Gaming laptop help thread

To start off I know that getting a laptop is inferior to getting a desktop to play vidya on but I can't get a desktop even if I wanted to because I have no space for it. So anons with black Friday/cyber Monday around the corner and with my laptop dying a year ago I have to borrow someone else's laptop and computer to post and play vidya on. I've been doing my research for months and with some saving I have a budget of 600$ but I still need some help.

Tl:DR:

I need a new laptop after my old one died and my room is too small for to ever get a desktop

Other urls found in this thread:

store.hp.com/us/en/pdp/omen-laptop---15t-x7r21av-1?jumpid=ma_omen-gaming_laptops_2_X7R21AV
dell.com/en-us/shop/dell-laptops/inspiron-15-5000-gaming/spd/inspiron-15-5577-gaming-laptop/fncwpi401h
store.hp.com/us/en/pdp/hp-pavilion-power---quad-w--2gb-gfx-touch-optional-1gk62av-1
notebookcheck.net/NVIDIA-GeForce-GTX-1080-SLI-Laptop-Benchmarks-and-Specs.178631.0.html
twitter.com/SFWRedditImages

I know very little about laptop gaming, but can you not build your own laptop like you can with a PC?

Thinkpads

You can but those cost thousands of dollars and still won't be as good a desktop

And which one would you recommend user?

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that's something you should rather ask Holla Forums about

Get an Acer or an Inspiron.
Unfortunately you don't have much in the way of options, most of the good gayman laptops are gonna be in the 850-1200 range.
Honestly OP if I were you I'd try to spend just a bit more and get an Inspiron with a 1060 but here are my recs that come as close to your limit as I can.

store.hp.com/us/en/pdp/omen-laptop---15t-x7r21av-1?jumpid=ma_omen-gaming_laptops_2_X7R21AV

dell.com/en-us/shop/dell-laptops/inspiron-15-5000-gaming/spd/inspiron-15-5577-gaming-laptop/fncwpi401h

50OFF699

quad core amd apu with a ssd will be your best value for older games
600 is the wrong budget for a laptop for gaming. Either go 300 or go 1200 or go home.

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user could get literally any laptop this generation due to all the integrated GPUs and be absolutely fine to play older games.

laptops have indeed closed the gap pretty well in terms of performance, but in terms of performance to cost and overall durability (as well as a complete lack of customization options and being held captive to the manufacturer or seller when it fucks up), they will never truly reach the PC's level. They are the consoles of PC gaming.

Enjoy getting your cock burned off.

Get the cheapest laptop with a 1050ti 4gb one, I think Asus or Acer has one. i7 or i5 don't matter much. You may have to install an OS but you are can do that, can you? 1050ti laptop is equivalent to the desktop one (for the first time I think) so it will play 1080p easily. Don't fall for "Gamerz" marketing.

store.hp.com/us/en/pdp/hp-pavilion-power---quad-w--2gb-gfx-touch-optional-1gk62av-1
Ah wait OP, found one that's closer to your budget than these 2 I linked earlier, and still a good one.

store.hp.com/us/en/pdp/hp-pavilion-power---quad-w--2gb-gfx-touch-optional-1gk62av-1

Don't get modern AMD on a notebook unless it's ryzen or newer because post-mid-2000s and pre-ryzen AMD cpus are thermonuclear reactors that will use 3x the power of an intel equivalent for 1/4th of the performance, and they'll set your house on fire. Ryzen/whatever is newer doesn't have this issue because AMD improved their CPUs a lot.
You're considering gaming on it so you definitely need a dedicated gpu in your notebook, don't fall for the "integrated is fine" meme. Integrated gpus do work on notebooks but only if you do nothing but edit text.
SSDs are an important part of notebooks, because acessing them is a less cpu-involved proccess (no need for complicated i/o schedulers for instance) and they use much less power. Having your OS and frequently used data in a SSD will be very beneficial for notebooks, doubly so because the average notebook HDD reads as fast as an american nigger.

DO NOT EVER UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES GET A HP NOTEBOOK. There are other brands that never put out a good product but this is one I can personally speak against, I have a lot of experience because I worked for them.

This is all I can tell you user.

Lenovo Legion Y720

can ya share some of those experiences? I haven't heard many bad things about HP tbh.

Thanks a million user, And yeah I noticed the prices raised on amazon when they were having a (((deal)))a view weeks back only to bring the discounted price a little over the regular price

My room is small so I use my laptop on my bed user,

I was thinking about getting one of them, but the 1 star reviews really put me on the edge for them and the list of problems they have


I still have my windows 7 ultimate disk

I have setup my desktop so I can use it in bed

talking about laptops, I´ve seen posts about this but I will ask anyways:

whats a good temperature to keep your laptop in while gaming? my i7 reaches 80 degrees and my gpu reaches 70 while playing EYE, and I dont think of that game as something too demanding. when should I worry? at 90? at 100? normally it just stays from 30 to 50 depending on how hot it is that day

Thanks again user


That sounds 80 sounds alright but you should try to keep it cool as possible and if it starts getting to 100 you need to cool it down asap.


>I have setup my desktop so I can use it in bed

Freaking lucky bastard user,That sounds top cozy

both of those temps are fine.
When your GPU starts to hit 90 and above is when you should turn on fans and possibly consider turning your computer off. If you're hitting 100 is definitely when you should shut your computer off in terms of your GPU.
CPU you have a lot more leeway. Your temperatures are fine, if anything that GPU temperature is quite reasonable.
80s are a bit high but certainly manageable for GPUs.and overall fine for CPUs as well.

They've done jewish shit like flash a different VBIOS on a GPU so they could lie and say it was a newer model.
For instance some 2012 pavillion dv6 notebooks have what they call "radeon HD 7690m" but it's really a "radeon HD 6750m". The 7690m is based on the 6750m so the vbios works, but you'll have random blue screens, game crashes and graphical artifacting because it's not exactly the same gpu. You can't even manually flash the original VBIOS because HP completely locks down everything but booting and basic stuff like selecting a boot device, setting the hardware clock or a password, this used to be the case on every single model back then but I'm not sure now (I worked for HP on their software side from 2010 to 2012, never touched a product of theirs after).
Speaking of software download any printer driver, it's going to be a 250MB or more file. It's going to install some official HP adware/bloatware/spyware/*ware that you have to uninstall manually after the installation ends (you can't disable it during the installation) and it'll reboot your PC without asking after installing or uninstalling. This has actually fucked me and by extension HP while working for them, I was working and HP AutoUpdater(TM) decided it was time to AutoUpdate and it AutoRestarted while I was busy.
If you're on linux and lucky maybe the printer has a free driver someone else made, but don't count on it.

Most of the time they have completely brain damaged design (look at the copper heatpipe), they'll stick a dedicated gpu on an APU notebook and the CPU and GPU will share a heatsink/fan combo with enough copper piping to cross the oceans. The GPU and the CPU will cook each other and the heatpipes will be too long to allow the fan to blow away the hot air. They'll also advertise the APU + dedicated (AMD) GPU combo as a crossfire setup but it's never going to be useful because of the performance difference of the 2 cards and the already useless nature of multi gpu setups.
They could easily fix the design in the pic by making the right end of the heatpipe on the cpu also go to the heatsink, and if they were feeling generous also put in some crossover pipes. But of course they won't, they want your hardware to die soon and to spend a few less cents on copper. They won't put filters anywhere either, they want your (warranty open if void) notebook to get filled up with dust so you have to go to a certificed service center and pay ludicrous prices for some neckbeard to vacuum the thing and probably put your nude pics on imagefap.

Another thing is how HP hates linux, if you're a linuxfag and get an HP notebook there's a big chance some piece of hardware requires proprietary drivers that you'll have to hunt yourself to work, or maybe it doesn't even have drivers. There are a few that can run completely free software or at least only require binary blobs, but you'll have to find out yourself.

HP notebooks also have astronomical failure rates, because HP will cost cut everything. During my 2nd month I got some free dv7 notebook because they didn't have the money to pay me (lie), it was a dumb offer to accept. For the next 20 months I worked there it died multiple times. A capacitor decided to leak and kill the motherboard with it, the SD reader stopped reading, the Beats by Dr Dre sound became a garbled mess and then finally the cpu cooked itself to death. They offered a new one but I took a reimbursement (pretended to be a regular costumer at the HP store in the building) instead. Maybe your experience won't be as bad as mine, but that's what using the thing for 5 days of the week every week in a work environment got me.

Oh and the screen hinges love to break, I don't know if their consumers are retarded but I made a friend at the store and he said people come in with snapped or nonworking hinges all the time.

dubs thread?

Jesus fucking christ. This is almost cartoony levels of jewery. I'll keep this in mind, thanks for letting me know about all this user, holy shit.
I'm sorry you got shafted so hard too, its sad when they can't even treat their employees decently.

Thanks for the warning user, This is the exact type of jewery I was worried about. Looks like HP is off the table.

Dell seems competent now that they're privately owned again

>bought 3 HP laptops
>they have served me well

Unless you plan on only playing emulators I implore you to reconsider.

pick 1

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those are fair points but the perfomance is really on par with pc. other downsides are just the price for the mobility

That explains what happened to my 2009 C2Q Laptop.

I didn't actually mean those 3000$ laptops user, I just need a decent one to play some video games on since my old laptop is busted and my room is too small for a desktop

pick whatever meme laptops is able to run external graphics card
don't worry they run at a lower speed depending on the implementation lmao

Build up instead of side to side. Now you have room.

Get a macbook and use openemu for the comfiest emulation experience known to man.

When was Dell bought out anyway?, I'm borrowing a dell right now and the owner had it for a few years now, and it runs (semi) fine. Except for when he fell for the upgrade meme for windows 10 which really sucks by the way if any user was wondering about win 10, the only real improved feature on it is the picture viewing so that you can view gifs and mp4 without opening a new browser and the file searcher.


I can't my door all the way before it hits my bed and I don't have the money it would be required for that

I have a gaming laptop myself. Pick it the same way you would pick a new desktop (compare GPU, CPU, RAM, etc., look at benchmarks, and so on) but keep in mind you won't have the option to change any of that shit later, so there's no point in splurging on one of the compponents if you'll have to cut back on the other that would cause you to bottleneck. Also keep in mind that with laptops, cooling is a big issue, so read customer reviews and the like to see whether it turns into a chunk of magma the moment you play a newer game on it. If all else fails, you can undervolt it later. Battery life is not important, your laptop is gonna drain even the best one soon once you start playing vidya on it, just get used to always carrying the charger along with your laptop.

Lastly, clean the laptop at LEAST once a year, it's really fucking important. If you don't know how, pay some asshole to do it, but ask him to also change the thermal paste and pads, since if you are gonna pay money for that shit, may as well get the full service.

Paid $900 for mine and after more than three years, I can still run anything if I turn the graphics settings down. I will have to buy a new one in a year or two, but since I am on the move often, the mobility easily makes up for it.

As for the often recited meme about laptop components being inferior and pricier to their desktop counterparts, that shit stopped being true several years ago, nowadays both desktop and laptop components tend to be similar in performance and price.

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that meme is still holds a bit of truth since cpus and sometimes graphics card overheat so much they throttle a lot of the times while producing some noise and configured to use less battery life since they are laptops after all, but they do the job as you said.

I should also add that I own an Acer and while the product is great, their customer support is absolutely shit, so don't count on them helping you with anything, ever. I once asked them to clean the laptop, as part of the warranty.
I then voided the warranty myself by getting it open and cleaned. Fuck those cunts.

nah, I'd rather use emulators on a phone with the digital pads

On the highest end of PC gaming? No, the gap is still there. For your "I play at 1080p, most shit on max with AA down a little bit", sure they are about on par with worse cooling and shitty keyboards.

if you want "new" just go to the hp, dell, gateway, toshiba webpages and look them up
also use this
notebookcheck.net/NVIDIA-GeForce-GTX-1080-SLI-Laptop-Benchmarks-and-Specs.178631.0.html
it will give you an idea of how shitty the video cards are in the laptop, they also review some laptops.

wrong

I see your flag ruseman.

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I was almost convinced to give a gaming laptop a try for the first time but then:

GAMING LAPTOP

Do you not have a desk? You can put your tower under your screen like some kind of highschool computer lab.

I can't fit a desk in my room

heres one for 6k

Then don't waste your money on gaymen laptops and get a better living space. Jesus fuck.

If it was that simple user I would have already done that.

It is that simple you fucking retard. Stop spending so much time on your computer playing games and pretending the real world doesn't exist and go make something of yourself. More shifts at work, push for promotion, look for better job, move to not-shit place with cheaper accommodation.

What job should I get user? A bank robber or a drug dealer or perhaps maybe a thief in the night. I'm pretty sure you're the one living in a fantasy world user.

There's your problem. Nothing will get fixed instantly, stop thinking it will. No one is going to jump out of your computer and slap a gorillion dollars in your hand. Even if it's minimum wage shit that you're doing right now then there will be minimum wage jobs in places that are cheaper to live in. You won't even have to go that far, just out of the city would do for most places.

I'm not American user

I assume you have a monitor already.
But if you wanted, you could build one of those small form factor PCs with a mini ITX motherboards. They're to the point where you don't sacrifice performance for the sake of size anymore if you're so inclined.
And if you need a small monitor, GeChic produces small, fairly high quality monitors.
Only problem is you won't have a battery, but you can find companies that produce batteries with an inverter included, and hold enough to last a few days powering your tech innawoods.

neither am I.

Also I never said I was giving up, But things happen beyond your control in life so I have to roll with it for now.

The focus on fixing those things before you indulge yourself. As far as gaming laptops go, they're underpowered and overpriced. Save your money for something better.

I wrote a wall of text but I erased it and am only going to say this, I am far from indulging myself user and trying to find a job where I live isn't as easy as it sounds.

Where the fuck even are you, Zimbabwe?

Not even joking anymore user. Due to modern GPU's getting low power you can get full size and power GPU in laptops.

Any 1050ti laptop or greater will be top shelf able to play any game OR you wait until next year and get the new AMD one. If you don't want to wait there is a RX 460 GPU AMD laptop out too but the CPU is slightly weaker but it is super cheap.

The people laughing at gaming laptops would be right to do so if the technology was 10 years old, modern gaming laptop is really good.

Or if you are super super cheap get a 2nd hand GTX 960 laptop because idiots sell them for the 10 series so you can get a deal.

Wait for the Intel CPU/Vega GPU gaming laptops that'll come out later next year.

Acer is known for shit build quality so avoid that shit. If the laptop can be openable, that's even better. You will have to clean it from time to time. Compressed air is a meme that only worsens the problem.

Those are probably going to be Apple-only. AMD doesn't have a reason to cooperate with Intel on laptop CPUs now that Ryzen is a more efficient low power CPU than everything Intel has.

Ryzen APUs are not out yet you turd, and FX based APUs are absolute garbage, slow ass portable ovens. Way to fucking give terrible recommendation.

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Until this year i would reply with >gaming >laptop but since nvidia started using the same gpu in desktop and laptop the >gaming laptop is actualy viable option
but you have to spend at least 800$
look for any laptop with nvidia 1050 and better
also i would highly recommend to get a laptop with SSD

Honestly even the GTX 9xxM series is great for gaming as long as you stick to 1080p but most laptoo screens are 1080p anyways. The ">gaming laptop" meme hasn't been relevant since GTX 7 series days

These days gaming laptops are actually starting to be better than having a desktop.

lets not go overboard

No, it's already happening. AMD barely has any market presence in the laptop market, because everyone is buying Nvidia/Intel.

No

They're telling me they don't do international business

Then do a mini-itx build.

Don't get an MSI Laptop. I checked their laptops recently and they still have the same specs as they did 3 years ago for the same price. You'll run into issues as well.

You're so full of shit

For the price of a "gaming laptop", you can build a top of the line desktop and get way more bang for your buck. But if you must, I hear the Asus RoG laptops are pretty good.

Maybe OP is manlytears

Thanks user for the recommendation but the price of a Asus Rog is way over my budget

Got a Lenovo Ideapad 510S, the damn thing uses a AMD R7M360, but it also have a freaking Intel HD Graphics 520. So, for some reason, games usually can only find the fucking Intel HD. I don`t know how to fix this. If you remove the Intel drivers, it will not run any games at all.
At least this beauty runs smoothly. That's not saying much, I guess.

Because AMD didn't have a laptop chip worth a shit until about three weeks ago. You're suggesting that now that they do, they're going to push Intel chips instead?

Oh, you have brain damage.

Can confirm. Been gaming on GT 750M for the past three years (was low on budget at the time) ad I can still run newest releases no problem, provided I turn off ambient occlusion and bullshit like that.

You mean AMD cpu/nvidia gpu.
AMD has the most power efficient processors right now and nvidia still has the most power efficient gpus.

Undervolting is a good piece of advice but make sure the laptop isn't so locked down you can't even change voltages. On some desktop parts you can get stuff like 20% reduced power usage and heat output with undervolting, you probably won't get the same results on notebook parts because the voltages are tighter but it'll still be significant.

After dealing with terrible customer support 2 days and finally asking for help from one of my relatives, I was able to get it for right on my budget for 600$ on Thursday and it will be here in a few weeks. Thank you so much user and other anons who gave me advice and helped me.

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