Help and advice for a gaming laptop.

Hi everyone,

I'm wondering if I could get some advice please? I have about £1000-£1600 to spend on a gaming laptop only I have no idea what I'm doing, I think the only thing I know is I want a 17" screen, something that will last a few years and I've I've been told to get 16 gig of RAM?

I'm looking to play games like Escape from Tarkov, War Thunder, lots of top down strategy things like Age of empires, civilisation, Hearts of iron etc etc, I have an console that I'll stick to the mainstream stuff for like Battlefield, Assassins creed etc. I don't want stuff to look bad but I don't need anything super funky in ways of graphics cards for FPS stuff, but if there's enough if the budget then throw it in.

Where do I start? Please help!

Thanks!

There are new laptops coming out with a new gen of graphics card. You may want to wait for laptops with the RTX 2060 to be available (and of course wait for benchmarks of the laptop version of the RTX 2060 to be sure you know what performance we're getting)

e.g.
https://www.pcspecialist.co.uk/notebooks/optimusIX-rtx-17/

Oussebon said:

There are new laptops coming out with a new gen of graphics card. You may want to wait for laptops with the RTX 2060 to be available (and of course wait for benchmarks of the laptop version of the RTX 2060 to be sure you know what performance we're getting)

e.g.
https://www.pcspecialist.co.uk/notebooks/optimusIX-rtx-17/

Click to expand...

Thats actually perfect as I will be funding this with a bonus from work that I wont be getting until the 26th of march.. obviously the one you have suggested I would need to change the ram and hard drive?

I will be buying two, I also want to pick one up for my old man, but the budget for that would be around £1000.

Yeah, I just linked to the configurator, you'd need to pick the RAM and storage and so on.

I'd be happy to suggest a spec, but the configurator doesn't let people create one while the product is out of stock. Besides which, prices can change. Or PCS might come up with a special offer on one between now and late March.

So I'd suggest planning the spec in detail only when it's close to the time to purchase

But yes, it looks like 16gb RAM and decent storage should be doable for the £1000-£1600 spec.

You probably won't get an RTX 2060 for the £1000 spec for your *dad, but could likely still get a Vyper with a GTX 1060. Which is pretty powerful (modern games on high-ultra depending on the title).

Thats great, thank you, I need a bit more power as I would want to run a few more demanding games, tarkov, war thunder, etc but my dad will stick to things like civilisation, anno, those types of things, so graphics wise from what im reading he will be fine with a 1060.

One more question if I may on hard drives, would you recommend switching to a WD or Samsung for gaming? I read from other posts they're good but I have to be honest I don't really how the effect the running of games...

Thanks for the responses

It will depend on pricing and what's available when you come to order. The ideal would be a fast M.2 SSD like the WD Black or 970 Evo (250gb or 500gb), and an HDD for mass storage. The fast SSDs let Windows and games load faster, among other things. The HDD is cheaper per gigabyte and can be used for storing misc files.

But I'd reserve exact recommendations closer to the time as pricing can vary. No point me telling you to buy a 500gb WD Black SSD if by the time you come to order, it's randomly £100 more than the Intel 760p. It might be faster than the 760p, but probably not £100 faster!

Oussebon said:

It will depend on pricing and what's available when you come to order. The ideal would be a fast M.2 SSD like the WD Black or 970 Evo (250gb or 500gb), and an HDD for mass storage. The fast SSDs let Windows and games load faster, among other things. The HDD is cheaper per gigabyte and can be used for storing misc files.

But I'd reserve exact recommendations closer to the time as pricing can vary. No point me telling you to buy a 500gb WD Black SSD if by the time you come to order, it's randomly £100 more than the Intel 760p. It might be faster than the 760p, but probably not £100 faster!

Click to expand...

Of course, I understand pricing, stock etc etc could change, im just trying to get a general idea of what money will get me what and if it will do the job for me.

Really appreciate the help, ill hang around the forums and hopefully you can go over my spec for me in march and help me out.

Good day to you.

In general terms, i7 CPU and RTX 2060, 16gb RAM, 500gb NVMe SSD, 1TB HDD would be the ideal sort of thing for £1600 or thereabouts I suppose. Keep us posted