$900 laptop recommendation?

[Joosh]

I'm looking for a good laptop from a trustworthy brand. I'd like a decent quad-core processor, 8gb+ of ram, 1TB HDD (An added SSD would be great for booting), I don't care if there's a GPU or not. 1080p screen would be nice. Also good build quality. Battery life isn't too big of an issue. I'd like to spend less than $900. I need it for photoshop, blender, and video editing.

 

[JackNaylorPE]

It's really hard to recommend a 'trustworthy" brand when competing brands are ade on the same production lines, by the same tech workers and using the same parts.

For the last dozen years or so we have had all our laptops custom built by Clevo distributors whereby we have selected the major parts going into the build. When making this recommendation, the most common response I get is "I never heard of Clevo...." Well did you ever hear of Quanta, Wistron, Pegatron ... cause those and other "no names" are the ones who made all the laptops you are likely familiar with but their only role in production was buying them from the OEM and designing the logo that was slapped on them/

The vast majority of laptops on the market are manufactured by a small handful of Taiwan-based Original Design Manufacturers (ODM). Major relationships include:

Quanta sells to (among others) HP, Lenovo, Apple, Acer, Toshiba, Dell, Sony, Fujitsu and NEC
Compal sells to (among others) Acer, Dell, Toshiba, Lenovo and HP/Compaq
Wistron (former manufacturing & design division of Acer) sells to Dell, Acer, Lenovo and HP
Inventec sells to Toshiba, HP, Dell and Lenovo
Pegatron sells to Asus, Toshiba, Apple, Dell and Acer
Foxconn sells to Asus, Dell, HP and Apple
Flextronics (former Arima Computer Corporation notebook division) sells to HP

http/forum.notebookreview.com/threads/clevo-guide-v2-0-faq-and-reseller-info.91510/

CLEVO is a large Taiwanese computer company specializing in laptops. While the Clevo brand name is perhaps not widely known, their products are re-branded and sold by known boutique brand OEMs (Original Equipment Manufacturers); notably Sager, VoodooPC, Falcon Northwest, Eurocom, etc. They are also considered (by whoever knows about notebooks) to design and manufacturer the best of the best notebooks in terms of superior build quality and innovative designs.

Clevo resellers are prohibited from advertising lower than set limits. we buy ours here:

https/lpc-digital.com/

For Photoshop and, I assume gaming in your spare time, I think $900 is a bit low for satisfactory performance. Cores, memory and screen real estate play a big part here. I'll pop back with a build that will serve adequately for those purposes.

 

[deepblue08]

If you dont mind smaller hard drive, this machine is very fast because it has an SSD and the build quality is very good. It is a Dual-Core, but at this price range Quad-Core would be very difficult to find: https/www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIADDT5UN9341

Your best bet for that price is a desktop, to be honest.

 

[JackNaylorPE]

17" https/lpc-digital.com/product/sager-np7870-clevo-n870hp6/

17.3” Full HD (1920 x 1080) Clear IPS Wide View Angle 72% NTSC Matte
7th Generation Intel® Core™ i7-7700HQ (6M Cache, up to 3.80 GHz)
16GB Dual Channel DDR4 PC4 2400MHz (PC4 19200) Memory (2 x 8GB)
Windows® 10 Home 64-Bit Edition Preinstalled, (without Recovery Media)
WD® Blue™ M.2 250GB SSD SATA 6Gb/s (OS DRIVE)
Intel® Dual Band Ultra Wireless - AC 8265 M.2 + Bluetooth 4.2 Combo
Free Shipping
LIFETIME Limited Labor and 1 Year Premium** Parts Warranty
$1300 before discounts (Cash Price = Business Check and other options)

15" https/lpc-digital.com/product/sager-np7850-clevo-n850hp6/

15.6” Full HD (1920 x 1080) Clear IPS Wide View Angle 72% NTSC Matte
7th Generation Intel® Core™ i7-7700HQ (6M Cache, up to 3.80 GHz)
16GB Dual Channel DDR4 PC4 2400MHz (PC4 19200) Memory (2 x 8GB)
Windows® 10 Home 64-Bit Edition Preinstalled, (without Recovery Media)
WD® Blue™ M.2 250GB SSD SATA 6Gb/s (OS DRIVE)
Intel® Dual Band Ultra Wireless - AC 8265 M.2 + Bluetooth 4.2 Combo
Free Shipping
LIFETIME Limited Labor and 1 Year Premium** Parts Warranty
$1260 before discounts (Cash Price = Business Check and other options)

You should be able to negotiate a $50-$75 discount. Most laptop HD offerings are slow 5400 rpm HD and the SSD isn't going to do squat for anything that's not on the SSD. Id add a 7200 rpm, 1 or 2 TB SSD after the purchase.

Yes we are talking $300 more than your listed budget but ...

- Photoshop loves cores... getting a current generation 4 core / 8 thread i7 CPU will pay large dividends in performance of your stated applications.
- Those same applications love more and faster memory, again, the investment in 16 GB, generally considered the minimum for PhotoShop will again pay huge dividends
- The larger screen will costs ya $40 ... certainly a worthwhile investment and the OPS screen's color accuracy is an essential tool for photo editing.

Understanding your stated budget limitations, simply put, I don't think there's a workable option in that price range. Can you run it ? yes, absolutely ... Can you run it efficiently, no.

As for Blender .... recommended hardware includes a 64-bit quad core CPU and Full HD display with 24 bit color, GFX card with 2 GB RAM

Video Editing ... What is included in those lappies will be a bit limited for video editing but 4 cores and 16Gb keeps you above the "crawl" limit".