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"Decent" gaming laptop / cooling question

3K views 10 replies 5 participants last post by  Masterchiefxx17 
#1 ·
Hi.

I need to purchase a somewhat "good" laptop for gaming purposes. My needs are not particularly high, but I'm having a hard time finding info on which GPU I should shoot for.

To be precise, I definitely must be able to run one game in particular, which is Age of Empires II HD (with associated Steam running in the background), which shouldn't take too much resources to run, but I'd also like to be able to run PCSX2 on it. The problem is, I know that, for example, my desktop Nvidia GTX 670 is good for it, but I can't find the "equivalent" of the GTX 670 for laptops. I suspect the price will be too high for me anyway, but long story short, is there some sort of table out there that lists laptop GPUs performance on various games, and maybe also a table that shows us some comparisons between laptop GPUs and desktop GPUs?

On a related note, my laptops often have cooling issues, middle-to-long term. What can I do to improve the cooling of a laptop in a significant way, and what can I do to prevent it from having overheating issues? During the last months of my last laptop I tried using one of those "fan pads", and didn't really notice much improvement; then I had to resort to laying it down on the monitor's back (!) instead of on the keyboard's back because this would dissipate more heat...needless to say, if I'm going to invest into a somewhat decent laptop I'd like to keep it in better shape than my last one.

I also heard that there are some brands of laptops that are more or less notorious for having dust accumulation/overheating issues: is there anything I should look out for?

Thanks.
 
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#2 ·
if you really must have a laptop for gaming then you definetly need a cooling mat and you must use it on a flat surface such as a desk.

secondly to get a really decent gaming laptop you are going to have spend quite a bit of cash around 1k or more. FYI you could build a better desktop for a few hundred less.
 
#4 · (Edited)
I need it to be a laptop, since all in all it's going to cost me less than a desktop anyway - with the prices we have in my country I can't get anything half good for less than 700€ (actual "good" starts from 1,100€), to which I still need to add mouse, keyboard, monitor, and an UPS since I'd use it mostly in summer where air conditioners will inevitably cause a few black-outs. Sure the desktop solution would be better, but for other reasons as well I still prefer a laptop.

I might use it in class sometimes, but that'll hardly happen tbh, I'm more of an old-school pen and paper guy. If that question was meant to investigate battery durability, it's virtually a non-issue for me (I'll probably kill the battery by keeping it always plugged in anyway. As long as it can last long enough to let me shut it down manually in case of a black-out, it's good enough for me).

Budget is theoretically anything between 600 and 1,000€ top. I'm fairly sure I can get a laptop good enough to run AoE 2 for even less than 600€, but I like to overshoot the requirements so that hopefully it'll still be good even when it'll start to lose some of its performance (plus I like to multitask a bit). Whether or not I'll make a bigger investment (1,000 vs 600) depends solely on whether or not I can get a significantly better gaming experience with it, which in my case is mostly based on whether or not I can run PS1 and PS2 emulators with good results (a half-arsed compromise is not worth 400€ since I wouldn't use it anyway).

Worst case scenario I can always bring my PS3 along with this laptop on holidays, and let it run the old PSX/2 games: cheaper solution, but also a luggage problem when travelling. Hence my dilemma lol

Thanks for the answers. Any cooling mat you would advise in particular?
 
#7 ·
I was thinking of buying at a local store (a chain called MediaWorld). I know online you can sometimes find better deals, but since we're necessarily talking of pre-assembled stuff it's not that common to find really good deals that are worth sacrificing easier tech support if needed.

I took a look at the store a couple of days ago, and I found some decent laptops within the "three-digits" range (<1,000€). In particular, I found one going for 900€ with an 850m GPU, 16GB RAM, i7, which seemed quite nice to me (I actually expected i7 to go for much higher prices). However, for much lower prices (600€) I could also find i7 with 820m and 12 GB RAM.

Thing is, I still don't know how much of a difference there is between 820m and 850m: I couldn't find one of those classic benchmark data/tables that you can always find with desktop GPUs (those that list FPS for mainstream games on different settings and compare them between similar cards), and the best I can find seems to be empirical data on YouTube where people play some popular games on either card, but they don't really show FPS counters anywhere; that, and sites comparing 820m vs 850m just to tell me that 850m is slightly better lol

I also found some "scores" for either card, and it seems that the 820m is in fact quite crappy (<6/10), while 850m is just slightly better (<7/10), but nothing groundbreaking.

So once again, my problem now is that I don't know if that minimum score improvement is worth 300€ (maybe PCSX2 would lag with the 820m but play just fine with 850m, or maybe 820m would be able to run it just fine, or maybe even 850m would not be enough; first case I would go for the 850m, but in the second and third scenario there would be no point for me to spend more and get basically the same performance).

Also, on an unrelated note, does it take more power/resources, or does it cause more heat or "strain" in any way, if instead of using the laptop on its regular screen I instead send the output image to an external monitor by using an HDMI cable? I'm asking because I'd like to know if the monitor size should be an issue (if I can just send the signal to an external monitor of my choice without overloading the laptop then I can just get a smaller monitor; otherwise that might be another factor too).
 
#8 · (Edited)
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