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LF laptop around $500
Sold my wife's 4 year old MSI FX420 on Craigslist for $225. Here's the "out of stock" page for Newegg so you can see the specs:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834152256
Now I'm looking for a new laptop for around $500 that would outclass the old one. Is this possible or should I have just kept the 4 year old laptop? Open to either Intel or AMD. She may play something along the lines of Sims 4, Tropico 5 or an equivalent game but nothing too demanding. A laptop that won't bog down too much while multitasking. Thanks for any ideas or recommendations.
Comments
For games like the Sims, Tropico and others like that. This would probably do.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834317602
Nothing special but should do well enough for those games. Just dont expect it to run demanding games at high fps.
Some comparisons between that and the old laptop OP had:
http://cpuboss.com/cpus/Intel-Core-i5-2410M-vs-AMD-A10-7300
https://cpubenchmark.net/compare.php?cmp[]=2287&cmp[]=796
The integrated graphic card on that laptop will be significantly better, but still seems a bit waste of money to spend more than 250$ (after counting the money he got from old laptop) for an upgrade that small.
Agreed.
But he has sold the other laptop and is now in need of a new one. On $500 nothing will be much of an upgrade. To play the games he listed an upgrade in the graphics department will be enough to meet the needs he mentioned.
If you buy a Lenovo laptop, it will likely come with Superfish malware installed. Lenovo says they stopped including the malware on their laptops in late January, but there are probably a lot of laptops with it pre-installed still out there, as they didn't do a full recall.
Now, lots of laptops come with bloatware. But Superfish isn't your routine bloatware. Superfish will make it so that there's a root certificate on your laptop with a publicly known password--meaning, there will be no such thing as a secure browser connection on the laptop until that is removed. You can try to remove it yourself--"it" being the certificate, not just the Superfish malware--and likely even succeed, as there are tools for it. But laptops from other brands will just have routine bloatware and not outright malware like Superfish.
This isn't an issue if you're going to wipe the hard drive and do a clean install from OS media acquired elsewhere on whatever laptop you buy. But if you're not going to do that, I'd be leery of Lenovo in the near future.
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The choice between Intel and AMD is basically a question of whether you care about graphics. If so, buy AMD. If not, Intel.
Unfortunately, it's fairly slim pickings on AMD laptops at the moment, as Kaveri hasn't had much adoption. Laptop vendors might be waiting for Carrizo, expecting it to be massively better. And while Carrizo is due out in the first half of this year, that could still be months away.
In the meantime, there is this:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834314557
That only comes with one memory module, so you'll have to add another to get the proper memory bandwidth. And laptop vendors seem to only be using the low-power variants of Kaveri, so the CPU really won't clock very high while gaming.