Reccomended here to buy a laptop but... stuck !!!

[Sennin]

Hi all,

This post is basically for me to try and get some help with buying myself a new laptop after being recommended here by a family member. When looking at new machines I always look at things from more of a Gaming Perspective so I have the flexibility to game on the go which is important to me. I am looking specifically at a laptop rather than a desktop for portability but I have been out of the gaming scene for a few years! I am looking to get back into the scene and need a machine I can rely on both now and in the future, (ideally, I try and take care of my machines so they last for at least 5 years).

In terms of games, initially I will be pretty much MMO based, WoW etc. I would probably indulge in FPS and RPGs and to a lesser extent, RTS although as said earlier, i have been out of the scene so I would shop around first. I would however want to play any game I buy comfortably, with an expectation that I could run games on higher settings in the near future, and comfortably as time goes on. I will also be using the machine for work, (albeit nothing overly strenuous past Microsoft Office), watching movies etc and photo editing. Ideally I want to be spending around the £1000 mark but as I come to mention a little further on in the post, it seems like the machines I have looked at seem to be around the £1200-£1400 mark due to certain specs that caught my eye.
I have spent the last few weeks doing some reading (in between work and life) and I am at a crossroads of sorts. So I have decided to voice some questions to see If I can finally come to a decision on what to buy.

1) Is 15.6” too small a screen for decent gaming on a laptop? A friend of mine who is way more advanced technologically than myself seems to think so and I’m curious to know other people’s opinions.

2) Is it worth spending the extra few hundred pounds and get a GeForce 1060 over a 9 series graphics card? After some looking the only laptops I can find with the GeForce 1060 don’t seem to be sold within the UK which makes it pointless in me going for them. But within the UK the region for a decent laptop with the aforementioned graphics card seems to be in the region of £1200-£1400. Would it be worth the investment for long term gaming? Or could I get away with spending approx. £1000 with a 9series card inside?
(What I mean by long term gaming is being able to run games effectively for a period of say 5 years. Understandably within this time period I would not expect the levels to be optimum as time goes on, but being able to play decently is important to me).

3) Am I right in thinking that Thunderbolt 3 will not really have much of an impact on gaming performance ?

Ironically enough, these are the only questions that spring to mind right now. I was a looking at the Defiance 3 models, wrestling between them mainly for the above points. I think the only other things I definitively know I would like is G sync and an i7 processor. Any thoughts or recommendations or am I even going in complete overkill with what I am looking at? I have posted a spec below to give you guys an idea of what I rightly or wrongly have been looking at although granted on the pricier!

Many Thanks!

Chassis & Display
Defiance Series: 17.3" Matte Full HD IPS LED Widescreen (1920x1080)
Processor (CPU)
Intel® Core™ i7 Quad Core Processor 6700HQ (2.6GHz, 3.5GHz Turbo)
Memory (RAM)
8GB HyperX IMPACT 2400MHz SODIMM DDR4 (1 x 8GB)
Graphics Card
NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 1060 - 6.0GB GDDR5 Video RAM - DirectX® 12.1, G-SYNC

FREE HOLIDAY SEASON BUNDLE with select GTX 10 Series GPUs!
Memory - Hard Disk
500GB SERIAL ATA II 2.5" HARD DRIVE WITH 8MB CACHE (5,400rpm)
DVD/BLU-RAY Drive
NOT REQUIRED
Memory Card Reader
Integrated 6 in 1 Card Reader (SD /Mini SD/ SDHC / SDXC / MMC / RSMMC)
AC Adaptor
1 x 200W AC Adaptor
Power Cable
1 x 1 Metre UK Power Cable (Kettle Lead)
Thermal Paste
STANDARD THERMAL PASTE FOR SUFFICIENT COOLING
Sound Card
Intel 2 Channel High Def. Audio + MIC/Headphone + SoundBlaster X-Fi MB3
Bluetooth & Wireless
GIGABIT LAN & WIRELESS INTEL® AC-8260 M.2 (867Mbps, 802.11AC) + BLUETOOTH
USB Options
3 x USB 3.1 Type A, 2 x USB 3.1 Type C AS STANDARD
Battery
Defiance Series 4 Cell Lithium Ion Battery (60WH)
Keyboard Language
DEFIANCE SERIES RGB BACKLIT UK KEYBOARD
Operating System
Genuine Windows 10 Home 64 Bit - inc DVD & Licence
Operating System Language
United Kingdom - English Language
Office Software
FREE 30 Day Trial of Microsoft® Office® 365
Anti-Virus
BullGuard™ Internet Security - Free 90 Day License inc. Gamer Mode
Browser
Microsoft® Edge (Windows 10 Only)
Notebook Mouse
INTEGRATED 2 BUTTON TOUCHPAD MOUSE
Webcam
INTEGRATED 2.0 MEGAPIXEL WEBCAM
Warranty
3 Year Standard Warranty (1 Month Collect & Return, 1 Year Parts, 3 Year Labour)
Delivery
STANDARD INSURED DELIVERY TO UK MAINLAND (MON-FRI)
Build Time
Standard Build - Approximately 5 to 7 working days

 

[Stephen M]

Do you have a maximum budget? If you are getting a machine like this I would up to the Silver warranty, it is only a fiver, plus the Artic Extreme thermal paste, also not a lot more. An SSD would be good for housing the OS and games, personally I would go for an m2 240/256GB but that will depend on budget, also a WD HDD, 7200rpm would be better than the drive you have selected. 8GB RAM will cover most games but many are going for 16 now, although it is an easy upgrade to add more. It is worth noting that PCS allow you to open up their machines without voiding the warranty, so things you want but cannot afford now can easily be added later on.

 

[Oussebon]

1) Is 15.6” too small a screen for decent gaming on a laptop?

It's an entirely regular, very common size for gaming on a laptop. Whether it's too small is down to personal taste. But I guess if lots of people found it horrendous it wouldn't be such a popular size. You can also use an external monitor/ TV if you want a bigger screen at home.

2) Is it worth spending the extra few hundred pounds and get a GeForce 1060 over a 9 series graphics card?

Good question. I would argue yes, if you have the money, for two reasons.
A) Performance per £. Let's say you for a very basic spec - 8gb RAM and 1TB HDD, no SSD or other goodies. A Defiance II is £871 and a Defiance III is £1239, ~42% more expensive. If you look at gaming benchmarks: http://tinyurl.com/zegvu3n you see upto 55% better performance in Far Cry Primal, 68% better performance in Overwatch, and 98% (!) better performance in DOOM.
B) Useful lifetime. You can't upgrade a laptop GPU, you're stuck with what you buy. The better what you have at the start is, the longer you get to keep using your laptop to play games on whatever settings you consider to be the minimum acceptable before you have to buy a new system.
And a bonus C) the Pascal GPU does have somewhat better DX12 support. There are a few games where it will benefit more than Maxwell.

WoW can be very demanding on the GPU if you crank up the Legion eye candy, so the extra horsepower of the 1060 over the 970 isn't going to waste if you like the visual experience. My GTX 970 (desktop) is about ~10% more powerful than the GTX 1060 (laptop) and Draenor was easily able to max out my GPU at the higher settings.

However, WoW would still run happily enough on a 970M so if you want to save cash it's not like the Defiance II is a complete potato.

3) Am I right in thinking that Thunderbolt 3 will not really have much of an impact on gaming performance ?

Yep.

 

[Tony1044]

I have the Defiance II and I'd add that for a 15.6" model it's big. I also (in my personal opinion) made a mistake by getting the 4K screen. No fault of the screen or machine - it's a beautiful display but Windows (even 10) just sucks at scaling consistently to those resolutions.

It came with the 980 card and full screen ran Doom magnificently at high settings. Windowed, it cranked all the way up to max without missing a beat. And with Vulkan I got even more stunning looking graphics, whereas Spydertracks here got constant game crashes so your mileage may vary there.

The thing that really drew me to the Defiance though was 2 x m2 slots and 2 x SATA slots. Bear in mind though there's no DVD drive. Not that that's a huge issue these days for most folks.

It also has a near full size keyboard with numpad.

I did a review of mine here - https://www.pcspecialist.co.uk/forums/showthread.php?51946-Defiance-II-a-year-(and-a-bit)-on - the good and bad bits of the experience buying.

 

[Sennin]

Hey guys thank you all so much for your replies (and review!), they have been massively helpful so far. I have taken them on board and implemented some changes to the build as i agree with them all so I'm looking at :

Chassis & Display
Defiance Series: 17.3" Matte Full HD IPS LED Widescreen (1920x1080)
Processor (CPU)
Intel® Core™ i7 Quad Core Processor 6700HQ (2.6GHz, 3.5GHz Turbo)
Memory (RAM)
16GB HyperX IMPACT 2400MHz SODIMM DDR4 (1 x 16GB)
Graphics Card
NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 1060 - 6.0GB GDDR5 Video RAM - DirectX® 12.1, G-SYNC

FREE HOLIDAY SEASON BUNDLE with select GTX 10 Series GPUs!
Memory - Hard Disk
500GB SERIAL ATA III 2.5" HARD DRIVE WITH 32MB CACHE (7,200rpm)
M.2 SSD Drive
240GB KINGSTON SSDNow M.2 2280 G2, SATA 6Gb/s (550MB/R, 330MB/W)
DVD/BLU-RAY Drive
NOT REQUIRED
Memory Card Reader
Integrated 6 in 1 Card Reader (SD /Mini SD/ SDHC / SDXC / MMC / RSMMC)
AC Adaptor
1 x 200W AC Adaptor
Power Cable
1 x 1 Metre UK Power Cable (Kettle Lead)
Thermal Paste
ARCTIC MX-4 EXTREME THERMAL CONDUCTIVITY COMPOUND
Sound Card
Intel 2 Channel High Def. Audio + MIC/Headphone + SoundBlaster X-Fi MB3
Bluetooth & Wireless
GIGABIT LAN & WIRELESS INTEL® AC-8260 M.2 (867Mbps, 802.11AC) +BT 4.0, vPRO
USB Options
3 x USB 3.1 Type A, 2 x USB 3.1 Type C AS STANDARD
Battery
Defiance Series 4 Cell Lithium Ion Battery (60WH)
Keyboard Language
DEFIANCE SERIES RGB BACKLIT UK KEYBOARD
Operating System
Genuine Windows 10 Home 64 Bit - inc DVD & Licence
Operating System Language
United Kingdom - English Language
Office Software
FREE 30 Day Trial of Microsoft® Office® 365
Anti-Virus
BullGuard™ Internet Security - Free 90 Day License inc. Gamer Mode
Browser
Microsoft® Edge (Windows 10 Only)
Notebook Mouse
INTEGRATED 2 BUTTON TOUCHPAD MOUSE
Webcam
INTEGRATED 2.0 MEGAPIXEL WEBCAM
Warranty
3 Year Silver Warranty (1 Year Collect & Return, 1 Year Parts, 3 Year Labour)
Delivery
STANDARD INSURED DELIVERY TO UK MAINLAND (MON-FRI)
Build Time
Standard Build - Approximately 5 to 7 working days
Quantity
1


Now this spec is at the top end of my budget, (just under £1500 and i don't want to go over if possible). What do you guys think? I picked a different hard drive, added more RAM and a SSD. I'm a little nervous that this is the right spec for the purposes i explained in the initial post!

 

[Scott]

I would probably change the M2 drive to an SM961, other than that it looks great. To be honest I would probably drop the 500GB drive and add a much larger one at a later date when funds allow (1TB would be the minimum storage space I would recommend nowadays. Ideally a 512GB SM961 as the main drive and then add a 1TB standard drive in the future).

I'm not sure what that would do to your budget though as the link is missing.

It'll be a monster of a laptop regardless, that's a great spec. One thing to keep in mind, gaming on the go isn't really an option without a power outlet as the GPU will be all but cripled on the battery

 

[Oussebon]

A cheap M.2 drive isn't worth buying. It's no faster than a regular sata SSD (and will be slower than some of the better ones) and you're basically wasting the slot you could be putting an M.2 NVMe drive in.

You're also going for a 17.3" laptop now. Bear in mind that it's a lot bigger and heavier.

Dimensions (W x D x H)	385mm x 271mm x 25mm
Weight	2.5KG

Dimensions (W x D x H)	417mm x 287mm x 29.98mm
Weight	3.2 kg including ODD and battery

That's not inherently a problem - just be aware of it

 

[Sennin]

Would the 128GB 600p M.2. NvME PCIe SSD (up to 770MB/sr 450MB s/w) be more suitable?
I can also change the hard drive to a 1TB WD Black 2.5" WD10JPLX sata 6 GB/s 32MB Cache (7200 rpm)

Both changes are still within budget. I am happy with the laptop being slightly larger

Thanks

 

[Scott]

I would honestly make an SM961 a priority. 256GB would be the bare minimum I would recommend so that you can get a couple of games on there, I would always opt for 512GB where possible though (to allow loads of games). The storage drive doesn't need to be anything special so I would go with a bog standard 1TB drive and put the saving towards the SM961.

 

[Sennin]

Will there be a massive performance difference between the 512GB over the 256GB ? The 512 puts the order over budget by about 100 pounds, so I'm just juggling whether its worth the extra. If it is then i would probably bite the bullet and just go for it with the 1TB because i wouldn't want to have to upgrade later, I would rather just have the machine ready from the outset

 

[Scott]

Will there be a massive performance difference between the 512GB over the 256GB ? The 512 puts the order over budget by about 100 pounds, so I'm just juggling whether its worth the extra. If it is then i would probably bite the bullet and just go for it with the 1TB because i wouldn't want to have to upgrade later, I would rather just have the machine ready from the outset

I would definitely say it's worth it. It's not critical but if you buy it now, you definitely won't need to worry about an upgrade, for size or speed, for a LONG time to come. The last thing you want to do is get 6-12 months down the line wishing you had got the 512GB.

I was in a similar situation where I had a figure in my head and various options pushed it over, I was going to compromise with losing in one department but I knew I would regret it so I bit the bullet. I do not regret it in the slightest. In a very short time the money will be forgotten