I’m a fan of Sager laptops. They’re a custom laptop maker that is actually the OEM for a lot of boutique vendors who buy their machines, do a little tinkering with them (or not), then slap their logo badge on the front and sell it.
I’m typing this on a Sager laptop right now that I bought circa 2019 (17.3", Intel i78750H, GTX 1070) that cost me close to $2k new, but equivalent performance today would be well within the budget here. It happily runs Hitman 3 and Sniper Elite 5 without complaint on High graphics settings. The laptop 1070 has never failed to impress me since I’ve had this thing. It’s not even my main computer at home but I still use it because it’s portable and been so reliable. This one is actually my 2nd Sager machine (other one is about 10 years old, that I travel with) and they’re both still running just fine. Never had a major issue with either that wasn’t my own fault.
Truth be told, my gaming laptop is big to be comfy to read email and news over breakfast. I often use my work laptop for that, though. It means I’m logged in a little early if anyone wants to im me, and i get through my email, and read the SDMB before i really start my day. My work laptop (owned by my employer) is about the same size as my smaller laptop.
Not a bad looking pick. The i7 will do very well and the (mobile) 4070 isn’t a slouch, especially since it’s running a 1080p screen. I’d say 1080 is fine for a 15.6" screen and the 144MHz refresh rate will make it look very smooth.
Slight downside is a single m.2 slot which is taken up by a 1TB SSD. If he wants to upgrade to a larger drive later, it’ll require swapping out the existing drive and 1TB isn’t a ton of storage if he’s going to be installing games (and probably holding on to a few choice titles for playing with friends).
Do you live near a Micro Center? Definitely worth seeing if they have one on display and how he feels about the screen,. keyboard, etc in person.
That does look nice. Mine is also an MSI, and it seems fine to me. Not like I have much to compare it to, but other than the heating and power issues I brought up earlier (runs hot and needs to stay plugged in) no red flags come to mind.
EDIT: Actually, I do remember one annoyance. The USB ports are too close together, so when I plug a mouse into it, I can’t plug anything into the other USB port on that side. It has two ports on each side, meaning I can pretty much only use a grand total of two ports, one on each side.
That doesn’t really present a problem very often, but I always plug in a mouse, and then if I need to plug in a USB stick for any reason, it’s starting to feel tight.
I did some poking around for pre-builts, and also tinkered in pcpartpicker. The best I could come up with for build-your-own was $1350 before monitor, which would add another $200 to $300. Also it was all AMD running on the older AM4 platform, meaning DDR4. That isn’t exactly cutting-edge modern like that MSI laptop. Switching the CPU to Intel by itself is the same price but the motherboards are more expensive, and switching the GPU to Nvidia is more expensive all by itself.
The best pre-builts I could find in the price range (given that at least $200 would have to be budgeted for the monitor) had video cards in the 3060 to 3070 range. Google says a laptop 4070 is roughly equivalent to a desktop 3070, so that laptop is looking quite nice compared to any desktop alternative I could find. Then again, it was essentially a cursory check. I didn’t go hard on the research. But still.
you know, I recently bought a 4TB drive, because… yeah. But that still looks so bizarre. A terrabyte. That was an imaginary huge amount of storage when I was younger.
Hah, yeah. I remember thinking “This 500 MB drive should last me forever!” back in the day.
1TB isn’t even bad, it’s just that it’s the only drive. So, in addition to the stuff he’ll want to put on there, it’ll house his Windows OS and all the assorted flotsam that comes with owning a computer: temp files, caches images from the web, saved memes, and so on. Down the line, he can replace it but that’ll involve more hassle (reinstalling OS, etc) than just supplementing it. It’s not a dealbreaker but it’s the first thing I thought about as a tick in the negatives column.