mhz ram, you just have to find out what your MOBO will support

HDD: You shouldn't focus on capacity here, that's the wrong way to look at things. How often will you need more than 500 gigs? and if it's because you have a ton of music/videos....then get an external drive for that.
a simple mechanical drive does just fine for gaming, but any upgrades you do here WILL make a big difference in your overall user experience. a 5400 rpm hard drive will give you decent performance, but a 7200 rpm drive will be even better. A SSD will be SUPERIOR though. You have to factor in your upgradability here. On my own gaming rig, I have a 750-gig 7200 rpm drive and a 240-gig MSATA-3 SSD, both have windows loaded so I can boot to either. On the SSD, a complete system restart takes me 11 seconds. On the HDD it takes 47. I'm not saying buy a laptop with a SSD, because it's exponentially more expensive to buy it from the OEM as an upgrade. what i'm saying is to do research on the laptop you are looking at... see if it supports SATA2(fast) or SATA3(6 gb/s...extremely fast)...or even an MSATA slot. then just yank the mechanical drive out and stuff in an SSD.

GPU: DEFINITELY, like pooned said, go with a dedicated card. Many games nowadays utilize features that only NVIDIA cards have, so if possible stay with NVIDIA. Don't let the numbers fool you= e.g. A GTX 560m will outperform a GT650m, do your research! Faster core clocks, faster memory clocks, more pipelines, more CUDA cores, GDDR3 memory(fast) or GDDR5(faster) + the memory amount. Look for things like this, and then compare benchmarks. An excellent place for information on GPU's is over at the NotebookCheck website. They have detailed info + multiple benchmarks about nearly every mobile graphics solution you can think of.

another thing you want to take into consideration before buying is...can it keep COOL while gaming? very important in the long-term life of the system. Laptops tend to have poor cooling, but some are worse than others. HP's tend to be the worst offender here, while ASUS tends to be the best, MSI and lenovo right after. Research on google once you settle on a particular model, and see if people are having heat issues, or even things like quality concerns. Remember, you're spending a lot of money. The least you owe to yourself is to make sure it's being spent 100 percent as well as you possibly can.

 

[SASRT8]

oh, and by the way. The intel HD4000 graphics is probably their highest-end graphics solution, albeit still integrated. It's basically a part of the ivy bridge(and sandy bridge i think) processors, and it's decent for low-end gaming. Many laptops use it in conjunction with NVidia cards. This is called Optimus, and basically what it does is shift between either the integrated solution or the Dedicated card when its needed...on the fly without any user input. This is mostly just to save battery

What i'm getting at, is my laptop has the Intel HD4000 setup in Optimus with my Nvidia Geforce 675M, and when running RS in MAX settings with 4x Anti-Aliasing at 1920x1080p resolution, Optimus never engages my dedicated card. It plays the game flawlessly on just the Intel HD4000 with max settings. It's definitely potent for a integrated card.

but for 800, i would NEVER buy a laptop with an IGP card, no way. your call!

with a 900 ceiling, this one here is a MONSTER

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834246628

It's a 5400 RPM drive, but it supports SATA3, so you can EASILY upgrade this thing to a SSD later on, and you'll have a laptop that will last you YEARS
it can probably play 5+ open RS windows with MAX settings all at once.
TBH I'm pretty surprised to see an 3rd-gen i7 and a GTX660m GPU in a laptop under 900 bucks...

 

[Night Fox6928]

oh, and by the way. The intel HD4000 graphics is probably their highest-end graphics solution, albeit still integrated. It's basically a part of the ivy bridge(and sandy bridge i think) processors, and it's decent for low-end gaming. Many laptops use it in conjunction with NVidia cards. This is called Optimus, and basically what it does is shift between either the integrated solution or the Dedicated card when its needed...on the fly without any user input. This is mostly just to save battery

What i'm getting at, is my laptop has the Intel HD4000 setup in Optimus with my Nvidia Geforce 675M, and when running RS in MAX settings with 4x Anti-Aliasing at 1920x1080p resolution, Optimus never engages my dedicated card. It plays the game flawlessly on just the Intel HD4000 with max settings. It's definitely potent for a integrated card.

but for 800, i would NEVER buy a laptop with an IGP card, no way. your call!

with a 900 ceiling, this one here is a MONSTER

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834246628

It's a 5400 RPM drive, but it supports SATA3, so you can EASILY upgrade this thing to a SSD later on, and you'll have a laptop that will last you YEARS
it can probably play 5+ open RS windows with MAX settings all at once.
TBH I'm pretty surprised to see an 3rd-gen i7 and a GTX660m GPU in a laptop under 900 bucks...

honestly i would downgrade the gpu for better performance else where on the comp if i could, i wont game heavy on it as i have an xbox 360, but i will game some, mostly rs tho prolly

 

[Clashfan]

honestly i would downgrade the gpu for better performance else where on the comp if i could, i wont game heavy on it as i have an xbox 360, but i will game some, mostly rs tho prolly

That computer has good performance everywhere. The 3610QM is a very fast processor. I know you said you wanted a CPU 3ghz+, but you really shouldn't worry about the 3610QM being 2.3. Only people who don't really know what they're doing focus on clock speed.

I looked at dell's site, and the way they're advertising processors is a little misleading. They're calling a a 2.5ghz processor with the ability to turbo boost one core to 3.1ghz "up to 3.1ghz". If you want to describe them like that you could say the 3610QM is "up to 3.3ghz"

 

[Night Fox6928]

That computer has good performance everywhere. The 3610QM is a very fast processor. I know you said you wanted a CPU 3ghz+, but you really shouldn't worry about the 3610QM being 2.3. Only people who don't really know what they're doing focus on clock speed.

I looked at dell's site, and the way they're advertising processors is a little misleading. They're calling a a 2.5ghz processor with the ability to turbo boost one core to 3.1ghz "up to 3.1ghz". If you want to describe them like that you could say the 3610QM is "up to 3.3ghz"

i was actualy thinkin they might of been doing that

edit. i was really looking forward to that dual chanell mem too.....i bet its good

 

[Clashfan]

i was actualy thinkin they might of been doing that

edit. i was really looking forward to that dual chanell mem too.....i bet its good

Any computer you buy will support dual channel memory. For ~$20 you could have the laptop SASRT8 linked to running 8gb dual channel memory. There's a decent chance it's running dual channel as it's shipped anyway, and either way the difference is pretty negligible.

 

[SASRT8]

The 3610qm is a ridiculously powerful CPU, and gets excellent scores in every benchmark i've seen it in. You're not going to get much better than that.
It supports Intel Turbo-boost, which is similar to what I described about the Optimus technology with the GPU
basically, when the power is not needed, it runs at 2.3 ghz on all four cores. When you actually need the processing power, it will automatically ramp the speed up to 3-3.3ghz on its own, without you ever even knowing about it. And trust me, it's seamless, just like the Optimus(which that lenovo also supports)
The memory is DDR3, so yes it is dual-channel. It's also 1600mhz, so it's potent aswell...not sure what the latency is but i'm sure it's probably 11-11-11-28ish, which is good.
the GTX660m has 2gb GDDR5 memory, so not only is the core of the GPU very fast(900mhz i think) but the memory is immensely fast. much too powerful to be in a 900 dollar laptop IMO, so that's a plus.
Plus you can download MSI afterburner and make that GPU run even faster, but I dont recommend overclocking unless you've done your research first. I've read that the 660m's can overclock to similar performance levels of the 670m.. impressive.
like I said before, your only downfall with the lenovo would be the slower hard drive. While it's more than sufficient for all practical gaming purposes... I've been spoiled by having a SSD so I'm very partial to them. They're amazing, simply put. It's an upgrade worth doing, without a doubt.'


in simple terms, the graphics that the y580 lenovo is capable of with its given hardware...well it'll simply blow your xbox 360 away. take my word for it. You may not be a big pc gamer now, but wait til you see what that thing is capable of. Plug your xbox 360 controller into it and give it a whirl with crysis 2, maxed out

 

[Night Fox6928]

anyone know if this one is dual chanel capable

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16834246628

i know sasrt8 said it was, but im pretty sure ddr3 does not mean it is dual channel capable, ddr3 is the pockets in the mem, unless dual channel always comes with ddr3 nowadays?

 

[SASRT8]

page won't display... no idea what the link is meant to lead to.

I have YET to see any current laptops running DDR3 RAM that is not dual-channel, although I don't know about every laptop on the market, so there may be some out there. TBH though, without even knowing what the link is supposed to take me to, I'd give it a 99% chance that yes, it is dual-channel.
If I were in the market with your given price range though, I would not look any further than the lenovo mentioned. If you do some r&r, you'll learn that the hardware in that laptop is TOUGH to beat for the price. Notebookcheck can tell you everything you need to know about every internal part inside of any notebook you might be looking at.
Either that, or head over to XoticPC.com and build your own computer..instead of looking at pre-builds on newegg.

 

[Night Fox6928]

http://www.xoticpc.com/sager-np3260-clevo-w250es-p-4339.html?wconfigure=yes

that computer is the one i bought, i dunno if the link works. that lenovo was supposedly not good for carrying around and stuff..... so i bought this, faster cpu in this one and 630m with optimus.

sager np3260 with 3740qm cpu, and ic diamon thermal compound everything else is the same.

 

[SASRT8]

excellent choice, you will be VERY happy with it. Sagers are the best, hands down.Their top-end machines are unbelievable.. their lower ranges are still a great deal for the price. And XOTICPC is great to deal with if you have any issues whatsoever. the 630m gpu is a little weak, but it is nonetheless a decent performer. For your needs, it will suffice unless you do any serious gaming. And if you do, they can be overclocked to nearly GT650m levels, which will play some of the more intensive games at med-med/high levels

 

[Night Fox6928]

dont forget its got optimus, so if i overclock to the 650 specs ur talkin about, it should be like a 660m or a bit better correct?

 

[SASRT8]

no, optimus does not work like that.

Optimus allows the computer to shift between the integrated Intel HD4000 and the Geforce dedicated card on the fly, at any time, seamlessly. It is based on the calculated amount of graphics load, and then Optimus selects the appropriate GPU. If it doesnt need the Nvidia card, it will use the integrated one to save battery life and keep heat levels lower.

It doesn't combine the power of the two cards, at any point...ever. That's not how it works. What you're thinking of is basically like combining two graphics cards in SLI, which splits the work load amongst the two cards and allows them to generate each frame in an alternating fashion. Sager is the only company who has a current lineup of SLI notebooks, but yours is not one of them. It's only their top models.

 

[Night Fox6928]

Is the 9-16 business days normal to ship to me from xoticpc.com??

edit: He just replied after i said what happened to the 5-9 you told me before??? and said so it should be at my house in 5-10. this is after i was thinkin in my head "if im getting fucked around here i am not going to be happy"