New laptop advice - general use and some gaming

Mancomb Seepgood

My Lenovo laptop is now 6 years old and has been giving me problems in relation to updates lately – freezing during startup after an update and forcing me to do a restore. Given how long it’s lasted me I have no major cause for complaint, but I was thinking that it may be time to bite the bullet and get a replacement.

I would use it for general web browsing, Kodi, some work using LibreOffice. I quite enjoy emulating older systems and would like to have a machine capable of running Dolphin reasonably well (for Gamecube games).I do enjoy gaming but would be happy if it could run games such as Skyrim or GTA V on medium settings – my main focus would be the likes of Civ and other strategy games. I’d like a 15.6 full HD screen and reasonably good build quality that would last a few years. Low weight isn’t such a huge requirement, I’ll mainly use it at home.

I was looking at this MSI at £599, any thoughts? I’d like to keep the cost below approx. €750:

https://www.saveonlaptops.co.uk/9S7-16J562-1673-MSI-GL62-7QF-1673UK_2066567.html

Mancomb Seepgood

Mancomb Seepgood wrote: »

My Lenovo laptop is now 6 years old and has been giving me problems in relation to updates lately – freezing during startup after an update and forcing me to do a restore. Given how long it’s lasted me I have no major cause for complaint, but I was thinking that it may be time to bite the bullet and get a replacement.

I would use it for general web browsing, Kodi, some work using LibreOffice. I quite enjoy emulating older systems and would like to have a machine capable of running Dolphin reasonably well (for Gamecube games).I do enjoy gaming but would be happy if it could run games such as Skyrim or GTA V on medium settings – my main focus would be the likes of Civ and other strategy games. I’d like a 15.6 full HD screen and reasonably good build quality that would last a few years. Low weight isn’t such a huge requirement, I’ll mainly use it at home.

I was looking at this MSI at £599, any thoughts? I’d like to keep the cost below approx. €750:

https://www.saveonlaptops.co.uk/9S7-16J562-1673-MSI-GL62-7QF-1673UK_2066567.html

that's not a bad deal for the money. all the basic stuff you mention will run fine. it's the requirement for gaming that pushes up the specs and therefore price of things. (except emulation which depends on the CPU more than the GPU. The cpu here would run dolphin fine)

you won't be getting a laptop with a better GPU e.g. 1050 or above for that price over in Europe at the moment.

it will run those games you mentioned fine. (recent and older AAA titles).
once you know it will struggle with new and forthcoming AAA games over the next couple of years. you could run them at 720p maybe but not above that.
if you're ok with that then it's not a bad option. although you'd probably want to put in an additional HDD for storage as the ssd is small (find one that fits in the optical drive tray)

other option would be to wait for this to be released if you were willing to go up to about 900 to 950 euro

https://www.cnet.com/uk/products/asus-vivobook-pro-15-n580/preview/

that would certainly be more future proofed in terms of longevity.

but really if you have the expectation of running upcoming AAA games at something like 1080p resolution over the next 2 to 3 years you'd be looking at getting a laptop with a 1050ti or 1060 GPU in it but that pushes the price up again.

TerrorFirmer

It's good for the money. The 960M is pretty capable, especially for games like you've mentioned. GTA V will run at 1080p mid-high settings at 60fps perfectly.

There are already Lenovo, Dell, etc laptops available with GTX1050 for €950-1K. The GTX960M is the best card below that, so really for €680 or so that MSI is a good deal.

There are also some sellers on Ebay selling 960M laptops for about €500-550 and some offer 12 month warranty, so there's that option also.

one more thing to check is the quality of the screen on whatever laptop you decide on.
www.notebookcheck.net cover most laptops and are pretty comprehensive.

Mancomb Seepgood

Thanks for the feedback.

From doing a little more digging the quality of the screen is a bit of a weak point but it should still be more than adequate for my needs as I'll be using it indoors on my lap or a desk.Good advice to on installing a hdd alongside the ssd,it doesn't take too long to fill 128gb.