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I'm after a new laptop that ideally is suited to large games such as Xcom, Civilisation V and Minecraft. I'll be bbuying an external harddrive so space can be saved there and not directly on my laptop.

So what laptop would any of you suggest?

Obligatory question: Does it absolutely have to be a laptop, or could you live with a desktop PC for gaming and a netbook or tablet for email, web browsing and the like when you're not at home? They're an enormous pain to upgrade, repair or even blow the dust out of.

Is there any difference between laptop and desktop PC. I just assumed that the laptop could do what a desktop pc could do.

(In terms of understanding the nitty-gritty of tech am very new to it all, I haven't returned to using a laptop/desktop pc (let alone gaming) for about five years. I'm serious!

Well, one lets you open the case and clean all the dust off the heat-sinks and the fans without wasting two hours of your life fannying about with fifteen different screws in three different sizes, and the other lets you play Minecraft on the toilet.

From the little I know of such things, desktops are almost always better than laptops for performance, even when they have same or similiar specs advertised. This is partially due to desktops simply having more space to play with and more effective cooling. Probably.
*Slinks out of thread*

Desktop is cheaper than laptop, too. And more reliable.

Chimaera wrote:From the little I know of such things, desktops are almost always better than laptops for performance, even when they have same or similiar specs advertised. This is partially due to desktops simply having more space to play with and more effective cooling. Probably.

Up to a point, yeah, but it isn't really noticeable unless you're playing really processor and/or GPU-intensive stuff; for the most part you'll just find yourself paying more money for the same performance.

Chimaera wrote:From the little I know of such things, desktops are almost always better than laptops for performance, even when they have same or similiar specs advertised. This is partially due to desktops simply having more space to play with and more effective cooling. Probably.
*Slinks out of thread*

Also lets not forget mobile devices traditional practice a highly creative naming scheme. IE naming themselves as if they were desktop parts but adding an M on the end. The M stands for mountain of lies not mobile which most people think it means.

Understand that a mobile CPU or mobile GPU will using a naming scheme designed to lie to you. Sometimes taking a name of a desktop counterpart of a totally different generation or architecture.

How much are you looking to spend? I dropped $500 and change on a Dell Inspiron 15 recently and it's capable of running stuff like Skyrim with everything turned onto low. (Honestly the fact that it can run Skyrim at all is pretty impressive.) It can handle things like MW3 and Battlefield 3 with a bit of choppiness, so if you spent a little more on a Core i5 or i7 machine you'd probably get pretty good performance.

I dropped $1000 USD on an ASUS Q550L W8 laptop with touchscreen for the wife's new job as a teacher. They do a lot of video outputting to projectors and I figured she was worth it. It's got an i7, 8GBs of RAM, and a GeForce 745M. It will run Saint's Row 4 on Ultra, only getting scketchy on the FPS when AA (or god forbid MSAA) is set to high. It however cannot touch my 4 year old Desktop with a GTX660. It more than does the job for her limited gaming tastes. For the $500 range, you're probably going to be gaming at medium settings at best, depending on how much you drop for a GPU. It's also not upgradable, so future-proofing is much more important.

hey, come to think of it, what sort of total budget are we talking here?

Also, are you willing to wade into a store to getting a boxing day deal?

Sorry if I'm hijacking but I'm basically in the same boat. Soon going to need a laptop for my wife, one that can handle Sims 3 + expansions. Would this be enough?

Enigma wrote:Sorry if I'm hijacking but I'm basically in the same boat. Soon going to need a laptop for my wife, one that can handle Sims 3 + expansions. Would this be enough?

Notebook check is your friend As far as laptop gaming goes 90% of it these days is the GPU holding everything back. You can compare and contrast gpu types against a wide list of games to get an idea how your laptop will match up (on average)

Enigma wrote:Sorry if I'm hijacking but I'm basically in the same boat. Soon going to need a laptop for my wife, one that can handle Sims 3 + expansions. Would this be enough?

That thing looks beefier than my machine. The Sims 3 is small-time graphics-wise.

Enigma wrote:Sorry if I'm hijacking but I'm basically in the same boat. Soon going to need a laptop for my wife, one that can handle Sims 3 + expansions. Would this be enough?

It beats my HP Pavilion DV7 from three years ago all hollow and I can run Skyrim, League of Legends, and the like with no issues; as long as I ensure I keep my settings reasonable.

General Zod wrote:

Enigma wrote:Sorry if I'm hijacking but I'm basically in the same boat. Soon going to need a laptop for my wife, one that can handle Sims 3 + expansions. Would this be enough?

That thing looks beefier than my machine. The Sims 3 is small-time graphics-wise.

Yeah but somehow Sims 3 with the expansions bog my computer down immensely and it isn't that old and this year I put in a 2GB Radeon 7850 vid card into it, plus the computer has 8GB of RAM. It has no problems whatsoever with games like Skyrim but it chugs with Sims 3. Hopefully that laptop is good enough to deal with Sims 3 since that is the only game my wife really cares.

Have you tried running a performance monitor while the game is up to see where it's bottlenecking? I know Sims 3 had horrible memory leaks at launch and it took them forever to fix it.

TheFeniX wrote:Have you tried running a performance monitor while the game is up to see where it's bottlenecking? I know Sims 3 had horrible memory leaks at launch and it took them forever to fix it.

What would you recommend for a performance monitor software?

GPUZ for monitoring my video card and Windows 7 performance monitor is more than enough to see CPU and RAM utilization. CPU-Z is an alternative if you don't like Performance Monitor. I'll just leave them up on my secondary monitor, which can be an issue on some games that lack borderless windowed, and have shitty full-screen support. You may have to result to ALT-tabbing to get a snap-shot of your performance over the last few minutes, such as when a game starts bogging down.

This is how I found out SWTOR wasn't using 20% of my video card or VRAM, while also running my i7 through the ringer and constantly shitting GBs of data in and out of RAM for no apparent reason. I didn't waste money on a new video card (as many posters on the official forums did). I just quit wasting money on a shitty game.