• Buying a college laptop ($1300 ish max), looking for help
    6 replies, posted
Hello, so I'm trying to find a good laptop for the next four years. I intend to do a lot of programming on it, for textual and graphical (XNA, Unity, etc), as well as some photo-shopping and video games. Would you mind critiquing my top choice? [url]http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=1949015&CatId=17[/url] Between the SSD, the light weight, good battery life and pretty decent integrated graphics, it seems ideal, unless you guys know of an equivalent for less. Any help would be appreciated.
[QUOTE=DoctorSalt;37163030]Hello, so I'm trying to find a good laptop for the next four years. I intend to do a lot of programming on it, for textual and graphical (XNA, Unity, etc), as well as some photo-shopping and video games. Would you mind critiquing my top choice? [url]http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=1949015&CatId=17[/url] Between the SSD, the light weight, good battery life and pretty decent integrated graphics, it seems ideal, unless you guys know of an equivalent for less. Any help would be appreciated.[/QUOTE] You're going to have a hard time getting even an acceptable frame rate with an onboard graphics card for video games, rendering, graphics, you name it. It's mostly because onboard graphics cards tend to only be designed to be able to handle 2D applications on the desktop. However, if you get a laptop with a graphics card, then your battery life turns to shit. As in, if you intend to use your laptop in high performance mode for over an hour you better have an outlet nearby.
[url]http://www.sagernotebook.com/index.php?page=products[/url]
Additional ideas: As far as video gaming goes, it doesn't need to be top of the line. If it handles L4D2, Dungeon Defenders, Splinter Cell Conviction etc on pretty good settings I'll be fine (Though I suppose Xna and Unity will be more demanding). My friend has that laptop and says he can max out TF2. I'm not sure if that'll be enough or not.
If you use that whole $1300 budget, you can get something pretty good. i7, 670m, 16gb ram, maybe even a ssd if you wanted.
Thanks so much guys! I've decided to go with this Sager with an Intel Core i7-3610QM, GTX 660M, 8 Gigs of ram and a 500 GB/4 GB harddrive/SSD hybrid.
Good buy, and you can always install a ssd yourself later on if you wanted, there should be an open bay or two.
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