Best buy (budget) laptop

[jk343]

Hi guys, I'm looking for a new (budget) notebook for regular work and a little bit of gaming on the side. For my budget I don't expect anything too fancy in the gaming department, but I'd still like to get the best performance possible. Any advice?!

1. What is your budget? €400,-

2. What is the size of the notebook that you are considering? 15'6

4. Do you need a portable or desktop replacement laptop? portable not required. WIll mostly use it at home.

5. How much battery life do you need? doesn't really matter

6. Do you want to play games with your laptop? If so then please list the games that you want to with the settings that you want for these games. (Low,Medium or High)? Occasionally. Not the newest of the newest, but some decent graphics would be nice

7. What other tasks do you want to do with your laptop? Mostly browsing, office etc.

8. How much storage (Hard Drive capacity) do you need? 320-500 will be sufficient

10. How long do you want to keep your laptop? 4yrs

11. What kind of Optical drive do you need? DVD

12. Please tell us about the brands that you prefer to buy from them and the brands that you don't like and explain the reasons. No preferences

13. What country do you live in? Netherlands

14. Please tell us any additional information if needed. Just looking for the best buy. =) So far I've found the Acer Aspire 5733Z, the Asus x54C-Sx109V and the Lenovo E520. Any advice is welcomed!

 

[americanbrian]

If you can pick up a cheap N5110 on ebay with the Geforce GT 525m it is a brilliant package.

The 525m is EXACTLY the same chip as a GT550M with lowered clocks. I just bought one of these and use afterburner to OC it to match the 550m.

The i3 is a sandy bridge 2.1GHz dual core and is plenty to run lots of modern games.

I cannot recommend it enough for the price/performance.

 

[americanbrian]

I actually upgraded mine heavily, but even at base its performance was good.

I would recommend disassembling and replacing the thermal paste with good stuff like MX-3 or similar. The stock TIM is rubbish.

I run a i7-2720qm and a 240GB OCZ Agility 3 and added 4GB of RAM.

Total cost: £657 and I get awesome performance. WEI is 6.6. The GFX is lowest sub score but it can play crysis at high details....

 

[americanbrian]

or here is the 17 inch version ending soon... Better spec too.

http/www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Dell-17-3-i7-2630QM-8Gb-DDR3-Blu-Ray-500Gb-GeForce-GT-1Gb-Vostro-3750-HDMI-SATA-/160830541690?pt=UK_Computing_Laptops_EH&hash=item25723f4f7a