Need some advice!

troyzer

Hi there!
Looking for some advice on a laptop (yet another thread). I'm currently using a complete piece of crap Compaq from a few years ago and it's my 21st coming up in December. My parents said I've got a budget of around 1,000, maybe 1,100 If I find something spectacular. I'm looking for an all purpose device that won't stumble with browsing, editing, movies, work etc but also for gaming.

I'm aware that the second gaming is mentioned, desktops are the way to go. But I'm a student and move around a lot so I need the laptop. That and the fact that I have my PS4 pre order down. As far as gaming goes, when it comes to PC I play strategy games exclusively. Command and Conquer, Civilisation, Empire Earth etc. But my true love is Total War. I've always wanted a laptop that can play all of the Total War games. As it stands I'm struggling to run Medieval 2 Total War on the lowest settings and it regularly crashes. I realise that for 1,000 euro the hardware I can get is limited. But I'm not looking for a beast that's capable of handling Battlefield 4 on Ultra at 120fps and all that crap. I could be wrong, but I imagine that the Total War games are a bit easier to tame with limited hardware.

I'm fairly tech savvy so throw all the details and specs you can at me, I want to be very well informed when I make a decision about what to get. So far I'm looking at two major candidates: the Dell Inspiron 17r SE and the Sony Vaio F15. I'm not entirely sure what either will cost because both of them have student rates applied to them and there are constantly deals and free **** thrown in. That and the fact that the Vaio I was looking at is configurable to my specs. But basically as it stands with no student discount the Dell is just under 1,100 and so is the Vaio that I've put together (slightly cheaper).
http://www.dell.com/ie/p/inspiron-17r-se-7720/pd

Here are the specs for the Dell, it'd be the first one by the way. I have no interest in a Blu Ray player and 1TB is enough storage for me, I've already got a 2TB external I won in a competition a while ago.

As I said, the Vaio is customised so I can't post a link. The webpage is also down for maintenance for some reason. But I've gotten rid of the touchscreen on it to save 100 euro. It has an i7-3537U with 12GB of RAM, 1TB of storage, a full HD 15.5" display, an 8GB SSD Cache, Nvidia 735/740GTm (I'm not sure which because the page is down like I said).

So basically the Dell has a bigger screen, a much more powerful processor, a very nice 32GB SSD secondary drive. The Vaio as far as I can tell has more RAM for the price (although I know this is easily upgradable), a better GPU and it's lighter and much more stylish. They both have the same storage and both are full HD, although the Vaio would obviously look better considering it's size. Both are running Windows 8 and both have 2GB of dedicated GDDR5 graphics memory.

So my question is which is better for what I want? I know that the Dell has a far more powerful CPU (or is it?). But will this be limited by a mediocre GPU? The opposite goes for the Vaio. I'm not looking to play this Total War games on ultra settings, but of course I want the best possible performance. That'll also future proof me against later releases because laptops are much harder to upgrade than desktops.

Other than the bare minimum specs, I don't know which laptop is easily or more cheaply upgraded. Any help is welcome!
I'm open to other makes and models that are around the same price. I'm also somewhat open to getting a laptop built to spec. Although I've never put one together myself so I'd have to factor in the cost of assembly if I was to go down that road.

Please help me out! I have plenty of time before December and I'm well aware that there could be millions of developments in the laptop world that will make these models obsolete or even phased out but I still want to have a model to steer towards.

Thanks! Long post over!

Torqay

The Dell has the far more powerful CPU indeed, the dual core Core i7 ULV is a glorified Core i5 processor and no match for a quad Core i7. Also, the GT 650M is actually a good bit faster than the GT 740M. That "very nice 32GB SSD secondary drive" is nothing but a write cache for the platter hard disk drive and it won't show up as a drive.

With a budget of €1,100 I'd rather have a look at PC Specialist, you'll get a better deal there. For example, the new 17" Optimus V with the new Haswell Core i7 in the following configuration costs €1,110:



The 15" version is €50 cheaper in the same configuration. The Optimus series has two HDD bays... if you want to add a real SSD.

And here some benchmarks:

troyzer

Torqay wrote: »

The Dell has the far more powerful CPU indeed, the dual core Core i7 ULV is a glorified Core i5 processor and no match for a quad Core i7. Also, the GT 650M is actually a good bit faster than the GT 740M. That "very nice 32GB SSD secondary drive" is nothing but a write cache for the platter hard disk drive and it won't show up as a drive.

With a budget of €1,100 I'd rather have a look at PC Specialist, you'll get a better deal there. For example, the new 17" Optimus V with the new Haswell Core i7 in the following configuration costs €1,110:



The 15" version is €50 cheaper in the same configuration. The Optimus series has two HDD bays... if you want to add a real SSD.

And here some benchmarks:

Looks like I'd be an idiot to get anything other than the Optimus then. It's far more powerful than either of them for roughly the same money. And I can choose my OS, what would you suggest? How would my Total War games play with that sort of hardware?

Now that I think about it, I have access to Dreamspark. I've already used the Windows 7 download, but I can get a genuine free Windows 8 download. Would you recommend that? And if so, what would you spend the saved 100 euro on to increase performance?

Cheers!

Torqay

troyzer wrote: »

How would my Total War games play with that sort of hardware?

Quite well, according to notebookcheck:

troyzer wrote: »

Now that I think about it, I have access to Dreamspark. I've already used the Windows 7 download, but I can get a genuine free Windows 8 download. Would you recommend that? And if so, what would you spend the saved 100 euro on to increase performance?

Since storage space is not so much of an issue, I suggest you swap the HDD for the 240GB Kingston SSD. You can always add a HDD later (the blessings of two bays).

troyzer

Torqay wrote: »

Quite well, according to notebookcheck:





Since storage space is not so much of an issue, I suggest you swap the HDD for the 240GB Kingston SSD. You can always add a HDD later (the blessings of two bays).

Would going from 12GB 1333MhZ RAM to 16GB of 1600MhZ RAM not lead to a bigger performance boost?

Torqay

Nothing in comparison to a SSD. A conventional platter hard drive is the real show stopper.

You can compromise, get 1 x 8GB 1600 MHz RAM and the 240 GB SSD, price €1,081 w/o OS. 8 GB is still plenty, you can always add another or even two later.

troyzer

Torqay wrote: »

Nothing in comparison to a SSD. A conventional platter hard drive is the real show stopper.

You can compromise, get 1 x 8GB 1600 MHz RAM and the 240 GB SSD, price €1,081 w/o OS. 8 GB is still plenty, you can always add another or even two later.

The problem is they're both really expensive to replace later. 1600MHz of Samsung RAM is close to 100 euro on Amazon in 8GB modules. It would cost me 200 euro to get up to 24GB from 8GB. Then again, the SSDs are ludicrously expensive too.

Do SSDs really add THAT much performance? I have no experience of them, but I know they're supposed to be faster and also much more reliable because they're obviously solid state.

Torqay

troyzer wrote: »

Do SSDs really add THAT much performance?

They certainly do.

Anyone who has ever experienced a SSD will never go back to platter hard disks. If you have some old clunker of a laptop, throw in some cheapo 64 GB SSD for 50 quid and be amazed. 5 years ago I got myself a little Eee PC with a tiny 4 GB SSD. It put even the most modern high end laptops to a shame in a boot race (it still does, unless they have a SSD). And not just that, everything opens much faster, feels a lot snappier. People had a hard time believing they were looking at a shabby 600 Mhz celery.

troyzer

Torqay wrote: »

They certainly do.

Anyone who ever experienced a SSD will never go back to platter hard disks. If you have some old clunker of a laptop, throw in some cheape 64 GB SSD for 50 quid and be amazed. 5 years ago I got myself a little Eee PC with a tiny 4 GB SSD. It put even the most modern high end laptops to a shame in a boot race (it still does, unless they have a SSD). And not just that, everything opens much faster, feels a lot snappier. People had a hard time believing they were looking at a shabby 600 Mhz celery.

So your suggestion would be to go for the 240GB SSD and 8GB of 1600MHz RAM as opposed to 12GB of 1333MHz RAM? Does the clock speed make that much of a difference when it comes to system memory? And is the GPU upgradable? It'd be nice to add some more DDR5 down the road.
I can see now that if I was to go with that configuration, an extra 200-300 euro down the line would give me an extra mass storage HDD for music and movies and boost me up to 24GB of RAM. I know that's a bit overkill, but I love having a buttery smooth experience. And it'll also future proof me. 8GB of RAM seems very limited to me, especially with a 64bit OS. That's minimum requirements for a lot of the latest games. Not that it REALLY matters, most of my gaming will be done on the PS4, it's just the strategy games. Do strategy games tend to be less demanding for the hardware?

Thanks for all your help so far! I just really want to know this stuff inside out.

Torqay

troyzer wrote: »

So your suggestion would be to go for the 240GB SSD and 8GB of 1600MHz RAM as opposed to 12GB of 1333MHz RAM? Does the clock speed make that much of a difference when it comes to system memory?

Hard to say really without running benchmark tests on the same systen for comparison. But I'd say the difference will be mariganal if noticeable at all. Go with the 3 x 4 GB configuration.

troyzer wrote: »

And is the GPU upgradable? It'd be nice to add some more DDR5 down the road.

That's the beauty of these Clevo barebones, everything is accessible and easy to upgrade, CPU, GPU, RAM, storage... as long as the components are in compliance with the motherboard specifications.

Torqay

Another option: order it with the 1 TB HDD (€1.026 w 12 GB RAM) and buy a 120 GB Samsung 840 Evo SSD seperately (88 yoyos at hardwareversand.de). 120 GB is more than enough for the OS and a few programs/games.

troyzer

Torqay wrote: »

Another option: order it with the 1 TB HDD (€1.026 w 12 GB RAM) and buy a 120 GB Samsung 840 Evo SSD seperately (88 yoyos at hardwareversand.de). 120 GB is more than enough for the OS and a few programs/games.

What would you do?

Torqay

They both very good SSDs, however, the Samsung beats the Kingston on IOPS benchmarks but the performace difference is negligible.

If it was me, I'd order it with the cheapest HDD and add a 250 GB Samsung 840 EVO which is currently the best value (-€150).