Budget friendly college laptop

[Will1335]

Hi, I will be attending college this year and need a laptop. I will be bringing my gaming PC to college so my laptop will mainly just be for school work. I'm looking for something fairly light/small so it's easy to take to and from class. Also I need it to have a decent CPU because I will be going for a computer science major, and that has some intensive programs. My budget is around $500; I am open to new and refurbished products.

 

[das_stig]

How about these ..

$499 - https/www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834234982&cm_re=amd_ryzen_laptop-_-34-234-982-_-Product

$579 - https/www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834850877&cm_re=amd_ryzen_laptop-_-34-850-877-_-Product

Lenovo may be a little more than budget, but specs are good.

 

[jaguarskx]

I recommend the following ASUS VivoBook F510UA FHD Laptop for $510.

https/www.amazon.com/VivoBook-i5-8250U-NanoEdge-Fingerprint-F510UA-AH51/dp/B0762S8PYM/ref=sr_1_fkmr0_1?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1529002426&sr=1-1-fkmr0&keywords=ASUS+Laptop+VivoBook+F505ZA-DB31


It is similar to the Asus Vivobook recommended above with the dual core AMD Rizen 2200u (about equal to the 7th gen dual core i3-7100u), but this laptop has an 8th gen quad core Intel i5-8250u. Both laptops have integrated graphics though, but you have a gaming PC. The AMD RX Vega 3 graphics core in the Rizen 2200u APU is estimated to be roughly on par with a GeForce 910m / Intel HD 520 graphics core. The i5-82500u has an integrated Intel UHD 620 graphics core with slightly higher clock speeds than the Intel HD 620 in 7th gen Intel CPUs and it has been optimized to use less resources when playing 4k video compared to the Intel HD 620. The Intel UHD 620 performs a little better than the Intel HD 520 so it will likely perform a little better than the RX Vega 3.

Graphics performance is more or less unimportant, the i5-8250u should provide better performance compared to the dual core Rizen 2200u. Especially in applications that can make use of 4 cores.