Well, I'll probably be doing a year of voluntary work in Turkey, promoting intercultural learning and stuff. That means I'll have to leave my beloved gaming rig (it's old and weezing anyway) back. I own an even older netbook now, but it has like 2 hours battery life without WiFi and can run Dredmor, but basically nothing else. Well, I think I want a bit more for a laptop, since it will be my PC replacement! What I need: Decent battery life, enough to last through a Workshop (2-3 hours). Portability - I'll be travelling with that thing quite a bit, mostly in Ankara, but also in the rest of Turkey sometimes. Some power behind it - I like to game, and I like games with some eyecandy at least. DoD and FTL will run everywhere, but I'd like to have some fun with slightly more demanding titles as well - probably Borderlands, Fallout, Trackmania... This is optional, but would be nice. An optical drive is neat, since you never know if you'll have fast internet, and I assume movies & games are sold somewhere As for the screen, I think most of the laptop screens in that budget are the same TN 1366x768, which is ok. If anyone knows an exception I'd love to hear about it, since I like decent screens. I don't know much about laptops since I never saw the need for a real one and I have the netbook mostly when visiting my parents, which isn't often. I hope some of you can enlighten me Route one would be getting something a bit bigger and more powerful, able to run stuff like Borderlands 2 and possibly Battlefield, but I don't think I'll be getting this. It's a lot more pricey, battery life suffers a lot more and it's quite a bit heavier. Route 2 would be a smaller notebook, probably 13.3 inches or something, with enough power to run older games (and perhaps CE with 5 fps ), but still light enough to carry around a lot and with a decent battery life. I'd take one with an optical drive, since Turkey sounds like the place where you need one. Route 3, as suggested by Kamismo, would be getting a cheap Ultrabook, possibly with a dedicated GPU. Nice, portable and with awesome battery life, biggest problem here is probably the price. Category 3 would be something like this. I can get that one for about 600€ in Germany, which is in the higher range of my budget. However, I can get a pretty decent Lenovo for 560€, namely the Lenovo ThinkPad Edge E535 with the A8-4500M processor, which would give me plenty of power for most games, it has a Radeon 7670M integrated, which should be decent for most games. It's a 15 inch one with optical drive, and the RAM can be accessed so I could easily upgrade it. Haven't found any decent review in English, sorry. Lenovo also makes good keyboards, so this sounds like a deal to me. I haven't found anything with a decent price point and portability in category one, does someone know anything? Also of note, I live in Germany, so specific store offers won't be very helpful
IBM laptops are the best in my never humble opinion. They are often more expensive, but they cost more because they are awesome. Note that regardless of the number of the GPU model, if it is in a laptop it is less than half as potent as any other model in the same line of GPU for desktops. This is a power concern. They are often underclocked and unable to dissipate even the reduced heat they generate in the laptop case, so they are inferior all around aside from battery life. 7670 in a desktop will work full settings and scrape by. But medium settings will be more than playable. The "same" 7670 in a laptop will barely scrape by on low settings. I wish I were kidding. It is mostly a marketing trick. They take the chipsets that barely work and rig them with custom firmware so they never push it enough to fail. The same GPU would fail in a desktop PC since the power supplied to it is so much more. (More power = more heat and higher chance to fail.) I suggest you try playing a game you know of on one of the systems you want to buy. If it works well enough on medium or better, then you are set. If not, then you know to continue looking. Put some thought into the fact that portability negates potency. Good luck.
Yeah, I'm sadly aware of that. The model I mentioned (Lenovo) has an integrated GPU as well, so I'll only need the "dedicated" one if I do boot up a game. I don't have high hopes for good settings, I just want to play Borderlands or TF 2 with friends at times, and for that the M GPUs should hopefully be enough if I lower the settings to minimum. As for IBM: Yep, they kicked ass, emphasis on past tense. They sold their laptop branch to Lenovo some years ago, and Lenovo has awesome ThinkPads in the higher classes, the one I posted is a ThinkPad only in name. If I could I'd obviously get something better, but I really only need it for a year, but I'll need it a lot during that time.
My dad uses a lenovo for work and it has crazy battery life - like 8 hours after 2 years - but performance correlating to that, lol.
