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Need help finding a decent Laptop for around $400 to play games on.
ClockworkSmiles
Member Posts: 13
in Hardware
Need help finding a decent laptop for around $400 to play games on.
I already have a decent gaming PC but I am always on the go and am really tired of dragging my PC around with me all the time.
I'm mostly looking for one that is about as powerful as a 360 or close.
Comments
$400? Honeslty probebly not much. And I am not trying to be insulitng. I looked around myself for a decent laptop for gaming/work. For years I built my own DT's for gaming, but due to my work I need to be more portable so I decided to go the laptop route knowing that I would have to sacrifice some performance for portability. My budget was around 900-1000 plus warrenty. That I found was just enough to get a decent laptop. Highend LT's for gaming like Alienware around 2k was too much. So after much looking around I went with a Lenovo y580, and I have not regretted it at all. Games like Tera, GW2, Civ 5, get around 35-45fps on highest settings.
The y580 has a full HD screen at 1900x1080, blueray player, Nvid 660m, Quad i7 Ivybridge cpu, SSD., 16g ram, good speakers for a LT. Not a bad little machine for what I use it for. A little more than 400, but not much over 1000.
edit: p.s. After saying all that I suppose I shoudl have asked what kind of games you looking to play on it?
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834131444
Should be good.
Depends on the kind of games you want to play. And if you dare say XBox quality games I'm going to have to remind you that a console's price when trying to equate it to a laptop of similar performance and cost is folly. Fool's gold. As consoles have specific components exclusively made for and optimized for a singular purpose, gaming. And often at the sacrifice of PC flexibility. While a gaming laptop cannot hope to duplicate this feat because companies making components geared to work for gaming laptops are not bound by exclusivity to any one gaming laptop manufacturer. They also have to include a onboard sound system and display. Which also add to it's cost.
But if you do happen to find a xbox like gaming laptop for $400 let me know, I could use 2 myself.
"Small minds talk about people, average minds talk about events, great minds talk about ideas."
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Mosty Skyrim and the older TES games, Fallouts 3 & NV, Civ 5 and the older ones, Final Fantasy XI (I play this one a lot), EVE, XCOM, Witcher, Mass Effect series and Dragon Age series along with some old games from GOG.
Hopefully around medium graphics and 30ish fps.
How well would that laptop run the games I listed in my other reply? I don't muich about computers.
While that's not a terrible laptop, it's totally inappropriate for someone looking for a budget gaming system. A $300+ CPU doesn't leave much room for everything else in a $400 budget.
On your budget, you should get an AMD APU and use the integrated graphics on it. The A10-4600M is the top bin, but you're not going to find that on a $400 budget. The A8-4500M is the next bin down. It's the same chip as the A10-4600M, except that it disables 1/3 of the GPU and clocks the CPU lower.
While a lot of games won't let you reasonably max settings on an A8-4500M, it should be able to make nearly everything playable at moderate settings. It offers a real quad core processor with decent clock speeds, and a GPU with 4 SIMD engines.
The laptop comes with a 5400 RPM hard drive, a 1366 x 768 monitor, and a fairly small battery, but those are the sort of sacrifices that you have to make to hit a $400 budget--and even then, it takes a considerable sale to hit that budget. It comes with 4 GB of system memory, which probably means that it leaves a memory channel completely vacant. (It could come with two 2 GB modules rather than one 4 GB module, in which case, there's no need to modify it.) That cuts your memory bandwidth in half, which will hurt graphical performance considerably. Thankfully, it's not terribly expensive or difficult to buy another memory module and fix that yourself:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820231483
Adding that to a $400 laptop will put you slightly over the stated $400 budget, though.
It won't manage playable framerates on the lowest settings for skyrim. At sub-$400 I am not seeing much that can. I will take the time to do a more detailed search, but the biggest hurdle is definetly being able to play Skyrim.
Here is the info on the HD 7640G. There was only 1 laptop benched with the chip. It has a similar configuration. It has a different memory configuration and the same screen resolution. The HDD might differ, and they used Win7 in the benchmarks instead of Win8. It should run faster under Win8. The HDD could hold it back but thats really only loading times. In the reviewed laptop(Lenovo) it used 1x4 GB which would halve the bandwidth. If you read the reviews on the Samsung laptop listed above they use a 2x2 GB configuration which should mean it will perform better.
If you look at the review it posted a frame rate of 28.4 fps at the lowest settings. Under $400 no other laptop is going to even get close. You might be able to do some things in order to increase the frame rate. One of them is to lower the resolution below native with hardware scaling turned on. It will give you a small boost in fps as there are less pixels to calculate. You could also think of it as getting anti-aliasing without having the processor calculating it.
Going to have to second the Lenovo Y580 or Y480 series of laptops if you are planning on doing any form of modern gaming on a laptop. Sure you can get away with one of AMD's APU based systems like the $400 system linked above but don't expect great results in games like GW2, Tera, Skyrim or just about anything else utilizing a more modern gfx engine.
As was discussed you simply cannot compare laptop gaming to an Xbox 360. It's difficult, though not impossible, to even consider building a desktop for $400 that could compete. Console systems are sold at a loss to the developer as profit is designed to come from peripherals and software.
This is about as good as your going to get on $400 bucks. It may be able to play some modern games at low settings, but not all of them, at least not in a playable state.
But what it probably will do is play older games fairly decently. Fall out 3 / NV will probably be playable, Torchlight 1 & 2 , Star Craft 2, WoW, ect will all probably be playable on decent settings.
I guess it all depends on what you really need a laptop for. If its for gaming a few hours after work in a hotel then the above listed one will probably do. You just may have to pick and choose a few older games to kill the time with. If you want playable graphics with newer games ( GW2, The Witcher 2, Crysis 3, FC 3 ) ect then you need to at least double your budget.
I travel alot during the week for work. Gone usually 12-14 days a month. I bought an HP laptop for around $650 that lets me play some games in the hotel. Batman AA &AC, Skyrim on decent settings, Fallout 3 / NV, D3, SC2, TL2, BL2, GW2, all on decent settings and easily playable.
But it wont play games like the Witcher 2, FC3, with playable settings.
Its doable at $400, just dont expect too much out of it. And choose a few older games you enjoy to play.
Thanks everyone! ^^
It would seem that I can't afford a decent laptop for gaming with only $400 so I'll just buy some more gym equipment for my back room like I originally planned and contenue carrying my giant computer around with me.
lol
I know right. People joke about old gamer sterotypes about us being weak and out of shape yet we end up carying our huge heavy PC's all over the place.
Any laptop with AMD A6 or better will probably be your best bet. AMD really has the lower end laptop market locked down with their APU's. I recently bought one ($800 mind you) with an A10 in it and it runs Tera on max settings fairly smoothly. Picture is amazing. The only gripe about the A series laptops is that they all seem to come with 5400 RPM hard drives?
I upgraded mine to a Seagate Momentus XT SSD Hybrid. There's a small difference between the SSD Hybrid in my laptop and the SSD in my desktop, but I can't put a slave drive in my laptop. So it's the hybrid SSD is nice.
You can check out the GPU benchmarks for http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834131444 right here. http://www.notebookcheck.net/AMD-Radeon-HD-7640G.69836.0.html
But for $400, that's probably going to be your best bet.
Most cheap laptops do come with a 5400 RPM hard drive. It's about hitting the price point, not AMD versus Intel. There are some AMD laptops with a 7200 RPM hard drive, and even a few that give you an option for an SSD.