It does not sound much of a gaming notebook.
You can check some information at notebookcheck. For instance, this is the info on the GPU: http://www.notebookcheck.net/AMD-Radeon-HD-6310.40952.0.html
I searched a lot for a gaming notebook. I ended up buying a Lenovo Y470 on some special deals this week.
How much are you planning on spending?
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I am a student too ;) I've been saving a lot for this notebook.
I don't think I saw any serious gaming notebook around that price. I believe Asus or Lenovo may have something for that price. You really want to avoid Intel HD Graphics for gaming.
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As you said the Intel HD Graphics are shit for gaming, but they're very good at saving energy, while you're not gaming/on the go, but you would need an additional graphics card for gaming then.
And given the all the recent problems with Radeon graphics cards (especially with Bethesda games), I would recommend going with Nvidia, but that depends on what games you want to play.
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Most modern Intel processors come with a graphics processor inside. In theory, you can kill all video acceleration when you are not using it. I think I saw somebody saying something about this on a review of the IdeaPad Y470 08552EU (Lenovo is selling it at almost half the price)
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Yes, but from what I know (and I have to admit, I don't know that much about PC hardware anymore) AMD processors don't have those. So, what I meant was, choosing an Intel processor + Nvidia graphics card, sounds like the superior way (at least for laptops), than going with an AMD processor and graphics card.
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Does it have to be a laptop? For £350 you wont get much in the way of any laptop, especially one to play modern games on, but a desktop might be ok.
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There aren't many, but they're there. Lenovo doesn't making a "gaming" laptop per se, its jsut that their laptops are incredibly sturdy and reliable, worth their value. Dell/Alienware have their M14x which is pretty beastly, but extremely overpriced. Then there is what I am currently typing on, Asus G73jh/g74jh. This has a very reasonable price and runs all games just fine. Of course with the money spent on it you could get a better desktop, but some people need mobile gaming and this fits the bill.
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Yup. That's why I bought my G73Jh. Going to college I needed something that could handle newer games decently, but had to be mobile - going back home every other weekend, attending LAN parties every once in a while, or just being able to do something in between classes (or boring lectures :P).
I for sure wouldn't trade it for desktop. That few FPS aren't worth the convenience laptop brings.
But hey, that's just me. Do whatever suits you best, right? :)
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I agree... They exist, but as mentioned by Janrok, they're WAY overpriced. The biggest problem you will always find is trying to cram too much power into a tiny space, things will overheat, so much that you need a laptop cooler just for mundane tasks. Attempt to run Skyrim on one that's even capable of running it at medium specs and you're looking at an hour of game time before you'll need to shut down to give the poor thing time to cool off.
Maybe in the future the concept of a Gaming Laptop will be more realistic, but now? Too much heat!
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Laptops over heat easily when you play games on them- gaming or not. It's best to just buy a desktop if you're that desperate to play games. If you need a laptop just buy a regular one and save for a console of PC on the side. If you're a student there are much better things you could be doing than playing Skyrim anyway.
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Laptops overheat faster than desktops in general, but it's not like every laptop has heat issues. My Asus can pretty much max out any game I've played on it so far, and it never has a problem with heat. The Compaq I had before this had a bad habit of overheating a lot, but it was a piece of shit anyway.
And sure, desktops will always offer better value for money, but when you want gaming and mobility and don't want to buy two systems, it pays to just save up a few bucks more and get a quality laptop. As mentioned a few posts above, both Asus and Lenovo have models that offer great performance for a reasonable price.
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+1
Just get a Desktop, put an i3(Even a Phenom II x4 would be fine) and a Gtx460(or AMD 6850), whatever ram is on sale(4gb probably could get it for dirt on sale), pray to the hard drive gods that prices fall and you should just cut it with the other stuff necessary in your price range.
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He should check here: http://www.reddit.com/r/buildapc post a thread and some fine redditors will help him build it!
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What you say is true Ufoleet. But I already got a desktop PC in the family room.
I just wanted a laptop so I could play wherever I go. My bedroom is so small lol. As you walk in you just see a bed and nothing more. xD
I don't think a desktop PC would fit in my room let alone the desk itself :D
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If you really want a laptop you can game on, then do that. Wait a few months and save up some more money, the extra cash will really get you a much better system for gaming.
If you buy a to cheap laptop, well then you are pretty much stuck with it, as there is no real way to upgrade it.
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Okay. That's what im deciding to do. My mate suggested i should buy a laptop on finance. That got me thinking really.
I could easily pay little by little each month and that way i could get an extreme gaming laptop instantly without having to wait a few months. :D
But is it really worth it?
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Well, to be honest - there is no good answer.
If you want it NOW NOW NOW - get it. If you can hold few months - keep in mind that the prices of hardware are constantly dropping. Laptop I bought merely a year ago for $1.5k is worth less than ~$1k now.
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the processor is slow, and although the graphics cards is of a new generation (6xxx), it has a very low rank (x3xx). it's a budget card not very useful for gaming.
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i run purely on laptops, (AMD mostly) but i recommend if you can bump your budget up to include at least 2.0ghz core 2 duo, then that would be... how to say? minimum? i'd recommend a very powerful AMD core, but they get a bit pricy, but if you can manage the core 2 duo, in the gaming range, odds are it would have a competent graphics card already.
Good luck dude :)
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indeed they are cheaper, hence why i run them, and why i recommended to those on a budget :) but you're right, if you want an i processor, i'd say i7, or it's not really worth it
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i7 has almost no benefits over a i5 gaming wise. You might see a 2-3fps increase if you are lucky...
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as much as i love Alienware, it's a lot of money, for pretty lights, you could build the same for less
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Everyone is saying they are overpriced, BUT, you can build your own on their website. Pick your specs on everything and they custom assemble it to what you can afford. You can get a decent alienware for 300 if you wanted. Personally mine was 1000 6 years ago and I can run evry game on the market still with no issues. BF3 on high settings, Skyrim as well. They are very long lasting and have great specs to choose from. And yes I have a laptop.
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Well, I don't see why other companies couldn't do the same. It's not like Alienware has monopoly on comp parts so you can build the same rig from other manufacturer. The thing is, even if you go for custom build - the separate parts are much more expensive than from anywhere else.
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I don't think you can get an Alienware for 300. Bare minimum 700 maybe, thats what my friend got for his 11 inch but still overpriced m11x. Anyway yeah, with those you're literally paying over $1000 extra just for the lihgts and casing if you go towards the end of the spectrum. If you think about it, it's kind of like the PC version of Macs if you're talking about price and hardware.
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I play on a "gaming laptop" and Skyrim defaults to High graphics (very high was the top I think). It was 500 euros. 4gb ddr3, intel i3 and radeon 6650 are the most important hardware on this piece of toplap. Hope this helps to figure out where you need to stand on the budget/hardware/skyrim balance.
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I haven't cared or tracked FPS for a long time in any game (last being cs:s and cs1.6 times if I remember correctly). Looking at his OP it seems he simply wants to know what hardware can handle Skyrim and at what level. That is my reply to him.
I can run it and playable mean the same to me unless you want to dive into linguistics and semantics. The fact that I mentioned that the game Skyrim itself defaults it's settings to High graphics would tell you that it can run it playably. Unless you think the default settings that the game checks for using a fast scan tool made by Bethesda itself gives you when you start are meant to make the game unplayable and just run it then I am all ears to hear why is that so.
Still the very fact that the game itself defaults my settings should be enough to understand that it is playable, yes I am saying it is playable. Bethesda did not default me to "I can run it" settings. Perhaps you have never heard of system scans and default settings in games. I am happy I can explain the concept of default settings to you. You seem to have missed that part in every game that has been ever released.
Maybe you want me to explain what are the minimum requirements and recommended requirements?
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Uh, that's not a "gaming" laptop. Something like this is a gaming laptop:
http://www.gentechpc.com/showpages.asp?pid=1099
For £350 you're not getting very far, it's better to just upgrade your desktop. Save at least £800 and you can get something really good to play it at either medium or high settings, depending on your resolution.
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I think you have no idea what the "" quotes mean. Something like that you listed is a 1600 dollar waste of money. Might as well Google for the most expensive hardware ever and call everything beneath it crap. An important factor when buying any hardware is price/value relationship or in other words "bang per buck". Most people unlike you can't buy 1600 dollar laptops.
Also you tell him to save 800 pounds so he can run Skyrim on medium or high. My 500 euro laptop can run Skyrim on high (default prefabricated setting that you can choose in the launcher)...
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I'm sorry, but do you know how to use the quotation mark? Read this, it makes a of sense: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quotation_mark#Usage It's also funny since in your other comment you actually wrote "gaming laptop" as well, did you reply just because you didn't like my post?
And no, $1600 is not that expensive considering the performance that laptop delivers, just because it doesn't fit your wallet or your opinion doesn't make it a waste of money. Some people don't like to compromise, but need something portable, so compare that $1600 to $2000 or more from an Alienware equivalent, or even worse, compare the closest Mac you can build to match that MSI, then see the gap in prices and how the Mac still fails. And I never said everything below is crap, but considering the average PC gamer standards, that one would fit the "gaming" title.
Also, great that your laptop plays Skyrim, but did you buy it new or used and where? At what resolution are you playing? What's your framerate? Because from the prices I have been seeing, 800 pounds sounds like a reasonable price, and since I haven't benchmarked Skyrim yet, I'm considering it close to The Witcher 2 in performance. So yes, if he wants to play at 1920x1080 and keep a playable framerate either medium or high settings will do fine.
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And no, $1600 is not that expensive considering the performance that laptop delivers
But seriously, anyone who pays more than $1000 for a laptop is either an idiot or has too much money. There's just no reasonably justification for buying a system like that.
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My advice?
Run away from HP laptops, like you're running from the devil. Had 3 (from different series) on the family, all of them ruined after ~1.5years because of extreme overheating.
I love the ones from Gateway, though. Battery life is shorter, but that's the price for a gaming laptop.
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Yeah, of course... never used a cooling pad though, they're a bit hard to find around here.
Gotta say though, those HPs are made thinking about the european market, so you might not have any problems if you live around there - but they sell the same models here in Brazil, which is waay hotter, so that might be an issue...
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I´m European and my Compaq (as you probably know, Compaq is a HP brand these days) used to overheat like crazy when I used it to play games, so it´s not just a weather issue.
Also, the harddrive killed itself after a year or so. Sure I got a new one for free, but in the mean time I lost all my data and had to wait over a month for the new one to arrive.
So yeah, I wouldn´t recommend HP either.
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Yeah, hard drive failure is one of the worst things that can happen on a computer. I've been using Crashplan as a backup solution ever since my first time, works as a charm (using it for both on-site backup on an external HD and off-site encrypted backup on their servers).
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As others have said, you should stay away from HP. I'd say go for an ASUS or MSI laptop. A bit pricey, but you won't be disappointed. Even the lesser priced ones are fairly good at running games. That computer MIGHT be able to play Skyrim on medium settings. But, I doubt you'll be able to fully enjoy it. I say, rack up a bit more dosh and go for a higher end laptop.
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I've never had an HP laptop. Bought an HP desktop, though. It was a work PC but I pimped it out. When I say pimped out, I mean I just added a Radeon HD 5670. It came prebuilt with pretty good items except for the GPU. It was a onboard intel gpu. It sucked. I can play most games on high at 30-60 fps. So, I'm fairly happy.
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3 friends bought them at the same time, all 3 were dead by the end of a year, over heating, screens going bad, keys falling off, I bought an HP netbook, had to return it a week later the keys started to die on it, the D and K keys actually, which is funny because I barely used it and am a pretty soft typer. Had a HP desktop about 5 years ago, plugs started dying on that one also. Stay away from HP.
Asus is amazing, same with MSI, only brands I would really go with prebuilt wise. I have a Asus netbook thats going strong 2 years later.
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That laptop sux... get an ASUS K53 series or something. With a GT540M Nvidia for example. Will run Skyrim like a charm.
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Get a laptop with at least an i-series processor with a 6000 series radeon or 500 series GeForce. Not really too certain about graphics in laptops though, I know that the 6000 radeon series is the desktop current and the 500 GeForce is the desktop current but not too sure with laptop components.
Battery life on a gaming laptop? no. Just plug it in. Otherwise your computer will go all energy savings on you and it will run slower. If you disable this then say goodbye to the 8.5 hours it promises.
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I just want to go on a record here as a one who made that stupid mistake - never EVER ever go for laptop with 2 graphic cards. It will just switch randomly while you game and you are all surprised and shit that you suddenly have 5FPS instead of 60-80. I game on Acer Timelinex series btw.
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Don't do it to yourself. Find a refurbed ASUS and you'll be happy. Guaranteed.
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Not only is that not true for half the gaming laptops out there, but it's not really a big deal. Cooling pads aren't really expensive.
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Anything short of the 6800 series (Radeon) or 560Ti (NVidia) won't get you very far with most games of this generation, and that processor would probably end up bottlenecking your performance even with a decent GPU. The rig you posted would probably play Skyrim on low settings, if that.
The most cost effective solution, I think, would be to buy a low-end laptop for non-gaming applications, and buy a decent desktop with above-average specs. If you're going for the lower end of performance and price range, there are a lot of pre-built desktops going on sale this time of year; you can get a pretty decent desktop rig for about $500/€370/£320. If you want a rig that can run this generation's titles on "High", it's a lot more cost effective to build it yourself (and it would still cost about $1000/€750/£630 based on component prices in the U.S.; I don't know what component prices look like where you live).
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You could also wait a few months for new trends in CPU and GPU architecture to drive prices down a bit, but where's the fun in waiting?
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Basically im planning on buying a gaming laptop. I found to HP Pavilion dm1-4027sa
11.6" Laptop.
The spec of the hp is:
Dual-core AMD E-450 processor 1.65ghz
Ram: 4GB
Hard drive: 320GB
Up to 8.5 hours battery life
Graphics: AMD Radeon™ HD 6310
I wanna know if i could play games like skyrim on it. And what game this laptop wont handle.
The website says this laptop is for work and play. So i knw its a laptop that can play games but just need to know if it could play most games?
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