laptop advice

Genoknight

 I'm leaving for college soon and I've never owned a lap top before so I'm looking for advice. Ideally it'll be for less than 600 dollars and capable of playing guild wars 2. It'll also be nice if the lap top was relatively thin and not extra bulky. I've been considering the samsungs but I have no idea.

Quizzical

I'll list four options for you.  For starters, there's the cheapest option I could find that features a budget gaming video card:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834246328

Next is the fastest laptop I could find that fits your budget:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834215390

It's a 17" laptop, so it's not exactly lightweight, though.

Then there is the cheap Trinity option:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834215419

And finally, the top of the line integrated graphics:

http://shopping.hp.com/en_US/home-office/-/products/Laptops/HP-Pavilion/A3H21AV?HP-Pavilion-dv6z-7000-Entertainment-Notebook-PC

Use the default configuration for this one, except that you want to change the processor to an A10-4600M.

All four mismatch the memory channels, which is a stupid thing to do, but most laptop hardware configurations that you can buy are stupid.  The first two use a discrete video card, so you're only crippling the processor memory bandwidth, which isn't that big of a deal.  The last two use integrated graphics, which needs a lot of memory bandwidth, so crippling it with mismatched memory channels will push you over budget.

Fortunately, that's a problem that you can fix yourself.  Buy your own memory module:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820231471

And then when the laptop comes, figure out which of the two modules in it is the 2 GB one, and replace it by the 4 GB one you just bought.  HP will offer to do this for you for $50 in their configurator, which you can do, but it's a lot more expensive than $24 to do it yourself.  Having to fix the memory will also push you over your stated $600 budget in the HP laptop.

As for performance, the basic processor hierarchy goes A10-4600M (fourth laptop) > A8-4500M (third laptop) > A6-3420M (first two laptops).  The first two are Trinity, which is AMD's latest and greatest; the last one is Llano, which is older.

For graphical performance, the hierarchy goes Radeon HD 7670M (second laptop) > Radeon HD 6550M (first laptop) ~ Radeon HD 7660G (fourth laptop) > Radeon HD 7640G (third laptop).

I'm guessing that a Radeon HD 6550M will be slightly faster than a Radeon HD 7660G, but it will be close.

The last two laptops are integrated graphics only, which means much lower power consumption.  It also means no possible driver problems caused by switching the graphics back and forth between the integrated graphics (at idle) and the discrete video card.

If they were all the same price, I'd prefer the HP laptop, for the best processor performance, good enough graphical performance, and low power consumption.  But they're not all the same price.

The graphics in any of these laptops will be good enough to handle nearly all games for the next few years, though sometimes it will mean low to moderate settings.  But if a processor isn't fast enough to handle a game, you're stuck with low frame rates no matter what graphical settings you pick.

If you want to put a very high premium on making the laptop thinner and lighter, then you can get this:

http://shopping.hp.com/en_US/home-office/-/products/Laptops/HP-ENVY/B2S72AV?HP-ENVY-Sleekbook-6z-1000

But that will only be about half of the performance of the HP laptop that I linked above, in spite of being essentially the same price.  That's the cost of getting a laptop that is 2 cm thick rather than slightly over 3 cm like the others linked above.  Will it run Guild Wars 2?  Likely, but not necessarily--and it's a safe bet that there are some games that won't run well on it.  With $200 in upgrades to get 8 GB of system memory and an A10-4655M it will, but that's way out of your budget.

If you happen to prefer Intel/Nvidia over an all-AMD system, then I couldn't find anything decent that fits your budget.