Budget Laptop for Development?

Skyl3r

Honorable
Nov 23, 2012
5
0
10,520
1. What is your budget?
$1000 - This is flexible, but I would like to stick to this if possible.
Also, if there's cheaper options that can handle my tasks with ease that'd be awesome.


2. What is the size of the notebook that you are considering?
15.6" or larger

3. What screen resolution do you want?
1920x1080 or larger

4. Do you need a portable or desktop replacement laptop?
The laptop will be to take the place of my desktop:
CPU: i5-4690k
RAM: 8GB@1600MHz
GPU: GTX 760 - 2GB VRAM
120GB SSD
1TB HDD WD Black
500GB HDD WD Blue

I don't need quite as much storage anymore, but a dedicated GPU is a serious plus; a processor with similar strength is ideal and at least 8GB of RAM.


5. How much battery life do you need?
2-3 Hours. Not critical at all.

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)?
StarCraft II - Low - Not concerned about this at all.

7. What other tasks do you want to do with your laptop? (Photo/Video editing, Etc.)
I will be using the laptop to perform tasks in:
Unity3D
Inkscape
Blender
Eclipse
IntelliJ
Potentially other development software.


8. How much storage (Hard Drive capacity) do you need?
At least 500GB and having room for an additional HDD/SSD is a huge plus.

9. If you are considering specific sites to buy from, please post their links.
Newegg, Amazon or Microcenter; but I'm open to others.

10. How long do you want to keep your laptop?
I'd like to be able to use this as my primary computer for several years.

11. What kind of Optical drive do you need? DVD ROM/Writer,Bluray ROM/Writer,Etc ?
Having a DVD R/W drive would be nice, but this is not necessary.

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.
I have a crush on Dell. Their laptops always feel very high quality and their support site is convenient and well organized.
I've heard numerous good things about MSI as well.
I'm impartial though. Show me a good Acer and I'll still consider it.


13. What country do you live in?
USA

14. Please tell us any additional information if needed.
I currently have a dual screen setup and couldn't work well without it. If the laptop can support 3 displays, (2 video outs + Laptop screen), that would be amazing.
I've been interested in touch screen laptops, but I'm not sure if they're really worth the additional money. Thoughts on this would be helpful.
 

Skyl3r

Honorable
Nov 23, 2012
5
0
10,520
In case anyone stumbles across this; I thought I'd share my $0.02 about the laptop I got.

I ended up buying an MSI GE72 Apache-027. (You can see it here)
I got it used for $864 which was about $136 less than I had anticipated spending.

The specs look like this:
CPU: Intel Core i7-4720HQ
RAM: 16GB @ 1600MHz
HDD: Has two bays, comes with 1 1TB 7200RPMs HDD
Screen: 17.3in
GPU: GTX 965m

It's not had any struggles with StarCraft, Unity3d, Visual Studio 2015, and I don't foresee any troubles anytime soon.
It all feels pretty high quality. I was semi scared reading reviews that it would feel cheap; but that was not the case.