Need a mid-low price laptop for gaming and university

sophie95xX

New member
Hi everyone,
brand new account here! I have found reading through the forum threads extremely interesting, however I am still lost and confused on finding a decent laptop for the purpose I want!

I'm looking for a new laptop, 15.6" (can give or take a little on this, needs to be portable though) at around the £400-£500 mark for light gaming and university work. I've trialed and errored over the years and been burned a bit! Can't fully remember details as have only recently had to develop a mild technical understanding of computing since I fell out of contact with my good friend and very clever PC expert last year. Needs to run Windows 10 as the equine movement analytic software that may apparently will be assigned to us only runs properly on Windows.

I'm going to Vet school in September so will need a reliable laptop to last me 3-4 years of daily use, as well as be able to game on it (Sims 4, minecraft, maybe get back into Skyrim and League of Legends if I get a laptop that can handle it at mid-level graphics quality and render distances). My current HP Pavilion 15 with an AMD A8-6410 APU and AMD Radeon R5 graphics has lasted me a good 3 years but has badly slowed down and takes and age to turn on and off - not to mention it is rather heavy! It did very well throughout my last 3 year degree with being used daily for 8-12 hours a day sometimes, and not being turned off for weeks on end if I had a huge bunch of assignments due - especially around Dissertation time!
I had to give up most gaming when I bought it to replace my completely fried Acer Aspire (Intel i5 with nvidia graphics card, got my friend to 'sort out some settings' and he decided to overclock it, and feigned ignorance when I asked him why it kept crashing, overheating and basically died on me), but in the last year I have been playing a little Sims 4 on low graphics and minecraft on medium graphics and low render distance on my HP pavilion. I miss playing the likes of Skyrim, League, Magicka, etc.!

Sorry for the essay, I had to splurge the information out quickly with my very rubbish technical knowledge.

So, any idea what sort of laptop I should be looking at?! No matter how much research I do, I still haven't solved the AMD vs Intel conundrum at mid-low budget point and although I'd love a dedicated graphics card, I don't know if I'm aiming too high for under £500 if I also want it to live for 3+ years.

I'm never considering Acer Aspire's again, just for my own peace of mind, and definitely no Lenovos as have only seen bad things with my mum's intel i5 lenovo with nvidia graphics card. I know I can't paint them all with the same brush but this is the last laptop I'll be able to afford for another 3-4 years so can't take too many risks!

Quick sum-up of a ridiculously long and confusing thread, my normally great english skills have failed me today:
£400-£500 budget
Preferably dedicated graphics
Decent processor
Decent longevity
Gaming + University work (mainly huge word processing documents)
Relatively light to carry
Windows 10

Please go easy on me, took me ages to work up the courage to find a forum and post on it, I'm so hopeless but I don't want to go into a shop and get talked into buying an unsuitable laptop without realising!

Thanks in advance,

Sophie
 

Oussebon

Multiverse Poster
Welcome to the forums :)

AMD's APUs are old and very weak CPUs and the 'trade off' they make for better graphics doesn't quite work these days in a lot of cases because they're still too weak for gaming.

£400-£500 budget
Preferably dedicated graphics
PC Specialist doesn't have anything that fits the bill there. As the forums belong to PC Specialist, users aren't able to give sales advice about other companies' models, but as a general comment I don't think I've seen anything anywhere with decent dedicated graphics at that price point. You do see some 'dedicated' GPUs like the GT 920M etc but these are barely better than integrated graphics. So beware of that.

I've seen a laptop periodically on sale for £600 with an i5 and 960M so if you can find something like that, it may be among your best options. However, for a gaming laptop with a bit of resilience to future games and that is better value in terms of performance per £ you would be looking at something like the Optimus VIII from PC Specialist around £800-850 (or any competitor's equivalent if you can find something similar for a better price).

AMD are due to release new APUs (Raven Ridge) in the near-ish(?) future. https://videocardz.com/71232/amd-ryzen-5-2500u-with-radeon-vega-graphics-spotted
No idea if PCS will stock anything with those, or how good they'll be - if it's like Iris Pro that probably means you still want a dGPU for things like Skyrim SE.

So I think you'll need to either - strain hard to find a bargain elsewhere, up your budget, or alter your expectations. Or possibly some combination of those.

If you want specific advice on non-PC Specialist options you could try an open forum like Tom's Hardware, which is very popular and has a lot of knowledgeable people on it. And in terms of general tech conversation or PC Specialist options, you're of course very welcome here!

Hope that's of some help, even though the outlook might be a bit overcast.
 
Last edited:

sophie95xX

New member
Thank you very much for your help!! That really does help to know what sort of spec to look for, I'll begin the hunt for an i5 and see where I can do from there. thanks for the help, I definitely got the wrong end of the stick about asking about laptop brands but that's great to know what I'm looking for in terms of spec and price point.
 
Top