Tech Corner

[GreatEmerald]

And i don't need performance for gaming really... but a dedicated card is better then none, right?

Actually... See how that laptop also has an integrated Intel HD Graphics 4600? Yea, well, both are pretty much of the same performance. So no, it's not better at all, it'll just eat more power and get in the way. Either drop it or go for a higher end one.

[Kalah]

I'm also thinking about a new laptop, since my current one (bought in 2011) keeps crashing. I thought about reinstalling the OS, but it's quite worn too so maybe I'll just buy a new one. I'll use it for surfing, some image editing work, writing and maybe a little bit of gaming (like Football Manager) but nothing with high resource requirements. What kind of things in general would you recommend for a cheap-ish purhcase?

• Which CPU?
  Any brands better than others?
  Any of them have less heat than others? (my current one gets too hot)

[GreatEmerald]

Well, for simple tasks like that you don't need anything fancy at all. I'd order them by price and go from cheapest to most expensive and see which ones are sufficient for the amount of gaming you want to do there. As for heat, newer generations produce less heat due to smaller lithography processes. Also, power requirements and heat go hand-in-hand: low-power (low TDP) devices don't make much heat at all. So that's why low-end devices, when sufficient, are the best: low price, low power consumption, low heat and noise. But you need to make sure they're of the latest generations, of course.

[ThunderTitan]

Either drop it or go for a higher end one.

It would be nice if i could...

What i really liked was that it was an I-5...

And now the price went up... great.


How about this one: http://www.emag.ro/laptop-asus-cu-proce ... DMDGRBBBM/

[GreatEmerald]

That's a decent GPU, it will even run Unreal Engine 4 games on the lowest possible settings. The processor is good enough too.

[ThunderTitan]

What about Dell:

http://www.marketonline.ro/laptopuri/la ... e=price-ro

This one has a very nice discount: http://www.cel.ro/laptop-laptopuri/lapt ... arantie-l/

[GreatEmerald]

Hah, that's the one I was looking to buy myself, before being informed that it's possible to get my whole desktop transported over. The graphics card is a bit less powerful, but not by much, and it should still be possible to play UE4 games on the lowest settings with it. Also, it comes with Ubuntu preinstalled.

[ThunderTitan]

So then, is the i7 and 4gb extra ram worth the extra money? Or should i just go with the i5 one?

[Pol]

I wouldn't go for i7, it's not necessary. Otherwise they seem to be identical.

Myself I dislike Inspirons, they are the cheapest line from DELL. But that depends I know.

Be careful about the keyboard, check it somewhere else, before purchase. Both have just 5400rpm drive, which seems like their biggest drawback.

[GreatEmerald]

Yeap, I don't think you need an i7 unless you're planning to do scientific computations or something.

As for the drive, personally I have no idea how people can live without an SSD. They aren't very costly these days and usually one doesn't need all that much disk space, not internal anyway. The first thing I do with a laptop is take out its hard drive and replace it with an SSD (and then put the hard drive in an HDD case to reuse it as an external one for storing huge files). Once you use it, going back to an HDD makes the system feel unbearably sluggish, because you get used to three-second boots and instant program launch

[ThunderTitan]

Well the price difference is less then 100$ (it's something like 60-70$), and i'm guessing the i7 will mean it will last longer when it comes to running stuff years from now.

And can i replace the HDD? Coz that's what my brother wants to do later anyway...

[GreatEmerald]

Well, the i7 is 10-30% faster, so maybe.

And of course you can, you just need a disassembly guide for the particular laptop series. Some models have HDD slots directly accessible from the outside, just like RAM, so replacing those is a breeze, it's just a matter of removing a few screws, sliding the old one out and sliding the new one in.
Those that don't have it accessible from the outside are a bit trickier to replace because you need to unscrew more things and usually remove the keyboard and whatnot, so more care is needed, but it's still quite doable.

[ThunderTitan]

And of course it has issues...

If i press the bottom, under the heat sink thing, the laptop shuts down... my brother had the bright idea of checking the heat while i was playing HotS on it... man, Blizz has some bad reconnecting system... by the time i reconnected from my PC the game was long over...

Anyhow, the battery is likely loose, right...

[ThunderTitan]

And my bro opened it up, and it seems some RAM was loose...

Lets hope that's all.

Oh, and is the fan thing supposed to spin, because it's not... does it just start when the video card is working harder?

[GreatEmerald]

In one of my laptops there's an UEFI setting of whether the fan should spin down completely or not. By default it's always spinning, but on other laptops it may very well be different. The important part is that it spins when under load.

[ThunderTitan]

So test it when i have the time i guess....

Busy fucking couple of weeks here... stupid money, why are tehy so hard to make...

EDIT: And it spins once a game is played... yay. Lets hope there are no moar problemos....

[Kalah]

I'll buy a new laptop this year - possibly as a Christmas present for myself. This old one is just getting too many problems; graphics driver crashes etc. So how are these two looking?

Lenovo G50-45 15.6" HD
Radeon R2, AMD E2-6110 Quad Core,4GB RAM,500GB HDD,Windows 8.1

Acer Aspire E1-570G 15,6" HD
GeForce GT720M,Core i5-3337U,4GB RAM,500GB HDD,Office 365,Windows 8.1

[GreatEmerald]

Well, unless you want it to be a very early Christmas present, I'd say you should wait AMD is launching their new Carizzo laptop line just this summer, and there should be more Intel Broadwell laptops available as time goes, too.

[Kalah]

Yes, if there are new lines coming, I'll wait until they arrive so that the old line is dumped on a discount.

[GreatEmerald]

Yeap.

Though personally, since I try and use all the tech for as long as possible, I'd rather go for newer gen gear than older. It might be rougher at the beginning but it usually lasts longer and is more efficient. Case in point was my previous graphics card: at the time (2009) I had a choice between AMD Radeon HD 4890, a very powerful card of the previous gen, and something more expensive from the recently released HD 5000 range. I went with the former, and just a few years later AMD dropped support for every card right up to and including my card. It also generates a lot of heat and eats a lot of power, yet the speed is not sufficient for most games, so I put it into my HTPC, but it's hilariously suboptimal there. Meanwhile the HD 5000 series is still supported and well-optimised to this day, as well as having some quite important tech improvements (like accelerated encoding and OpenCL) that weren't there initially but were added over the course of its lifetime. Sigh.