Again, nothing remotely cutting edge, turn-based strategy, I have moved away from first-person shooters.
Ok tossing another out there, has a Nvidia fx card:
I think this one is pretty good, but it’s slightly over your budget and maybe you don’t have access to Micro Center.
Decent CPU. Decent GPU. Maybe a bit chunky. 512GB SSD is kind of small, but SSDs are cheap-ish and easy to upgrade down the road.
Simulpost, is that any better than the Lenovo I linked? Looks to be very similar.
The i7-13650HX is a tier above the Ryzen. If the open box doesn’t bother you, that’s probably the better deal.
It would bother me personally. I assume open boxes are returns over dead pixels, but maybe I’m missing out as a result.
OK thanks their web site shows several in stock in the stores here.
I agree. The 13650HX is faster.
Anecdotally, I’ve owned many open-box laptops, including several from Best Buy and Microcenter, and they’ve all been fine. No dead pixels or other issues. They’re actually better quality controlled because they’ve been tested at least three times: once by the manufacturer, once by the person who didn’t like it for whatever reason (but it wasn’t completely broken, or the store would’ve junked it), and then another time by the reseller who accepted the return and then at least had to reformat it if not refurbish and re-test it. Best Best also has a good return policy on them, so if you don’t like anything about it, you can bring it back within a few weeks or so. They’re usually fantastic deals — I prefer to buy open-box whenever possible — and they will sometimes have special in-store-only open box deals too. Worth asking about.
Sometimes people buy gaming laptops and then return them for design reasons, as in “this laptop was too big/heavy/loud/hot for me”, not because there was anything “broken” per se.
Which brings us back to:
What are the actual titles of the games you mostly like to play? Genre alone isn’t super predictive of performance requirements… there are some shooters that can run on potatoes and some turn-based games that are quite demanding, especially once you’re a few hundred turns in and there are units everywhere.
The reason I ask is because it would help you make a better purchase decision if you could figure out whether you actually need a discrete graphics card (a separate GeForce or Radeon inside) instead of one integrated into the CPU. The integrated stuff has come a long way, and can play older or less demanding games pretty well. They are cheaper, quieter, and cooler, and would also give you better battery life.
But if you don’t care about any of that, then I would default to a discrete graphics card just to be safe.
Do you mean the “Copilot PC” crap? Unfortunately that’s in all new Windows 11 PCs, even the ones that aren’t marketed as such. Thankfully, most of it can be disabled with some effort. I just got a new gaming PC too and spent half an hour turning off all the AI spam… Microsoft is REALLY annoying about it, but mostly you can turn it off with only the occasional nag to re-enable it (still, ugh).
If you don’t want to deal with that, you would have to leave the Windows ecosystem and go with something like the Steam Deck / Lenovo Go route (handhelds with SteamOS instead of Windows). They are much less powerful than a proper gaming laptop, though.
I am currently working on a mega-scenario for this title:
Strategic Command WWII: War in Europe
The game engine in question is now almost a decade old, note. Because of the size of the map I need a lot of RAM here (16K). I just tried to push its performance envelope last night, and it passed with flying colors. But can’t hurt to have the power on demand if another newer title gets my attention, as in ones that require more oomph may be an option going forward.
I’ll go to BB today and see if they have or can order the Lenovo which I found there and linked above.
That particular game (looks fun!) is a 2D game that doesn’t have 3D graphics, so it won’t benefit from a graphics card (either discrete or integrated) at all. It needs a whopping 8 MB of graphics memory (!). Not a typo… that’s 8 megabytes. Even by 2016 standards, that’s tiny.
However, this still stands:
Exactly. That’s especially true if you ever want to branch out into recent 4X, RTS, or military sim games, many of which are in 3D now.
It doesn’t have to be a Lenovo in particular, IMO. There’s nothing special about Lenovo gaming laptops (their business Thinkpads ARE special for various reasons not relevant here).
If they don’t have that exact one on hand, look for anything around $800 that has:
- An SSD, at least 512 GB, but ideally 1 TB+. Do NOT get one that still has a mechanical hard drive (if they still even make those)
- A GeForce RTX 4050+, but ideally a 5050+
- At least 16 GB of RAM
The link I provided earlier filters it down to pretty much that criteria, and you can check if any are in stock at your local store: Gaming laptops under $850 at Best Buy. You can reserve it for pickup if so, check it out there, and return it on the spot if you don’t like it.
Pretty much any CPU you’ll get paired to the other requirements will be sufficient. The rest will come down to how much you like the build quality, keyboard, and screen while you’re there. Ask about open-box units too, if you’re ok with that. Sometimes they keep them in the back.
And if you have a Microcenter nearby, check that out too. Their Powerspec line of store-brand gaming computers are excellent values for the money — often beating big-name manufacturers by a lot, especially if you can find any open-box ones. And they support them in-house too, which means you can bring them in for onsite tech support.
PS: A reason to choose a RTX graphics card in particular, as opposed to an older Nvidia GTX or an AMD Radeon card, is something called Nvidia DLSS. It’s an machine-learning* hardware upsampling technique that can drastically improve gaming performance at minimal loss to visual quality. It is especially helpful on lower-end gaming systems, where turning it on can be the difference between “this is unplayably laggy” and “hey, this isn’t bad at all”.
AMD and Intel have their own similar techs (FSR and Intel XeSS), but for now at least, they are still playing catch-up and Nvidia’s is currently a bit better and more widely supported in games.
It won’t be available on older titles, but it is very common in recent-ish 3D ones (the last 4-ish years) and can make a big difference.
(*Don’t let the Copilot spam turn you off this. It’s not a Microsoft thing, but something invented by Nvidia graphics researchers. Not all “AI” is the same, and in this case it’s a similar but different technology that really helps in gaming. It also predates ChatGPT and Copilot and such.)
OK got it thanks @Reply. 
Got the next Lenovo a step above the one(s) upthread , $1099:
GIGABYTE - GAMING A16 - 16" 165Hz 1920x1200 WUXGA Intel Core i7-13620H - 1TB SSD - 32GB DDR5 RAM - GeForce RTX 5060 - Black Steel
I don’t know much about laptop hardware. I do know that the laptop version of a graphics card is definitely less powerful than the desktop version of the same card. I think they’re something like half to 2/3rds as powerful. Something to note if you look at performance benchmarks – if you look at how a game performs with a desktop 5070 will probably be close to twice as fast as a laptop 5070. That said, they can be perfectly competent with non-demanding games or even demanding games on less than the best settings.
Same thing applies to laptop CPUs I suppose.
I will also say it’s essential to get an SSD in a laptop. I’d go so far as to take a 250gb SSD over a 2+ TB mechanical drive. The performance difference is night and day and I don’t even know why they’d make laptops with mechanical drives anymore or if they even do.
You want something for gaming with a fairly robust cooling system, which usually means bigger and heavier. I don’t really know anything about specific brands or anything like that.
That sounds like a pretty decent all-rounder!
Does anyone know what happened to 5.1 PC gaming speakers (the kind that takes multiple stereo-in cables)? They used to be ubiquitous back in the 90s and 2000s, but now I only see two left, from Logitech and SteelSeries. All the other 5.1 sound systems I could find seem to be for TVs, with only HDMI ports and not the “traditional” 3.5mm audio-in that PCs like to use for gaming. Even optical/Toslink seems obsolete now.
Is this because you can just use the HDMI soundbars with Windows (even if the PC doesn’t have ARC/eARC and connects to a monitor via DisplayPort)? Can you just plug it into the graphic card’s HDMI port and use it only for audio while having the video separately sent to DisplayPort?
Or did everyone move to headphones instead? I’ve tried various virtual surround sound solutions, including Aureal A3D back in the day, Windows Sonic, and Dolby Atmos for Headphones. Maybe I have weird ears, but none of them sound anywhere as realistic as having real rear speakers.
I happened to have a pair of studio monitor speakers sitting around and I managed to fake a quadraphonic setup by plugging them into the rear L/R 3.5mm audio port of my motherboard. Then connected my cheap soundbar to the front L/R 3.5mm port. It works, but now the rears sound so much better than the front, lol — I didn’t realize how good the studio monitors would be for gaming.
But that setup has various small issues… it’s missing the center channel, for one, and a subwoofer (which I don’t really care about). More annoyingly, I now have two independent volume controls. Maybe there’s an USB volume dial that can do it in software…
I’d actually be quite happy with a 4.0 setup, I think. Contemplating just buying another pair of the same studio monitors, which is much cheaper than a real PC-focused 5.1 system (like the SteelSeries Arena 9 or the Logitech Z906). Is that a good idea?
But what happened to the 5.1 systems… why are they so rare now? And 7.1s seem even rarer.
On the other hand, 5.1.4 speakers are a thing now (with upward-firing tweeters for Dolby Atmos height): https://www.monoprice.com/product?p_id=33832 But I’m not sure Windows and games would support that (it doesn’t even seem to have any input ports… maybe needs an amp with stereo wire outputs?). If they did, it would be great for shooters with overhead aircraft.