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mid-range notebook advice
Hi, I will be traveling alot next year because of work and was wondering if i could get some advice about a new gaming laptop. I mainly play GW2 and WoW with my friends. My budget is around 800 euro. I came across.....
Any info and advice would be great. Thanks
Comments
In my experience MSI makes quality stuff. Not sure where the guy above me got that from, but its just his opinion I guess.
The laptop you linked will be just fine for playing WoW and GW2 for sure, and most other games as well. You may not be rocking Crysis 3 & BF 4 on Ultra but you will be able to play everything at very reasonable setting. Especially for traveling and what I assume will be hotel stays.
I think MSI is a fine choice. The ones I typically look for in notebooks are Sager, MSI, and ASUS.
MSI is both cheap and not. MSI is a top motherboard and videocard maker. These things will be top quality. Its the other stuff that will be cheaper and is something MSI has been working on over the last 4 years to improve. So yea, things like the case will be cheap but much more improved compared to 4 years ago. The keyboard should be fantastic.
On your actual choice, you are looking at the lowest end MSI Gaming laptop. It seems rather expensive considering its in Euros. The GT740 is not that fast. I don't really know many good sellers in the Netherlands so I probably would not be able to find a better deal.
Toshiba is terrible for gaming. They prevent the installation of all hardware drivers that are not authorized by Toshiba and are only available from Toshiba.
You can work around it just like you need for certain laptops from all of the manufacturers (my 7750G from Acer has the same issue).
http://www.squaretrade.com/htm/pdf/SquareTrade_laptop_reliability_1109.pdf
Never heard anything good about the MSI but yeah it is my own opinion.
Its difficult to tell how often any companies products fail and if they do what kind of support you will receive. If we were to look at MSIs failure rate, the only measured failure rates are on internal hardware. In Internal hardware they perform comparably to ASUS. Better rate on motherboards, worse on GPU, but overall within a tenth of a percent. Considering they are a hardware manufacturer, this would extend into the major components of the laptop. So it should be safe to say the failure rate on MSI notebooks will be about the same as on an ASUS notebook.
On support, that's going to be bad. All the Taiwanese companies offer bad support. ASUS, ACER, and MSI.
Now if we look at the individual components, no company touches MSI in notebooks because MSI is not in the duration of so an so hours race or weight of notebook race. This means you will be getting a completely different type of product ideal if you are going to be connected to a wall outlet, or off power for up to 2 hours.
If we look at the products themselves, MSI offers things like 1620 res monitors, dual SSD raids, full memory bandwidth, great keyboard, mobo, and GPU. Also with the product its difficult to find an MSI laptop that has a bad configuration. Its easy for a lot of current laptop makers. These would be terrible ideas if the goal is power consumption. But if the goal is to have a portable computer they are fantastic ideas. They reasonably use these features at each price point to offer a well put together a well balanced machine at each price point, aside from power consumption.
To me buying an MSI product is pretty much buying an ASUS product.
^ whops:)
Discrete switchable graphics are intrinsically problematic on driver updates. But Acer doesn't go out of their way to artificially disable driver updates the way that Toshiba does.
I bought my laptop in 2012 (winter), the best driver for my 6650M GPU from Acer is from 3 months prior to that point (aprox), it has not been updated since, AMD driver installers do not work. It is safe to say you do not get cockblocked this badly without having a disabled driver update.
You can't go wrong with MSI gaming laptop. I have older, GX740 and it runs great and is completely cool. Some of my friends own newer MSI gaming versions and are very happy with their purchase.
My only gripe is that you probably will not get much performance out of Nvidia 740m GPU.
You might want to search web shops for ASUS N56JR model, which has GTX760m GPU. It can be found for a bit over 800€.
I bought a sony vaio svs151290x due to it's dedicated 640m video card and the fact that it's still around 1" thin and 3 ish lbs. It doesn't run games on high or anything but it's definitely the best combination of portable and game capable. On power save modes I can get up to 4 hrs of batter with it as well.
If I wasn't concerned with portability or battery life. Battery life being something you're probably not concerned with considering you want a gaming laptop. I would go with the Lenovo Y500 series. They come with dual graphics cards and are definitely the best priced for performance laptops I can find.
It doesn't take OEM sabotage to make that happen. If you've got discrete switchable graphics that pair an Intel CPU and an AMD GPU, video driver updates can be problematic because you need an Intel video driver paired with an AMD one. AMD also discontinued their driver updates for discrete switchable graphics with a Llano CPU awfully quickly.