Recommendations for a decent gaming laptop

[The Leprechaun!]

Before anyone everyone goes bat shit crazy and tell me desktops are far better than laptops for gaming, I'm aware. However, due to being at a university quite a distance away from home, and generally moving around the country quite a lot of the time, i need the portability of a laptop at the expense of better desktop options out there. And no i won't be persuaded otherwise, so don't bother

 

Price range is anywhere between £400 and £800 (ish), already I've had one friend suggest the Lenovo Ideapad z580, whilst another has suggested this:

http://3xs.scan.co.uk/ConfigureSystem.asp?SystemID=1608#

 

Is either of these a good buy (I'm thinking more the 3XS Graphite rather than the Lenovo atm), has anyone used Scan before and any other recommendations/suggestions?

 

Also, I'm clueless when it comes to computers, so layman's terms if possible...

Cheers,

Joe

 

 

[Rock-climby-Dave]

Scan are fine, IIRC it's who I got my PC off. You're probably tired of my interjections at this point, so I'll leave the others to it.

 

 

 

Also, MACS HAVE BEEN RULED OUT ALREADY.

To avoid a shitstorm as happened on facebook, posts suggesting or trying to lead on an argument of 'mac Vs PC' will be deleted.

[The Leprechaun!]

Its always nice to have a mod as a friend... :L

 

Good to know about Scan too, cheers!

[M_P]

Check out novatech- I know the people who own the company very well so I'm probably a bit biased but I've never had any issues with their stuff and it's all much better priced than alternatives that i've seen or used and they cater for a variety of budgets.

http://www.novatech.co.uk/laptop/gaming/

[AK47frizzle]

Just.... what ever you pick.... just don't go for alienware....

[Liam Porter]

The one you linked is much better than a Lenovo Ideapad Z580, regarding specs.

I've never heard of 3XS though, so can't comment on anything other than the specs and price. No idea what quality they are or how long they're likely to last.

 

 

From experience, here's a few brands I'd avoid/look out for;

Sony VAIO - I had a Sony VAIO, was my favourite laptop I had. Wasn't the best spec-wise, but build quality and ergonomics, it was amazing. It was also the most expensive I've had. I could play games on it with it being on my bed, without it getting hot and overheating. Reason I got rid of it was because I dropped it and fucked it up.

ASUS - Good specs:price ratio, you get more for the same cost as another brand laptop. I'd say poor build quality though, the keyboard/keys were flimsy and the keyboard started to bend inwards in the middle. The speakers went 'rattly' after about a year or so. The subwoofer port stopped working completely, so after just over a year, I returned it to Amazon for a full refund.

Toshiba - Had two of these, both the same. Worked well, quite good quality, better than ASUS, worse than Sony VAIO. Bear in mind, these will not survive if you drop them down the stairs, I accidentally tested this twice.

HP - Avoid like the plague. My dad had one, my step-dad had one, my brother and sister both had one, my nan and grandad had one. They all, without fail, overheated and fucked the processor within a year. Not the best build quality, no too expensive, but seem to have massive cooling issues.

 

 

If anyone else wants to go against what I've said, for whatever reason, feel free, this is from my experience, of 1 laptop from each of the brands (apart from Toshiba and HP).

 

 

Finally, if I was going to get myself another laptop, which I might for Uni, it would definitely be a Sony VAIO.

[Lozart]

If budget is unlimited and you're happy to be paying nasally for the brand then I'd say yes, go for a Vaio. Or a Dell XPS (and put up with the horrible customer service when it inevitably goes wrong).

 

If budget and performance are your driving factors then Scan and Novatech would be my recommendations. The Novatech i7 based ones around £700 are pretty damn good and I've always had good service from them (we used them for work machines for a while).

[jcheeseright]

I bought a second hand dell xps a couple of years back and it was rock solid, played everything I threw at it and was easily within your budget. Ebay is a good place to look.

[The Leprechaun!]

Cheers for the suggestions and help so far, its been really helpful! After reading more into this and browsing a bit more, I've now started to look as this:

http://www.novatech.co.uk/laptop/range/novatechnfinityn1407

With a dual Intel Core i7 processor, 8GB RAM (2x4GB), 256 GB SSD and NVIDIA GT 640M graphics for £784.98 (thrown in 64-bit Windows7 as well) that seems pretty good to me (its the certainly the one with the highest specs for the lowest price I've been able to find, and only 4/5 days shipping rather than a month (build time included) from Scan, and ideally i need it asap as my old one has bitten the dust today, joys of joys...)

[proffrink]

A 640M won't do you much good. Even my Macbook has a 650 and that only does so much for gaming. Look for a 655 or above, or drop down to the 500 series and more bang for your buck - the 600s don't have that much over the 500 series anyway.

 

Apart from that, seems decent. Just bear in mind that you'll always be paying a huge premium for going with a laptop. Truly ask yourself if you're making the right call here over a desktop because your laptop will be redundant in about two years time even if you buy top of the range - can you really not shuttle a microATX desktop around and buy yourself a cheap ultrabook for notes etc.?

[Caliber]

I can offer you some assistance. I found a laptop similar to mine on PC Specialist, few parts are different but I think the model is near enough the same. I get good performance out of mine, around 3 hours battery life whilst messing around on After Effects and doing some light gaming, so I'm guessing between 1 and 2 hours when pure gaming on more high-spec games.

 

Link: https://www.pcspecialist.co.uk/notebooks/cosmosII-17/

 

Display: Full HD Widescreen

CPU: Intel® Core i5-4210M CPU @ 2.60GHz

RAM: 8Gb Kingston (Can't remember if it was the HYPER-X or standard)

Graphics Card: Nvidia GeForce 840M

 

HDD: 500Gb Serial ATA II

2nd HDD: None

DVD/Blu Ray Drive: 8x SATA DVD+R/RW/Dual Layer

Memory Card Reader: The only option there.

Thermal Paste: Arctic MX-4

Sound Card: Intel High 2 Channel High Definition Audio

 

Bluetooth/Wireless: 150Mbps (Top option)

Router: None

USB: The only option there.

Battery: The only battery type there (I bought 1).

Power lead: 1 UK power lead.

 

OS: Windows 7 Home Premium 64bit (Windows 8 can get bent)

Office Software: None

Anti-Virus: Bullguard

 

All the rest of the options default.

 

All that comes to £621.00, which is a pretty good price if you ask me. Good value for money. I reccommend this build to anyone looking for a nice mid-high end portable gaming rig. Renders things with ease on After Effects aswell (Although I don't do crazy CGI, just minor post-production stuff that never gets published. So I don't know how it'll handle active 3D rendering, I presume well).

 

The only problem is the touchpad. It lacks distinct buttons. So you kind of have to guess where the right and left mouse buttons are, and your mouse clicks can get a little inaccurate because the mouse buttons are actually a part of the touchpad. I'd just use a mouse, but I rarely have the space to use a mouse aswell, so I just make-do for now.

 

Hope this helps in your descisions.

[AK47frizzle]

hey... that's great and all... but please, check the date of the original post

 

Anyways, since we're on this, I might as well say that since I posted in this topic a while, I too have bought a decent gaming laptop for my self and it cost me £530.

 

It's a lenovo G505s with an AMD A10 5757m CPU with a Radeon 8650g and Radeon 8570m GPUs.

 

Brilliant for the price.

[The Leprechaun!]

This post is so old I'd forgotten about it...

I've been happy with my 3XS Graphite for the past 7 months, works a treat, but thanks for the recommendations anyway