Chimpy Chompy on 29/1/2015 at 16:46

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Hello people, I'm after some tips on a mid-range laptop for fairly general use.

Ideally it should be able to handle a bit of gaming. I'm not expecting anything high-end, just the ability to run, say, World of Warcraft half decently. Do I want a proper GPU or can the Intel chips handle that these days?

Still not sure if I want 15" or something smaller, but I'm leaning towards more 13" for the sake of portability. Budgetwise I don't want to go a long way past £600 - as I already have a desktop serving as Primary PC.

All advice appreciated!

demagogue on 2/2/2015 at 03:12

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Intel chips can handle quite a bit, but with limits.
I got an XPS 12, and I can play Dishonored pretty smoothly, but it defaulted to a low setting so the background objects are low poly and fuzzy. (Actually I didn't even try it at a higher setting yet, maybe it's better than I think.) Edit: A better example is Stalker. You can run that on the highish settings, and it looks awesome and plays great. So something like WoW should run fine.

The new broadwells means you get really long battery life too.

The XPS 12 has some issue with image-retention (the image stays a few seconds after you remove the source), my mouse freezes when I'm holding down a keyboard key, and other little annoying things, so check for things like that. The IR problem you can send in for a repair, and I'm hoping the mouse issue can be fixed with a driver update though.

Edit: Looked it up and the mouse-freezing is caused by the Synaptics palm-check. So I got that fixed, yay!

voodoo47 on 2/2/2015 at 16:08

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I'm pretty sure those words cannot be used in that particular order. unless it's sarcasm.

bikerdude on 2/2/2015 at 22:01

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* Great that makes things much easier from my perspective.
* They aren't the best places for laptops as they only offer generic one size fits all type laptops. In this instance PcSpecilist is the best place -

octavian on 3/2/2015 at 09:16

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I don't have any experience with SSHDs so I can't say. Which is why personally I would consider an SSD and one external drive. Or more. Depending of how you use your computers having a couple terabytes, or more, floating around/between your person/computers/other people may offset the advantages of a SSHD, which I'm sure exist, simply because you can't take the SSHD with you. Granted, the externals would be slow terabytes but portable. Pros and cons.

In terms of SSDs the biggest bang for you buck comes from the ~30-50 times faster random 4Ks, and that's most noticeable in the legs your OS gets. Faster gaming, that's a non-issue if you don't keep your games at the fragmented butt end of your HDD. Nothing is fast down there. Loading times, meh, here and there, no ingame performance gain. And for general use I doubt you'd need the sequential bitrate as it's pretty hard to hit that limit on an HDD even if you're trying, which is say ~5 times lower. Unless you're doing magical things like watching/recording uncompressed video at 1080p 60fps or other similarly marvelous activities. That will bottleneck a mechanical, sure. IMHO big SSDs are never worth the money unless you specifically need the high sequential bitrate.

I'd get the smallest SSD I can get by with for my OS and other bits that need an SSD (which ones? none, so 128 GB) and then I'd get a bunch of externals. Thinking that for the price of a 500GB EVO 850 I can buy three 1 TB USB 3.0 externals. And the first couple hundred GB of each of those drives are decent fast. And I'd put what I want read fastest in those first couple hundred GB. And yes, it's downhill from there and the last couple hundred GB are going to be slooooow. It does require a decent amount of micromanagement. Say you have just one HDD, it's half full, you want to install a game and your SSD is full. What then? That's partly the reason I'd get more, just so I can move things around. It sounds like a big pain in the butt and it is but it can give you a decent result if you're on a budget.

A big SSD for all your games, pictures, movies, music just doesn't make sense to me, personally. My reasoning is the simple-minded, mp3s are what, 40KB/s at the very best? FLAC? Well even my 6ch NIN SACD comes in at a measly 15MB/s bitrate. I'm not putting that on a ~500MB/s sequential SSD. I gladly give up something I can't even use to get more storage. Even my six year old battered external HDDs measure 30MB/s at their very worst and I'd be hard pressed to read that amount of data/s from them in any general use concievable scenario. Unless I'm copying to and from which is dead slow, of course.

That's my two cents at least, I'm sure somebody will say something if they think otherwise or I said something too obviously crazy. Just thinking out loud, maybe I give you an idea or something.