Lude Generation

My lad wants a new laptop for Chrimbo and will be giving his old laptop to his brother.

It’s been years since I’ve looked at computers and apparently he tells me that the Voodoo 2 8mb isn’t the coolest GPU on the street any more.

He currently has a HP G62-107sa (win 7, Intel i3 2.13ghz, Intel HD graphics) and this is what he will be giving to his brother.

We have a budget of £400/450 for a new laptop. It will be used for homework, surfing and so on, but ultimately he will be playing games on it. He doesn’t want a desktop (I appreciate he will get a better gaming pc for the money) as he does use it around the house and his mates sometimes all get together on their lappys.

Gaming wise, he wants it to be able to cope with Minecraft (with fraps recording and shaders, what ever that all means!) and games like Skyrim.

He has seen this http://www.pcworld.co.uk/gbuk/laptops-n ... 0-pdt.html which is an i5 2.6ghz (with a built in overclocker to 3.2), 4GB ram (we will upgrade to 8GB) and an intel HD4000 GPU (integrated).

I have spoken to him about whether an integrated GPU will be any good for a predominantly gaming laptop and he has told me that models with a dedicated GPU are £800. Apparently the Intel HD4000 is powerful and about as good as you can get when it comes to laptops at this price range.

Would appreciate any feedback from those who know about these things and/or any alternative suggestions that will fit his requirements.

Cheers

Only thing I would say is that Acer tend to have good specs, but the build quality is usually ... well ... completely rank. make sure you get some sort of extended warranty if you go for that.

Cheers Mr Lemon.

Would you say that the Acer is well specced for the money and is the GPU ok to runs stuff like Skyrim.

I take it the Acer is quite a jump up in spec compared to his current HP?

For the money the spec of the Acer is good, I'm not denying they give value for money in the spec vs price stakes! The biggest jump will be the processor, he's going from an i3 (entry level) to i5 (mid level) processor, and one that is clocked faster. So yeah, it should be able to play games. HOWEVER - while it may play Skyrim, I wouldn't be expecting to be able to ramp all the graphics up full etc. With integrated graphics the aim is generally to keep costs down and improve battery life, if it can handle games - that's generally a bonus.

Yeah, i think he appreciates it won't be Skyrim on max settings. His current laptop lags bad on Skyrim.

He plays things like Grid, NFS MW, Euro Truck Simulator 2 and so on, but these work ok on his current lappy so shouldn't be a problem.

Fair play - Skyrim is a beast of a game though!

I put the same post up on DW and somebody has recommended this -

http://www.pcworld.co.uk/gbuk/laptops-n ... a&istBid=t

and this

http://www.laptopsdirect.co.uk/Sony_Ci5 ... ffid=78888


What are your thoughts? I guess the HP looks the better of the two? Are refurbs OK?

Refurbs are totally fine, just check what warranty you'd get with it. I buy a lot from http://www.tier1online.com/ and the support they give for aftersales on refurbs is amazing.

The Sony has the advantage of a dedicated graphics card, but see if you can find a comparison between that card and the intel 4000HD if you can.

The refurbed HP has an AMD Radeon HD 7670M (2 GB DDR3) by the looks of things. Any good?

The Sony a NVIDIA GeForce GT 740M 1GB.

I'll see if i can find a benchmark site later and compare all 3