Laptop Advice

[log21]

I’m going to college soon and I want a laptop that can play games and also bring to class.

• I want to be able to play almost any game at 1080p. (AAA games like RDR2, Resident Evil 4 and Silent hill 2)
• I’d like a screen size of 14-18 in, nothing tiny or huge
• Screen resolution of 1080p or higher and a display of 140 hz or more.
• My region is the US.
• My budget is $1500 USD give or take.
• I am open to used/refurbished, but new would be ideal
• Battery-wise I need enough to get me through a day of college. Probably 8ish hours or more.
• Weight and thickness isn’t important to me, but I would be carrying it in a backpack.
• I don’t care a ton about the keyboard, but I don’t want a super crappy one
• I need an hdmi port

Any recommendations? I’m kinda new to laptops and don’t know much about their GPUs and CPUs and their naming is confusing.

 

[Tech Junky]

Clevo Barebone Laptop Series - R&J Technology, Clevo Barebone Notebook kits, Laptop and desktop system builder

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Lots of choices, no sales tax, free shipping. Just pick one and then add your own RAM/NVME to it for cheaper than the big brands you find in the stores. They also sell models with everything inside and you just take it out of the box and turn it on.

The issue with the complete versions is the charges for the RAM/drive are higher than you can get them for through Amazon. It just takes a couple of minutes to remove the screws on the bottom and pop the case open to insert your parts.

I've had a couple of them now and they're durable and work as well as name brands. It's a real cost saver though where you can get a $1300 model and do some upgrades and end up with one worth significantly more. I swapped out the screen on a few of them now and 4K120 on my current one. Swapping the screen takes about 10-15 mins and then you get what you want when it comes to colors / brightness. My biggest issue with most laptops is the screen not being very good and fairly dim. Most laptops ship with one that's 250-350 nits in brightness and that's not much in a bright room let alone outdoors. The average higher tier screen is ~500 nits and if you get a size that allows for mini-LED you can jump up to 1000+ if you can find the inventory.

Battery on most isn't going to do 8 hours though unless you go with the non gaming models. One thing though you can do is get a battery bank and a trigger cable to extend things a bit. I do this when I'm doing stuff in my car and get a couple more hours from using he battery bank method or plugging the cable into a lighter power plug. I got a slim battery pack that's 20k mah but you can get higher / thicker options that will last longer. I just wanted something that would supplement power and originally got it to power my 5G modem box when power went out. For the modem it would last 16 hours but that was only pulling about 5W. Laptop idle is about 30W and browser stuff might be about 45W-60W and the bank provides up to 100W. Total w/ the GPU engaged though hits 180W which won't pull power from the bank while engaged.

The trigger cable though is cheap at $10 or so and the bank ~$80. Car adapter IIRC was about $40. In the car it's easy to do Car adapter >> bank >> laptop for keeping them all charged up.

GPUs and CPUs and their naming is confusing.

higher the model number the more performance it will have.

For NVIDIA on the link above they have options...
4050
4060
4070
4080
4090

I usually aim for the xx60 as it's a decent performer and an uplift from the basic xx50 option. The 70/80/90 options tend to be significant price jumps for each tier.

Clevo Barebone Laptop Series :: nVidia GeForce RTX 4060 8GB - R&J Technology, Clevo Barebone Notebook kits, Laptop and desktop system builder

your Memory hard drives build your laptop based this Clevo Barebone Series select from options provided build

rjtech.com

$1139-1599 for the 4060 and I would go for the $100 one with the AMD CPU because I'm leery about the Intel 14th gen. And it gives your budget room to play with upgrades if you go down that rabbit hole.

 

[igor_kavinski]

^^^ great advice regarding the battery bank.

Choosing a laptop good enough for games unfortunately leads to sacrificing battery life for the privilege.

I wouldn't recommend the 4060 coz with the 4000 series, Nvidia is cheating customers out of their hard earned money with slower GPUs than mobile 3000 series.

This fits the OP's budget: https://www.newegg.com/p/2WC-000K-03349

 

[Tech Junky]

4060

I've got a 3060 right now. I haven't looked too deep into the 4000 series as my next one might be a 5000 by the time I swap again. I'm also trying to get away from Intel at this point as well. I already swapped my server for AMD and the laptop is the last Intel based device.

In general though the GPU on laptops you're good as long as you don't go for the base option and there's no real reason to go for the top option unless you're Mr Monopoly and burn cash like it's going out of style. In general though you shop for laptops based on the CPU/GPU because you can't replace them typically. There are however some higher end models that use desktop CPUs and have swappable GPU boards as well but, they're not in most budgets.

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https://eurocom.com/ec/upgradepricelist(2,511) - MOBO/CPU/GPU $2200+

There's some older models though that you could just pop the CPU and drop a new one in like you would in a desktop. AFAIK they're the only company that had the option to do this sort of upgrade in the past. Clevo also gets sold under different names like Sager and the key to finding other sellers is search by the model number.

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