Now when I say a gaming laptop, let me be clear; I am not much into ultra high graphic FPS games with names like “Call of Modern Warfare: Batllefield Warfighter XVII.” My games of choice are strategy games like Civ, and I’ll play PRadix games and Total war too. Sure, the odd shooter is good. Loved Bioshock.
My budget’s 900-1200 bucks so I am looking for bang for buck. Some specific questions:
Will AMD chips do as well as Intel?
How important is it to have an nVidia orATI graphics card and not Intel onboard graphics?
Incidentally the computer will probably be usually plugged into a monitor so a massive screen is not a major requirement.
For laptops, energy efficiency is at a premium, if only because of thermal throttling. AMD tends to do badly here. The general consensus is that Intel is the no-brainer even for desktops so for laptops, it’s very difficult to believe it would be the right choice. The new 400 series AMD GPUs promise to solve that but it would be wise to wait until the AMD GPU gaming laptop reviews are in.
Actually, it seems that you won’t really have to choose between AMD/Intel and AMD/Nvidia. On Newegg, there are 242 Nvidia laptops and 2 AMD GPU laptops. Then there are 443 Intel laptops and 2 AMD CPU laptops.
Intel onboard graphics can be good enough for many games. You’d have to look at benchmarks for the Intel integrated graphics to see if that’s good enough for you. From what I’ve seen, for modern games, you’re likely looking at 720p, low settings, 30fps at most even on the best i7 for a game like Bioshock Infinite.
If you must have a gaming laptop rather than a small form PC you can lug around and do not want to wait until the new generation mobile GPUs become available, a laptop with 950M or 960M seems like a good idea. Something like this: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960M,NVIDIA GeForce GTX 950M,New,$1000 - $1250,$1250 - $1500,128 GB,256 GB Gaming Laptops | Newegg.ca
I’ve had good experience with Asus G-series laptops. This model in particular probably has the best CPU/GPU/Ram specs for its price. Having gsync built in is a big plus - it makes the experience more fluid at variable/lower framerates.
This one is the same price and slightly newer. It has a 128GB SSD and a 1TB drive. The CPU is a touch newer/faster/more power efficient, the GPU is a moderate downgrade. No gsync. 2 pounds lighter.
If you don’t mind turning down settings on more intensive games, the latter is probably the slightly better overall experience.
We just got a new generation of video cards on a smaller process which means faster performance and less heat and energy uses. I don’t know how long it’s going to take for laptop GPUs from this generation to show up. But something to keep in mind if you’ve got some time to wait.
Intel integrated graphics is fine for primitive games but not adequate for blockbuster AAA type games. You mention not being into big graphics blockbusters, but mention total war, which tend to be pretty intensive. If you want a gaming laptop, the GPU is pretty much the main part.
I didn’t look around too much, but you’re basically looking for something with a 960M through 980M GPU, an intel 47xx or 67xx CPU, and at least 8GB of ram although 16GB is popular. SSD + large slow drive combo is preferable.
Your requirements are pretty light. Civ 5 (and soon Civ 6) don’t take a lot of horsepower to display. Almost any semi-decent machine will be able to run those, assuming at least an i5 processor (though I would go for i7 just to future-proof a little bit).
Fortunately, now’s the time to buy anything with a graphics card in it now that Nvidia has released their brand new models (the 1080 and the 1070). That means anything with the old models (the 980/970) should have dropped in price.
To answer your questions directly:
Like the difference between Nvidia and ATI video cards, Intel and AMD seem to flip back and forth every generation of chip. This time around, it’s Intel that has the better chip.
An onboard graphics card uses the onboard processor to show the video. A separate card has a separate chip dedicated solely to generating graphics. As a rule, the the separate card runs better and faster.
All that said, I would highly recommend a desktop PC over a laptop. “Gaming laptop” isn’t quite the contradiction in terms it once was, but I still laugh a little whenever I hear the term. Desktop machines aren’t as portable, but I do love that if something goes wrong, I can just pop open the case and replace the faulty component. And if you’re going to be sitting at a desk with the machine hooked up to a monitor anyway …
I’m going to second this. I went the gaming laptop route a decade ago and I really regret it. It went outdated for gaming pretty quick, and it was too bulky to transport around like a laptop regularly. For your budget you could easily build a high quality desktop machine and buy a cheap Chromebook.
Gaming laptops are fine if you actually need a laptop. Desktops are obviously better performance for the money if you don’t, but there’s nothing crippling about a well designed laptop. They’re fine.
Or, an even better idea, without using ChromeOS (which I really dislike): build yourself a nice, beefy, high power desktop that can run anything and everything (including all the modern games), and for portable use, buy a cheap Windows 7 laptop off eBay. There’s plenty of laptops out there, and most of them are good 'uns.
If you’re looking for the most “bang for buck” in a custom laptop, you should take a good long look at Clevo/Sager. It’s exactly their niche. They are fairly obscure but have a good reputation and are good machines. I’ve bought a couple laptops from them and I plan on buying another one when the time comes around again.
Starting around $950 you get a 6th generation i7-6700HQ, discrete graphics (Nvidia GTX 950M or 960M and up), 8GB RAM, a 1TB HDD, and there are always a ton of customization options.
Good news is DVI and HDMI are essentially the same video format so you won’t see any degradation by converting to DVI from HDMI. However, there are two gotchas here:
HDMI supports up to 8-channel audio. DVI is video only.
Not all DVI cables support HDCP copy protection as standard, so you might have some issues playing Blue-ray videos and some other HD content.
The lack of audio is no great loss, I’d use alternative audit devices anyway. The current availability and arrangement of devices in the home is such that it is unlikely this computer will ever be used to stream media to a TV or entertainment system.