Decent laptop for $600-800?
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I'm looking for a general purpose laptop - something that can handle both CS:GO and Visual Studio. Because
I'm cheapskateI have very limited funds, price is the most important factor - but it has to have SSD, 3 hours battery life, and not choke to death when compiling large C++ codebase while watching YouTube. Ideally about $600, but if there's nothing good enough for that price, I can spend up to $800.Any recommendations?
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@Gąska said in Decent laptop for $600-800?:
I'm looking for a general purpose laptop
/me Nods, many in that price range are somewhat suitable for general things...
@Gąska said in Decent laptop for $600-800?:
Visual Studio
Oh. You're looking into the $1000 range then.
@Gąska said in Decent laptop for $600-800?:
has to have SSD
Oh yeah, those are going up in price nowadays...
@Gąska said in Decent laptop for $600-800?:
not choke to death when compiling large C++ codebase
So tons of memory and multi-core CPU...
@Gąska said in Decent laptop for $600-800?:
up to $800
Uh huh. We talking American dollars, right?
@Gąska said in Decent laptop for $600-800?:
Any recommendations?
Buy used?
At that price point you're going to be skinning everything and cutting corners and your hardware... Unless the scene has changed in the last few years anyways.
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@Gąska
Assuming you don't need the Windows Pro features (e.g. Domain Join), you could probably make do with a customized HP Envy 15" http://store.hp.com/us/en/ConfigureView?catalogId=10051&urlLangId=&langId=-1&storeId=10151&catEntryId=1450653&quantity=1Their configuration tool is coming up with $760 for 8GB of RAM and a 360GB SSD.
Pro is +70 on that, or there are some RAM increase options as well, but either of those are going to break your price range unless you can find a distributor that's running a better sale than HP store direct.
I'd imagine you could get something similar in the Dell XPS line as well.
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@Tsaukpaetra said in Decent laptop for $600-800?:
@Gąska said in Decent laptop for $600-800?:
Visual Studio
Oh. You're looking into the $1000 range then.
I have much more lenient definition of "work" than @blakeyrat. At my last workplace, they gave me HP Probook 6570b, and it was pretty comfortable for me (except for games, but then I never played games on work computer).
@Tsaukpaetra said in Decent laptop for $600-800?:
@Gąska said in Decent laptop for $600-800?:
not choke to death when compiling large C++ codebase
So tons of memory and multi-core CPU...
The "choke to death" was literal. Literally literal. If it doesn't BSODs/hangs up/goes out in smoke, it's enough. I can build $300 PC with only brand new parts that can handle VS and YouTube at once - surely it isn't much to ask for in mobile segment?
@Tsaukpaetra said in Decent laptop for $600-800?:
@Gąska said in Decent laptop for $600-800?:
Any recommendations?
Buy used?
Is it real advice? As in, is the probability of a laptop dying within a month after purchase low enough to actually consider used one?
@izzion said in Decent laptop for $600-800?:
@Gąska
Assuming you don't need the Windows Pro features (e.g. Domain Join), you could probably make do with a customized HP Envy 15" http://store.hp.com/us/en/ConfigureView?catalogId=10051&urlLangId=&langId=-1&storeId=10151&catEntryId=1450653&quantity=1I'll look into it.
Meanwhile, I've found this thing:
Can someone tell me if it's a good choice and why not?
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@Gąska said in Decent laptop for $600-800?:
As in, is the probability of a laptop dying within a month after purchase low enough to actually consider used one?
The most common thing to go out in a laptop is the hard drive and keyboard, so if you just swap that out when you get it you're typically golden (unless the previous owner otherwise abused the unit. Laptop, after all...)
@Gąska said in Decent laptop for $600-800?:
this thing:
Seems fair, I don't see anything immediately wrong with it.
On that note,
@Gąska said in Decent laptop for $600-800?:
I can build $300 PC with only brand new parts that can handle VS and YouTube at once
That sounds more economical. Get a beefy desktop, and then use your cheepo laptop to remote into it for the heavy stuff like Visual Studio. That way YouTube will be completely unhindered while your workhorse is doing the stuff on the side.
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@Gąska
Specs wise, it looks fine. I'm always a little leery of buying from pop-up 3rd party vendors on Amazon, especially with such severe Chinglish in their writeups, but assuming the laptop is legitimate (aka not stolen / counterfeit), your warranty support should be through Dell anyway so it doesn't reeeeeally matter if the reseller winds up being a little dodgy, as long as they sell you what they said they would.
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@Tsaukpaetra I would never buy a laptop if I didn't have to. But desktop PC is a horrible thing to carry around in buses, and you need a dedicated place in your home to install it.
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But desktop PC is a horrible thing to carry around in buses, and you need a dedicated place in your home to install it.
And that's the bigger version.
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@Gąska said in Decent laptop for $600-800?:
you need a dedicated place in your home to install it.
Mine's sitting next to my bed. The white noise is supposed to help me sleep at night.
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@coldandtired said in Decent laptop for $600-800?:
And that's the bigger version.
Ah, but it doesn't have place for dedicated graphics, CS:GO it probably not going to like the embedded Intel Gfx very much...
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@Tsaukpaetra I have the i5 NUC from 2015 (with Intel HD6000) and it plays TF2 fine.
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@coldandtired does it have a screen? Because you also need to carry the screen. And keyboard. And mouse. And mouse pad. And speakers. And power strip. And Ethernet cable long enough to reach the nearest socket, unless it has Wi-Fi built-in which it probably doesn't because it's not listed.
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@coldandtired said in Decent laptop for $600-800?:
@Tsaukpaetra I have the i5 NUC from 2015 (with Intel HD6000) and it plays TF2 fine.
Well it just goes to show you how outdated my hardware is...
I can't do the same on my i7-4500U with the GT 735M and get much better than about 5 FPS...
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@Tsaukpaetra my sister has i3-5005U and GF 920M, and it handles CS:GO at 100FPS. Maybe you forgot to switch on High Performance power plan?
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@Gąska said in Decent laptop for $600-800?:
Maybe you forgot to switch on High Performance power plan?
That actually makes it worse, 'cause then it's 16 FPS for a minute, then 2 FPS for five, then apparently it cools down enough and goes back to 15 FPS, and oscillates from there.
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@Tsaukpaetra I assume you're already using lowest settings and sub-native resolution?
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@Gąska said in Decent laptop for $600-800?:
@Tsaukpaetra I assume you're already using lowest settings and sub-native resolution?
It gets pretty good if I knock it down to 640x480!
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@Tsaukpaetra well, half of pro players use 800x600...
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@Gąska It has Wifi and Bluetooth built in. Leave one screen at work, hang it on the back of your TV at home. Ditto for keyboard and mouse. I've done it myself.
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@Gąska said in Decent laptop for $600-800?:
Meanwhile, I've found this thing:
Can someone tell me if it's a good choice and why not?
I have a similar Dell. The only thing I'd be aware of is 256Gb is not enough. I have 512, and don't even have music or videos on mine, and it's already filled up. Windows 10 and all the Visual Studio stuff, by itself, takes up a lot of disk space.
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@The_Quiet_One I've had 120GB SSD and 1TB HDD in my last PC, and I've never filled up the former despite having everything except games installed on it. I think I'll be fine. And if not, I can always buy additional HDD.
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You can also get something like this:
Dell Refurbished
Laptops Starting at $199 & Desktops $99. Buy Dell Refurbished Computers, Laptops, Desktops and more - Includes Dell Warranty.
0_1490575671165_Dell Refurbished Dell Latitude E7440 - Laptops.pdf
Comes out to $452.03 after tax and free shipping for me (using coupon SAVE45DELL).
I can't find the resolution info for the amazon one, but this one is 14.1" Full HD (1920 x 1080)
Personally I swore off Inspirons after my last laptop had a very bad touchpad. I ended up buying a latitude this time around and I'm very happy with it. I bought it from dell outlet, but it was NIB, I guess an unopened return.
I put in 1TB Samsung SSD and 16GB of RAM and i'm pretty happy with it so far. It cost me about $600 plus tax, but that was after about $300 in Amex credits.
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@dangeRuss thanks for the code! This gives me a bit more options.
Is the "refurbished" laptop guaranteed to work flawlessly? Are there some quirks wrt. warranty?
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@Gąska said in Decent laptop for $600-800?:
Is the "refurbished" laptop guaranteed to work flawlessly?
Generally more so than non refurbished. They go through more rigorous testing than the first time round to make sure whatever error is fixed. If I was buying a laptop I'd start off looking at refurbished
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Currently I'm looking at this thing:
https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834315742&ignorebbr=1
Opinions on i5-6200U?
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@Tsaukpaetra said in Decent laptop for $600-800?:
Buy used?
Or buy a refurbished unit. Most decent-size cities have at least one mom-and-pop computer store that sells refurb boxen whose prior owners were businesses. These machines have typically been sold to the store because the former owner procured the latest and greatest as a replacement, not because there's anything broken with them. The wife now has a refurb laptop from such a place, but with a fairly inexpensive upgrade to SSD (no fucking way will I ever use spinning rust as an OS disk again). It was maybe $350 all-in for something that would've cost at least as much brand-new, consumer-grade from a national chain.
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@Gąska
Stay away from Acer. You'll only have trouble with it.
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@asdf you can say that about any brand nowadays. Laptop market is a Minesweeper game with 1000x1000 board and 500,000 mines, where uncovering one square costs between $500 and $2000.
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@Gąska That's not entirely untrue, but I've had particularly bad experiences with Acer. Batteries, joints, fans etc. that all break 2 months after the warranty expired. Most of the time, you can tell the cheap quality of the components just by trying it out in the store (wobbly keyboard, cheap screen joints, noisy fans).
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For dev work, you really want an i7.
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@Magus from what I've seen, cheap mobile i7s are same as i5s (2 cores with HT), with slightly higher clock rate and slightly more L3 cache. Say, i5-6200U and i7-6500U - according to cpubenchmark.net, it has only 12% more points. Is it really that much difference?
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@Magus said in Decent laptop for $600-800?:
For dev work, you really want an i7.
Not necessarily. The i5 in my Surface is fine for compiling large C++ projects and playing Skyrim. Those numbers don't mean much anyway, since those product lines have been continued for a few years, which means that some older "i7"s are considerably slower than a modern "i5"s.
Also, some of those i7s get pretty hot after a while when used in a laptop, have to be clocked down and are then considerably slower than their i5 counterpart. The Surface Pro 3 had that problem, IIRC.
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@Gąska said in Decent laptop for $600-800?:
I can build $300 PC with only brand new parts that can handle VS and YouTube at once - surely it isn't much to ask for in mobile segment?
I echo the above sentiments of "look for a refurb". It'll be hard to hit the requirements for the budget.
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@Gąska
Acer power supplies tend to have the pin inside the laptop, making it easier to break if you pull a dumb and quickly pick up your laptop to move it without disconnecting the AC adapter. Also, they don't maintain a consistent power adapter model for all models, so it can be challenging to find the correct replacement part if necessary.By contrast, any modern HP will use one of two adapters (depending on whether it needs a 65W or 90W power draw), and the 90W adapter is compatible with 65W machines, so you can be guaranteed to work with a single model of replacement AC adapter. And the pin is inside the adapter, so less likely to break from sudden pluggus-interruptus, and much cheaper & easier to fix if you do manage to break it.
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@Gąska said in Decent laptop for $600-800?:
Is the "refurbished" laptop guaranteed to work flawlessly? Are there some quirks wrt. warranty?
Refurbs are almost always "Some idiot bought it then returned it because it was the wrong shade of blue, so we charged him 15% restocking fee, and are passing that savings on to you".
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@Gąska said in Decent laptop for $600-800?:
surely it isn't much to ask for in mobile segment?
yeah, it really is. laptops are super expensive for the performance you get.
most 2k$ laptops are outperformed by 500-700$ desktops of the same era.
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Cheapo Gaming Channel
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R3SEIS4BzRk
I wouldn't get anything lower that 2gb on the GPU front btw.
My MacBook has a nvidia 760GTX and 16gb of ram and runs every game I can on play on the Mac fine but the retina resolution you are looking at about 15fps. 1080 and most stuff works fine.
I wouldn't buy anything other that £800 it is all crap. The screens are crap, the spec if crap. I wouldn't bother.
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This one seems interesting:
Seems like the RAM might be limited to 8GB, and I'm not sure if you can swap out the hard drive, but if you can, a 1TB Samsung 850 Evo is about $325, so it's right around your $800 budget.
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@dangeRuss 8gb minimum is a piece of shit.
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@lucas1 said in Decent laptop for $600-800?:
@dangeRuss 8gb minimum is a piece of shit.
Shirley you mean maximum?
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@lucas1 laptops are piece of shit anyway, so what difference at this point does it make?
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@dangeRuss don't matter .. not enough. If you wanna VS at least 16gb.
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@Gąska yep. But unfortunately people need a portable workstation.
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@lucas1 I've been using VS 2008 on Athlon 2600+ with 2GB DDR just fine. My last PC had 12GB and it could handle VS 2015 with Skyrim running in background.
Am I the only one here who can live with projects loading 30 seconds?
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@Gąska Skyrim can run on my phone in the background. And yes 30 seconds is too long.
The point is don't buy crap. When I've bought a cheap laptop ... guess how I upgraded .. by buying a decent one.
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@lucas1 too long to be comfortable, or too long to be able to work with at all?
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@lucas1 said in Decent laptop for $600-800?:
The point is don't buy crap.
As I've said earlier, my current situation doesn't make desktop PC practical.
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@Gąska Depends how many projects are loaded by it is besides the point. I could load 40+ projects quickly but running that VS2013 and Spotify was too much for my old Core 2 Duo machine even when It was overclocked from 2 to ~ 4ghz. BTW the machine had an SSD back in those days.
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@lucas1 said in Decent laptop for $600-800?:
portable workstation.
Dell has those too...
Description Precision M3510 Date & Time: 3/28/2017 1:11:23 AM SYSTEM COMPONENTS Precision M3510 Qty 1 Dell Outlet Precision M3510 Windows 10 Pro Unit Price $759.00 Dell Outlet Precision M3510 740MT Shroud 08TV0 Label 0N84T Software 0P1H1 Shipping Material 22F28 Wave Systems Software 26YTJ Shipping Material 2FMH4 Software 2HF94 Information 33RD8 LCD Bezel Non-Touch with Camera and Microphone 36J4J Certified Refurbished 3E476 Software 417KX Non- Touch LCD Back Cover 4NN41 Service Software 4P84D No Fingerprint Reader and No Smart Card Reader (Contact and Contactless) Palmrest 5KFNN AMD FirePro W5130M 2GB GDDR5 6H6CP Software 767MJ Label 8CPFW Windows 10 Pro 8G8J6 Dell Power Manager 91PDM McAfee Security Center, 30 Day D02V6 8GB (2x4GB) 2133MHz DDR4 Non ECC Memory D6H21 Processor: Intel Core 6th Generation i5-6300HQ Processor (Quad Core, up to 3.20 GHz,6M Cache, 45W) FYH6M Information G07XH Information G5Y34 Service Software J0KR8 Information J94W8 Windows 64 Bit JJ8DK 4 Cell Primary Battery, 62W/Hr KHWXC Software M3GVR 128GB SATA Class 20 Solid State Drive M3TVF No Resource CD M4821 Software M5M36 Software N1W64 15.6inch FHD (1920x1080) Display N9PW1 Software NJW79 Performance Optimizer NRKJ1 Bracket P5Y8H Software P6XPR 125V Power Cord R609C 130W A/C Adapter, 3P RK893 Information T75C1 Intel Dual Band Wireless 8260 (802.11ac) W/ Bluetooth TJJRT Waves Maxx Audio V2M1P Label V74Y4 Information W753G Cable XC6HC Information Y6682 Internal Dual Pointing Keyboard (English) YJF8N Information YX1YP None Qty 1 Unit Price $0.00 PR M3510 : 3 Year Hardware Service with Onsite/In-Home Service After Remote Diagnosis (Included in Price) Qty 1 Unit Price $0.00 TOTAL: $759.00 Free shipping on all products only with Dell Outlet! Limited Supply! View Details Total Price Sub-total $759.00$759 (plus tax and maybe shipping).
has 8GB of ram, but can go up to 32.
Has an SSD (but only 128GB).
Also this system is from the future...
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This is an out of date config btw.
Amazon.com
