Buying a Laptop - seeking advice

[Darrin_]

I am looking for a powerful ultrabook for college, preferably under 1000€. It should be able to handle light gaming and have a long battery life. Current options:

Asus Zenbook UX310UQ Campus edition
Display: 33.8 cm (13.3") Full-HD WideView Matte (1920 x 1080),
CPU: Intel® Core™ i5-7200U DualCore (2.50 - 3.10 GHz),
Storage: 512GB SSD SATA,
RAM: 8GB RAM DDR4,
GPU: NVIDIA® GeForce® 940MX 2GB DDR3

Lenovo Ideapad 710S
Display: 33.8cm (13.3") Full-HD Anti-Glare (1920 x 1080),
CPU: Intel Core i5-6260U, 1,8 GHz - 2,9 GHz, 4 MB Intel Smart Cache
Storage: 512GB SSD PCIe,
RAM: 8GB RAM DDR3,
GPU: Intel Iris Graphics 540

The Zenbook looks arguably better, has a newer CPU, DDR4 RAM and a dedicated GPU
The Lenovo is lighter, thinner and has a way way faster (3x) Storage due to PCIe.

What would you pick?

 

[jaguarskx]

Unless you are using programs that are reading / writing massive amounts of data you will not really notice the difference between SATA and PCIe. An example would editing large video files, or better yet recording 4k video which basically writes about 400mb of data per minute at 30 FPS.

I would just go with the Asus if you want to play games.

 

[Darrin_]

Unless you are using programs that are reading / writing massive amounts of data you will not really notice the difference between SATA and PCIe. An example would editing large video files, or better yet recording 4k video which basically writes about 400mb of data per minute at 30 FPS.

I would just go with the Asus if you want to play games.

Thank you for your advice! Do you have any experiences with Asus or Lenovo? My last laptop was a UX32VD from Asus and the power jack broke twice... I am kind of reluctant to returning to Asus. They might have have improved though... not sure

 

[jaguarskx]

No experience with Asus.

As for Lenovo, I have used a couple of their ThinkPad business laptops and own an IdeaPad Y470 from 2011. No problems with the ThinkPads, but I had overheating issues with the IdeaPad (too much thermal paste was applied). I had to clean it out and re-apply thermal paste which fixed the overheating issue. Also. their Windows 7 image eventually started causing the nVidia GT 550m to crash the laptop within 15 minutes even after doing a factory reinstall. At first I thought it was hardware failure. But when Windows 7 became corrupted and the option to do a factory reinstall failed, I installed my own copy of Windows 7. That fixed the problem with the GT 550m.