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Gaming laptop recommendations?

Miles Prower

Miles Prower

Joined
Jul 30, 2018
Location
UK
PSN
sppeac1987
Hi guys - I've recently come into a bit of money so I'm looking to upgrade my old dinosaur of a laptop from 2013 :p

So I'm looking for recommendations of a decent gaming laptop to buy (prefer to have a laptop as opposed to desktop for space reasons), that can play Shenmue III with no issue (and S1&S2 HD). Can anyone recommend any in particular as I really don't have much knowledge about what is best to get at all. In terms of price range, I'm ideally looking for under £1000GBP (about $1300). And preferably with an HDMI port - I have no idea if that's the norm anymore? (but do understand most don't have CD drives anymore)

I'll be using it for purposes other than gaming, but would really like to be able to play the PC versions of Shenmue, to be able to play the higher-end Sonic PC games and their mods etc :)
 
Nathanial Essex said:
Would this be more powerful than a PS5/XSX?
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It can be tricky to compare PCs to consoles, but I'd say it's probably quite a close match.
Though if you're looking for something long term (i.e. 5+ years), then I suspect you'd get more mileage out of a console due to optimisations.
 
I went shopping for a gaming laptop last "Black Friday", so I can share a few models I was looking at and what I bought. I'm not sure if the prices will be similar for you since I'm in the US, plus the prices might be different now since they were based on a black friday sale.

My general advice would be to simplify the search by looking primarily at the CPU and GPU, then weigh the other features according to price (screen resolution/size/refresh rate, upgradeable RAM, M2 SSD slots available, etc). I personally looked for a Ryzen 7 CPU and a RTX 3060 GPU w/ 6 GB VRAM as a starting point, that's what I'd recommend and it can be close to your price range as well. Then you can see if you can go up or down a "tier" in each, see how that affects the price and if the trade off is worth it for you. I think Intel came out with a new line of laptop CPUs, so that might be worth looking into.

Bought: Lenovo ThinkBook 16p - It was a good all-around laptop for my needs and has a 3060 GPU w/ 6 GB VRAM and 1440p screen.

Others I was looking at:

Acer Swift X - This seemed like the best "bang for your buck" that I found. It was the one I was favoring until others went on sale, and I felt I might have buyers remorse from the 4 GB of VRAM.

Lenovo Legion 5 - This was considered the best laptop for the money from the "JarrodsTech" channel below.

Lenovo Legion 7 Slim - A lot of good tech is a pretty sleek package!

Asus Zephyrus G14 - This was a bit out of my price range and it didn't go down in price on BF, but it has great specs in a small form factor.

Some Youtube channels I looked at. These usually have videos that go over best laptops in certain price ranges, as well as benchmarks:

 
I need to buy a laptop for my work but I am thinking that will be used for gaming and central coast structural engineer's job for both. What do you recommend to me in this scenario?
 
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Miles Prower said:
Hey man, just wanted to thank you as opted for this one in the end - arriving Monday! :D
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Apart from the great price-specs ratio, did the model name Katana counted in favour for your choosing? I believe it did 😂

@chrislynn1940 thanks for writing that golden post. Please let me know: are the gamer/s and engineer/s the same person/s or in the opposite separated groups of people? I would love an engineer getting to the laptop for work just to find a previous Quake Champions session.
 
Seaman said:
Apart from the great price-specs ratio, did the model name Katana counted in favour for your choosing? I believe it did 😂

@chrislynn1940 thanks for writing that golden post. Please let me know: are the gamer/s and engineer/s the same person/s or in the opposite separated groups of people? I would love an engineer getting to the laptop for work just to find a previous Quake Champions session.
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Hah, I didn't think of that, but possibly! Its doing me well so far, only issue I had was that the hinge broke quite quickly, and was starting to damage the screen - apparently this is a common issue with this brand? I took it back to the shop however and they repaired it, replacing the hinge and screen completely and haven't had issues since.
 
chrislynn1940 said:
I need to buy a laptop for my work but I am thinking that will be used for gaming and central coast structural engineers job for both. What do you recommend to me in this scenario?
Click to expand...
What sort of price range you looking at?
 
Katana is very cool. Good choices. For moddable laptops you can upgrade yourself forever and turn into gaming machines, you can't go wrong with slightly older Thinkpads (+ 8bitdo or Xbox controllers). Lots of cheap prebuilt gaming level Thinkpads are available on ebay originally from governments and businesses. I bought one for like $300, has decent gfx (altho you can easily hook up an external gaming card to a Thinkpad), 16GB of upgradeable RAM, 1TB SSD. Turned out some previous owner had added a third party 4k screen to the thing. It's absurd. No Windows on mine, but most include it. That said, all you really need is any Linux (Fedora is so good) + Proton to run practically any Windows game flawlessly today, and often faster than native. Or make a Steamdeck (Arch) if you want. We live in preposterous, glorious times.

Still, I'm thinking about buying one of these <https://frame.work/> neat modular forever machines. Iris Xe could probably run Shen3 easily, or at least all my retro games and most new stuff I'd play, without an external gfx setup, although it looks similar to the Thinkpad if I wanted to jack into a gtx 2080 or whatever. Dunno yet. I'll probably get the diy kit, max # of processors. Orange bezel of course because i'm still dreaming, and it's still thinking.
 
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Miles Prower said:
Hi guys - I've recently come into a bit of money so I'm looking to upgrade my old dinosaur of a laptop from 2013 :p

So I'm looking for recommendations of a decent gaming laptop to buy (prefer to have a laptop as opposed to desktop for space reasons), that can play Shenmue III with no issue (and S1&S2 HD). Can anyone recommend any in particular as I really don't have much knowledge about what is best to get at all. In terms of price range, I'm ideally looking for under £1000GBP (about $1300). And preferably with an HDMI port - I have no idea if that's the norm anymore? (but do understand most don't have CD drives anymore)

I'll be using it for purposes other than gaming, but would really like to be able to play the PC versions of Shenmue, to be able to play the higher-end Sonic PC games and their mods etc :)
Click to expand...
First, you'll want to look for a laptop with a dedicated graphics card. This will ensure that you can run demanding games smoothly without any lag or stuttering. Some popular options include NVIDIA's GeForce GTX or RTX series or AMD's Radeon RX series.

Second, you'll want to make sure that the laptop has a powerful processor and enough RAM to handle demanding games. A quad-core processor or higher and at least 8GB of RAM should be sufficient for most games, but if you plan on running multiple programs at once, you may want to consider upgrading to 16GB or more.

Third, you mentioned that you'd like a laptop with an HDMI port. This is still a standard feature on most laptops, so you shouldn't have any trouble finding one that meets your needs.

With those factors in mind, here are a few gaming laptop recommendations that should meet your needs and fall within your price range:

Acer Nitro 5 - This laptop features an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 graphics card, an Intel Core i5-9300H processor, and 8GB of RAM. It also has a 15.6-inch Full HD display and an HDMI port. You can find it for around £700GBP ($900 USD).

ASUS TUF Gaming A15 - This laptop features an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 graphics card, an AMD Ryzen 5 4600H processor, and 8GB of RAM. It also has a 15.6-inch Full HD display and an HDMI port. You can find it for around £800GBP ($1000 USD).

Dell G3 15 - This laptop features an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 graphics card, an Intel Core i5-10300H processor, and 8GB of RAM. It also has a 15.6-inch Full HD display and an HDMI port. You can find it for around £800GBP ($1000 USD).
 
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