Gaming notebook on a budget

I actually bought a laptop years ago that was actually advertised as a gaming laptop, and honestly it worked pretty slick, being able to play 7th gen games with no problem. Here's the thing though - it most certainly wasn't budget, and it was a laptop in that it could fit on your lap and it had a fold-down screen. However the thing is a fifteen pound beast of a machine and is about as portable as a conventional compact PC tower.

As Dirty Harry once said, "You gots ta know yer limitations."

If you're planning on playing current gen games on a laptop and not break half a grand, then maybe ask again in about 5 or 6 years. If you're okay with less graphic-heavy games, then I would honestly scour Amazon for "Renewed" laptops, and sometimes you can find a semi-decent deal. No guarantees, but that's probably the only way you'll find something.
 
You should just save up if you're not willing to dish some cash on a gaming laptop or PC tbh or spend it on a console.
 
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sasazuka said:
I can play decade-plus old games on this non-gaming HP laptop from circa 2012 and I don't think it gets anywhere near that hot (maybe 40 degrees Celsius). Then again, I always turn down the resolution on games to 640 x 480 or less for semi-decent framerate, not that resolution matters that much on a smaller screen.
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I recently played through Nightdive's System Shock 2 rerelease on a crappy HP Vista-powered laptop from 2007, and it stayed just fine. Same game on my MSI laptop and it left the poor machine at around 75 degrees. It's simply that the components in the gaming notebooks I've encountered are too powerful for their own good. You can throw the snazziest whip-cracking parts on market into a shell and play Minesweeper and Doom 2 for all of 30 minutes before the CPU and GPU begin heating up, and with no way to vent the temperature will begin to rise exponentially. Low-end laptops don't really have that problem; they often don't have the power to get that hot, a game either runs and the system stays fine, or it runs so poorly you can't play it at all. You can get nice gaming sets with good exhaust and not-shit fans, but the beasts like that can cost upwards of $1500 and are so heavy you might as well be huffing a full sized tower around.
 
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I've had several supposedly high end laptops and all scared the shit out of me with how hot they got.
 
ThinkThankThunk said:
I recently played through Nightdive's System Shock 2 rerelease on a crappy HP Vista-powered laptop from 2007, and it stayed just fine. Same game on my MSI laptop and it left the poor machine at around 75 degrees. It's simply that the components in the gaming notebooks I've encountered are too powerful for their own good.
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It's not that they're too powerful, it's that the game isn't programmed with such powerful parts in mind, so they never bothered to put in an FPS cap, so your 1080 Ti starts to render 6600 frames per second and heats up just like you were rendering GTA V at 4k and ultra max graphics.
 
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The Shadow said:
I've had several supposedly high end laptops and all scared the shit out of me with how hot they got.
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The trick with buying gaming laptops is to buy the cheap ones. They have lower end GPUs/CPUs and as a result a much, much lower TDP so they don't melt or get that hot.

The laptop space is in a weird position right now in that there's no low TDP GPU that is decent enough. What about the GTX 1050? 75 watts, too hot, should be half that. The closest thing is the Geforce MX150, it's really just a GT 1030 for laptops and don't diss the 1030, it was the best GPU money could buy at one point (because every other card was out of stock due to crypto-miners).

It's actually not a bad GPU and at 25W it will run cool. Games will run with some tweaking of the settings and lowering the resolution, it's amazing how low-spec you can get and still be able to play a modern game. I showed Resident Evil 7(the demo) to a guy and ran it on his $350 laptop from 2016 with an Intel GPU. At 960x540 and everything on low, sure, but we played through it.

@Webby's Boyfriend here you go, 499 on sale for a couple of more hours, it's actually a really good deal.
 
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Gustav Schuchardt said:
Here's what performance you'd get. It's not too bad at all. 30 to 60 FPS at 1080p depending on the game

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And it's also faster than Intel's Iris Pro-line that they use on their most expensive i7 HQ processors.

But there's a big gap between the 1030(mx150) and 1050. In the past Nvidia had the 40-series that slotted in between the 30's and 50's of their current generation, the 40's being more expensive but still cheap and more power hungry but only using ~30-35 watts.
 
Smaug's Smokey Hole said:
And it's also faster than Intel's Iris Pro-line that they use on their most expensive i7 HQ processors.

But there's a big gap between the 1030(mx150) and 1050. In the past Nvidia had the 40-series that slotted in between the 30's and 50's of their current generation, the 40's being more expensive but still cheap and more power hungry but only using ~30-35 watts.
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Nvidia have a weird strategy to be honest. Killing off the 1040 and renaming the 1030 to mx150 is designed to leave a gap in the market.

And of course Intel can't seem to make a decent integrated graphics to save their lives. Hence the MX150 really.

Interesting thing is the IGP in an AMD 2400G is pretty competitive with an MX150


Of course the 2400G is a desktop part with 46-65W TDP. The 2500U is slower

www.reddit.com

r/Amd - AMD Ryzen 5 2500U Vega 8 "Adrenalin" vs. Nvidia GeForce MX150 (Intel i7-8550U)

18 votes and 25 comments so far on Reddit
www.reddit.com www.reddit.com

Maybe some of the next gen mobile Ryzens could get into the 1040 range of performance.
 
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Gustav Schuchardt said:
Nvidia have a weird strategy to be honest. Killing off the 1040 and renaming the 1030 to mx150 is designed to leave a gap in the market.

And of course Intel can't seem to make a decent integrated graphics to save their lives. Hence the MX150 really.

Interesting thing is the IGP in an AMD 2400G is pretty competitive with an MX150
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AMD's strategy in the laptop space have been befuddling over the years, it is a huge market, they make GPUs for laptops and looking at the PS4/Xbox they obviously know how to pack a GPU in with a CPU. But they made the A-series with crummy integrated graphics. Worse GPU than a cheap Nvidia, better than Intel but weaker than Intel on the CPU side. It's what nobody wanted. If someone wanted a good AMD GPU in a laptop they had to buy a laptop built around Intel parts.

Something that I found interesting about Intel is that they added eDRAM to their Iris Pro iGPUs. The Xbox 360 used 10MB of eDRAM, it was seen as a risky and potentially expensive endeavor back then, some years later Intel slapped 128MB on their CPU(package) for their shitty iGPU to fart around with. That's a lot of transistors. There was some speculation that they did it because they had massive unused manufacturing capabilities going to waste when moving to a new node and partially because they had to add something. They weren't going to add cores, until Ryzen came along, then suddenly it was they had consumer processors with more cores than 4.
 
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I have a gaming laptop since it seemed like the most practical thing considering the fact that while I'm in uni I have to pack up my whole life and move it 200 miles up/down the country every couple of months. My place in first year didn't have a TV so I'd have to bring my TV and my Xbox 360 and it would've taken up too much space in the car. I got mine for £600 back in 2016. It's decent, runs most games I've played on it pretty smoothly. I bought a cooling pad to keep it on since anything with fancy shaders makes it sound like a jet engine and I would like to play The Sims 4 with shader mods in bed without flambe-ing my ovaries in the process. Other main downsides include the fact that he's a chunky boy so I have to get slightly larger than average laptop bags that are basically just hiking rucksacks with a laptop pocket instead of fun cute macbook sized ones. Also you have to replace the battery frequently because the gaming uses it up real quickly so you have to keep the thing plugged into the mains which wears out the battery.

Honestly, it is a bit of a meme laptop; it's got glowy neon green LED keyboard like a borg supercomputer but I kinda don't mind that because all my computers before this one were shit netbooks that were low end even by 2010-2012 standards with like 1GB of RAM and shitty Intel GMA 3150 integrated graphics so compared to that this thing feels like a borg supercomputer and I kinda like that the look of the thing reflects that - it's been a fun gateway into PC gaming. That said, once I'm not in uni anymore and get my babby's first real job I'm probably gonna buy an actual desktop PC.
 
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why settle for a gaming laptop when you can get a BADASS nvidia shield?
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The cheapest way, in the bang for your buck sense, would be to buy a used Dell office computer/Optiplex for $100. A Core i5 with 8GB of RAM is the sweetspot, but even an i3 is a good start and can be replaced with something from the same generation, plus you get a OA Windows license for the Pro version and if so desired it can still be upgraded to Win10 Pro AFAIK.

It should be minitower of course, then put a 1050 or other card in it that doesn't require a 6/8 pin power connector, buy used if necessary. Cards like that are small so it's a guaranteed fit and the 275W power supply doesn't have any 6/8 connectors(it can easily be replaced, but this is about not spending money).

Computer + graphics card should ideally be ~$200 total at this point. A used standard Dell/HP keyboard can be picked up for a buck or two, take it apart(very easy) and remove the front/top, the keys will still be attached, put it in your sink with hot water running and give it a good scrubbing with some dish soap to get rid of the finger grime, then put it in a windowsill to dry. Dishwasher is also an option.

Used screens can be picked up for cheap and even a new 24" 1080p Benq costs $110(?), if you buy the computer from an office/school when they're replacing everything then a used one can be had for fifty bucks or so.

Cost so far: 250-330 bucks.

If you're at a university, find out where they put all their electronic trash on its way to recycling. Why spend money when you can spend time hovering around trash?
 
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You can get a android tablet for cheap and download various emulators to play old games and shit. Good for trying out classics you never got to play. Other than that, your best bet for gaming is going to be a desktop, or a refurbished gaming laptop but in my experience gaming laptops rarely have the compacity to play games like fallout 3, etc.
 
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Gotta be honest, this is all pretty illuminating for me. I've always wanted to get into PC gaming but the issue is I often feel overwhelmed in trying to figure out what's the right way to build a PC and if it can run the games I want.

Last year, I got a new laptop for school after my old one died. The graphics and core are by AMD; specifically it's got a Radeon graphics card and Ryzen 5 processors. It sounded impressive, more advanced than my 10 year old desktop and my old tiny-ass laptop. Since it was modern I figured that it could probably run Doom 2016, but sadly it chugged along at 30 fps even at the lowest settings. And that's when I found out AMD doesn't work well with the old games I like, especially the ones that run with OpenGL, which constitutes something like 90-95% of what I play on my computer (partially out of necessity and partially because I love older PC games). It can some modern-ish games pretty well, but the problem is, as most people mentioned, the laptop gets disturbingly hot. I dunno, I can understand it when it's playing an intensive game like Mass Effect, but I don't think a computer should start burning my hands when it's playing something graphically simplistic like Dusk.

What I want is a computer that can fill that happy medium for me; something that can play the handful of modern games I want to play while also not stuttering playing old games. At first I thought about getting a laptop specifically for gaming because as a college student I don't quite have the luxury of space to build a PC in the dormroom, but after careful consideration from the comments in this thread, I think building is the better way to go.
 
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Baldur's Gait said:
Gotta be honest, this is all pretty illuminating for me. I've always wanted to get into PC gaming but the issue is I often feel overwhelmed in trying to figure out what's the right way to build a PC and if it can run the games I want.

Last year, I got a new laptop for school after my old one died. The graphics and core are by AMD; specifically it's got a Radeon graphics card and Ryzen 5 processors. It sounded impressive, more advanced than my 10 year old desktop and my old tiny-ass laptop. Since it was modern I figured that it could probably run Doom 2016, but sadly it chugged along at 30 fps even at the lowest settings. And that's when I found out AMD doesn't work well with the old games I like, especially the ones that run with OpenGL, which constitutes something like 90-95% of what I play on my computer (partially out of necessity and partially because I love older PC games). It can some modern-ish games pretty well, but the problem is, as most people mentioned, the laptop gets disturbingly hot. I dunno, I can understand it when it's playing an intensive game like Mass Effect, but I don't think a computer should start burning my hands when it's playing something graphically simplistic like Dusk.

What I want is a computer that can fill that happy medium for me; something that can play the handful of modern games I want to play while also not stuttering playing old games. At first I thought about getting a laptop specifically for gaming because as a college student I don't quite have the luxury of space to build a PC in the dormroom, but after careful consideration from the comments in this thread, I think building is the better way to go.
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Go for it. If space is a concern, you can still build a solid desktop with a mini-ITX case. And you can even buy premade, customized PCs nowadays. Though it’s not that hard to build your own rig (and it’s satisfying as well to build your own rig). It’s not like before where you had to RTFM to know stuff like which jumper caps go where otherwise your PC won’t run.
 
Qi Meng Dealer said:
Go for it. If space is a concern, you can still build a solid desktop with a mini-ITX case. And you can even buy premade, customized PCs nowadays. Though it’s not that hard to build your own rig (and it’s satisfying as well to build your own rig). It’s not like before where you had to RTFM to know stuff like which jumper caps go where otherwise your PC won’t run.
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Tbh, I'm a bit intimidated by the prospect of building my own rig primarily because of how sensitive a lot of the components are. I might go for a premade one depending on how easily upgradable it is. Don't need anything too fancy right now; my only criteria is that if it can run Doom 2016, Witcher 3, and Duke Nukem 3D without shitting itself then I'm good.

How efficient is a mini-ITX case? It sounds like a good idea for a dormroom, though my concern is cooling and how easy it is to upgrade the components. If it's between that and a regular desktop, I want to know which is a better option.

Also, where can I find the premade PCs?
 
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