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Best Gaming Notebook ~ $1000-1500?
Hey all,
I'm usually pretty knowledgeable about desktops and have been building my own for a couple of decades but when it comes to laptop/notebooks I'm a total noob.
I've been spending a lot of time away from home working and the iPad just ain't doing it for my gaming. I'd much prefer to just keep on playing my MMO du jour when I'm on the road.
But I don't really want to go nuts $-wise either.
Just to let you know what I'm used to, my current desktop is built around an i7-930 @ 4GHz with a Radeon HD 7990 and a couple of SSDs (OS and gaming.)
One of the ones I have been looking at for ~ $1200 is the MSI GE70 0ND-032US. The CPU is an i7-3610QM. It has 8GB ram and the GPU is a GTX 660M w/ 2GB. No SSD unfortunately. Here's a link to the specs: http://www.ncix.com/products/?sku=73048&vpn=9S7%2D175611%2D032&manufacture=MSI%2FMicroStar&promoid=1393
What do you think? Suggestions for something better? I'd like to get it from NCIX since they're local to me and I can just walk in and pick it up. Whatever you suggest, I'd rather not go smaller than 17". Thanks in advance.
“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?”
― CD PROJEKT RED
Comments
A lot depends on your priorities. The GeForce GTX 660M is the top laptop bin of the lowest end GPU chip of the generation--from either AMD or Nvidia. We could call it mid-range, perhaps, but it's certainly nothing better than that, and will lose by a considerable margin to $100 desktop cards.
The MSI GX60 will better than double the graphical performance of what you picked, but does give up some processor performance to hit the same price tag.
http://www.ncix.com/products/?sku=77720&vpn=9S7%2D16FK11%2D021&manufacture=MSI%2FMicroStar&promoid=1393
It's also 15" rather than 17".
If you want both the Intel Core i7 processor and something faster than the GPU you picked, as well as your preferred 17" monitor size, then the Clevo P170EM is the thing to look at. That will bump up against your preferred $1500 spending cap, however. A lot of vendors sell it, but I'm not sure exactly who will ship to Canada.
Thanks Quiz. Nice find on the MSI GX60. I didn't know you could get notebooks with the 7970M in this price range. I agree that the graphics performance on the one you linked should blow the 660M out of the water... I might go for a 15.6" screen after all.
“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?”
― CD PROJEKT RED
The way that the MSI GX60 saves money is by going with an AMD processor rather than Intel. Intel charges a lot for their Core i7 processors, and even AMD's top of the line, the A10-4600M, is much cheaper. But it's also slower, so it's a question of priorities. On the bright side, in addition to being cheaper, it also uses substantially less power.
Bets gaming laptops on the market are the ASUS G series laptops! I absolutely love my G74! I bought this laptop because I work out of town alot and stay in alot of hotels so I wanted a laptop I could game on while im out of town and I have ABSOLUTELY NO regrets in buying this machine! It is amazing!
Good luck mate!
Asus has some laptops that are comparable to the one in the original post, but they've avoided high end gaming laptops for the last couple of years. An Asus G74 was a decent enough mid-range gaming laptop in its day, but it's not what you want to buy new today.
Agree with post for sure.
This:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834152366
The MSI GT70 with a 3630QM and 670MX graphics.
Will probably run like a lower end i5 + 7770 desktop type set up. They vid cards in these are upgradeable as well. Got my wife one and she loves it.
I found the GX60 for £999 here and it looked like a great deal as it also had a 64GB SSD in it, however once I started reading reviews of the processor I started to wonder if the slightly lower price was actually worth it?
It seems to perform worse than my sandybridge i7 from early 2011.
http://www.toshibadirect.com/td/b2c/laptop-model.jsp?family=qosmio&model=X870&lid=CFAMqosmio_SeriesLinkX870
I went with a I7 3630 with a nvidia 670m from toshiba and was pretty impressed. I did some customizing on lenovo and HP and for everything i wanted the toshiba came out about $100 cheaper and shipped faster than both HP and Lenovo. For gaming in mmorpgs this computer plays Rift GW2 SWTOR all on ultra settings with 30 FPS or higher with games like wow running around 60-70 fps. nice 17.3 screen also comes standard unlike the 15.3 on hp and lenovo.
I agree, most of todays mmo's are cpu hogs, make sure you get a nice one, don't worry so much about having the best of the best graphics cards these days.
What happens when you log off your characters????.....
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFQhfhnjYMk
Dark Age of Camelot
So you say other peoples suggestions suck then advise him to get a 560?? hmmmm.....
http://www.ibuypower.com/Store/Holiday_CZ-17_Gaming_Laptop
Got that for my wife shes been really happy with it. We have had no trouble other then not big fans of Windows 8.
It's a question of priorities. Yes, an A10-4600M is slower than a Sandy Bridge Core i7 (that's why it's about $200 cheaper!), but it's still a capable processor. Games that can't run well on an A10-4600M are going to find an awfully small market.
One could say the same of a GeForce GTX 660M, I suppose. But the big difference is that a lot of games will run well at low settings but not high settings on a given video card, while the video settings typically don't have that much of an effect on the processor load.
On a sufficiently large budget, you get a Core i7-3630QM together with a Radeon HD 7970M or GeForce GTX 675MX or 680M or whatever. But that likely pushes you over budget here. Given a choice between losing 1/3 of the CPU performance (assuming that games won't scale past four cores) or 55% of the GPU performance, which would you choose? Either choice is reasonable.
That's an ancient Fermi card, which will run very hot and have terrible energy efficiency. That's why Nvidia is trying to get rid of them cheaply. If you only look at price and performance, a GeForce GTX 670M or 675M can be a good deal, but not so much if you care about the heat output.
I guess you get to pick your poison, really. As compared to a proper high end system, do you want to give up some CPU performance, a lot of GPU performance, or some GPU performance while having a laptop that runs very hot?
Also, I'm leery of Toshiba, as some of their laptops artificially disable video driver updates. Many people wouldn't care, but that can be a big problem if you run into major video driver glitches in a new game that driver updates have already fixed, except that you can't get the driver update. I don't know if that particular laptop disables video driver updates, but I'd certainly look into it before making a purchase.
You can get a Y400 starting for around 750 bux that has a Nvidia 650M in it as well as having the ability to add a second one in the Ultrabay where the DVD rom is making it into an SLI machine down the road for added performance. you can also get an Y500, which is 15.6 inches(Y400 is 14 inch machine) for starting around 850 bux which also has the Ultrabay.
Other wise there are a number of choices to consider in that price range, most logical choices would fall in that pice range any way, you dont want to overspend on a gaming laptop, or any laptop for that matter cause you can really get riped off if your not a consious buyer. MSI and Sager are basically the choices you have after the Ideapad series, The top end of the price range ur looking at around 1500 for a Sager np9370 which is my current favorite gaming machine out right now, this machine is freaking sweet, you can get it in SLI, the best choice would be the new Nvidia 670MX series cards, there not the old 670M cards that were based on Fermi but the X after signifies its Kepler which uses 28nm transister size compared to the old fermi which is 40nm which equates into less heat,power,overclocks better, etc... but you can get the np9370 with any high end card you want you just have to pay for it.
When I say sager I mean clevo as well, since there one in the same just with different model numbers that vary slightly. The clevo w110ER/Sager NP6110 is also a nice tiny machine for a decent price but its only 11.6 inch mahcine its got nice graphics with the nvidia 650M in it though. Also another choice would be Clevo P151EM1 / Sager NP9130 which is a 15 inch machine and probably would be your best bet with what your looking to find in a gaming laptop.
MSI also has some nice laptops, the MSI GT60 is one hella laptop, which is at the top end of your price range. It has everything and any choice you could think of in a laptop. You could go a barebones rout and get your self something really crazy and still stay in your budgest like the most powerfull graphics card on the planet the Nvidia 680M, here is a MSI MS-1762 barebones unit for 1350, http://www.agearnotebooks.com/msims-1762-680m.html#tabs, you would have to add an Operation system and you would be running the most powerfull mobile graphics card in the world.
I havnt recommended anything with AMD and it may seem I only like Nvidia but the truth be told I really dont like Nvidia at all, there so expensive and AMD only adds to it being unwise to spend so much more money since there only a fraction of the cost and provide equal performance in alot of the areas that matter.
I think you forgot to mention the Y400/500 series laptops you are talking about are the Lenovo series which would be difficult for those not experienced in the laptop realm to pick out from your post. But I do agree that currently for those in the market for a "budget" gaming laptop the Lenovo Y480/Y580 laptops are just about as good as you can expect to get minus some huge discounts on some other brands such as the Asus G series.
Lenovo Y series: http://www.lenovo.com/products/us/laptop/ideapad/y-series/
Asus G series: http://rog.asus.com/notebook/
I don't see any plausible reason to get a GeForce GTX 560M today unless the entire laptop is on clearance. It's too much heat for too little performance, and wouldn't necessarily be a good deal even if Nvidia were giving the card away completely free.
That's another ancient Fermi card, and will likely put out more heat than today's high end even, while not offering anywhere near the performance. The base model has a lot of cut corners, too, including a completely vacant memory channel and a 5400 RPM hard drive, and fixing those will add quite a bit to the base price tag.
Two lower end cards in SLI is a very, very bad idea. Even if you can put a video card in the ultrabay at all (which I'm skeptical of), it would probably be crippled by a lack of bandwidth--to the degree that two cards in SLI could easily perform worse than one card by itself.
If you have 1,000 dollar to spend honestly any laptop you'd buy would be able to handle what you need. Question isn't always about what laptop can run what nowadays. You should also be thinking about build quality/durability. I can't say anything about MSI but from what I've used the Dell XPS series and their Alienware brand has never let me down expesially with their very good resale value for if you want to upgrade in the future.