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Deciding on a Gaming Laptop

Solid Slate

Estimable
May 28, 2015
4
0
4,510
1. What is your budget? $1500 preferably, going up to $1750 for extremely good deals.

2. What is the size of the notebook that you are considering? 17.3" mostly, but can do 15.6" if it's a really good deal.

3. What screen resolution do you want? I'm thinking 1080p. I saw one or two 4k laptops with good specs on Newegg, but I'm not sure if it's worth it, especially seeing all of the weird graphic quirks on my sister's 4k.

4. Do you need a portable or desktop replacement laptop? Don't have a desktop. I won't take this thing many places, but I like being able to move around my house easily with it.

5. How much battery life do you need? 3-6 hours will do me fine.

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)? As high as possible. I don't need everything 100% maxed out, but High-Very High settings are necessary MGSV, GTAV, Hitman15, stuff like that.

7. What other tasks do you want to do with your laptop? (Photo/Video editing, Etc.) Video and Photo Editing (think Source Filmmaker-types with Adobe or similar to spruce it up), writing

8. How much storage (Hard Drive capacity) do you need? 1TB HDD, 128GB SSD

9. If you are considering specific sites to buy from, please post their links. Newegg and Amazon are great and I'm open to other trustworthy sites as well.

10. How long do you want to keep your laptop? I'll have this baby a minimum of four years, possibly 8 or 9 depending on my finances in College.

11. What kind of Optical drive do you need? DVD ROM/Writer,Bluray ROM/Writer,Etc ? A DVD player should be fine.

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 no prior experience except for a $500 ASUS K55A that got its MB fried twice and now just won't charge anymore. MSI and Gigabyte seem good from my research but again I'm open to most stuff. Absolutely no Apple.

13. What country do you live in? USA, Indiana

14. Please tell us any additional information if needed. I'd prefer to have a GTX 970m card. I have no idea what power CPU I should be looking for, most seem to be in the 2.5-2.7GHz range. Is that good?

Some laptops I've been considering:


http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834152682

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834233079

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834152817

What do you think is best among these, and do you have any suggestions?
 


^That's a bit of an overstatement^. But yes the MSi GE is the one I would recommend simply because Gigabyte is new to the laptop game, and the GS series laptops run a bit hot because of their thinness. You may also find a 980m in your price range with MSi and Alienware if you're willing to go the full $1750. It should be known that the GS you are looking at runs it's 3x128GB SSD's in a RAID 0 configuration. You may or may not be into that.