Cheapest gaming laptop?

[ctfgod]

Hello.
Recently, my 5 year old Lenovo laptop died which i used for mostly gaming and its performance was rather poor (30 - 40 fps on Team Fortress 2). I am looking for a new gaming laptop to call my own. My budget is $400 for anything that can run games like Rainbow Six Siege or. I literally cannot afford anything else, as me and my family are suffering from finance issues. I was planning on getting a new laptop two years ago, but that never happened. If anyone has any suggestions that would be great.

Kind regards,
-CTFGod

 

[ArchitSahu]

I would not buy it then. It is not worth it. It will not be playable and just too bad. Save up as long as possible and hold off for now. Otherwise you would get similar performance.

 

[hang-the-9]

Cheapest "gaming" laptop would be about $7-800. You can get something used for $400 with a 960M or 970M video card, just make sure you test it first.

 

[jaguarskx]

A new laptop with a dedicated graphics chip (GPU) costs $600. Anything less than that will have an integrated GPU. Integrated GPUs are actually pretty decent for what they are, but they do not come close to the performance of what gamers would consider a "gaming GPU".

The best new laptop you can buy is a $350 Acer laptop with an i3-7100u CPU and Intel HD 620 graphics core. You can use to it to play some games that are not graphically demanding such as Skyrim at 1366x768 with default settings, the Mass Effect Trilogy (not Andromeda) at 1080p and default settings, and Star Trek Online at 1080p with a mix of low and medium settings. Those are games I have tested myself with the older Intel HD 4400 graphics core that was released in 2013. The Intel HD 620 can also play League of Legend without any problems. However, Rainbow Six Siege is a relatively demanding game so you will have to use the lowest settings and resolution as well. Below is a link to some benchmarks for the Intel HD 620. Be aware that the laptops tests have the more powerful i5-7200u or i7-7500u CPUs rather than the i3-7100u so games that are CPU dependent would have FPS results that are is little lower. Team Fortress 2 should play fine at 1080p with medium settings.

https/www.notebookcheck.net/Intel-HD-Graphics-620.172256.0.html



Here's the link to the Acer laptop for $350.

https/www.amazon.com/Acer-E5-575-33BM-15-6-Inch-Notebook-Generation/dp/B01K1IO3QW/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1518797955&sr=8-3&keywords=acer+i3-7100u


Buy and install the following 4GB DDR4 RAM stick into the laptop for about $47 to get a total of 8GB. 4GB of RAM is not really enough to play games with especially when using integrated graphics because it will be using the system RAM. When there is only 1 stick of RAM it will operate at half speed. Usually not a big deal, but slow RAM affects integrated graphics performance. Installing a 2nd stick of RAM can increase game performance when using integrated graphics by 10% to 20%, it depends on the game. The benchmarks for the Intel HD 620 in the above link are based on laptops with 2 sticks of RAM.

https/www.amazon.com/Crucial-Single-PC4-19200-Unbuffered-260-Pin/dp/B019FRDKWI/ref=sr_1_3?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1518798001&sr=1-3&keywords=4gb+ddr4+sodimm

 

[jaguarskx]

If you are okay with buying a used / refurbished laptop, the the following 17.3" Asus-X-Series-X756U is pretty good with a dual core i5-6200u and nVidia GTX 950m GPU for $375.

https/www.ebay.com/itm/Asus-X-Series-X756U-17-3-8GB-Intel-i5-6200U-2-3GHz-1TB-Laptop-GTX-950m/292448784303?hash=item44174e4faf:g:7mwAAOSwXzNag4Nj