Help with choosing a laptop for both gaming and watching movies

[hac13]

I need some help choosing a laptop for my girlfriend who is looking to upgrade her current one. Her price range is £570 or less (With 570 being the hard upper limit) and I have narrowed it down, to the best of my ability to two different laptops which are:

~ HP Pavilion 15-ab208na
- Intel i7 6500u
- 12GB RAM
- 2TB HDD
- 1366 x 768
- NVIDEA GeForce 940m 2GB

~ Toshiba A50-C
- Intel i7 5500u
- 12GB RAM
- 1TB HDD
- 1920 x 1080
- NVIDEA GeForce 930m 2GB

She enjoys gaming, although not to the extent I do as a heavy gamer, and as such I was initially tempted by the Pavilion: As with the graphics cards in both laptops, games will run considerably faster at 768p. However whilst she is not picky about the laptop she gets and cares less about resolution than I, I think due to the amount of TV and movies she might watch that a higher resolution screen might be the way forward to allow her to watch them in 1080p like she currently does on my desktop PC on which I have 1440p screen's. Yet obviously this would be at the cost of a better processor, more hard drive space and a better graphics card.

Overall I was wondering whether the resolution increase from 768p to 1080p warrants the reduction in spec's across the laptop as a whole. Any help or contribution would be greatly appreciated.
Many thanks,
Hal

 

[tothergnome]

Difference between 720P and 1080P aren't comparable. HP wins.

 

[jaguarskx]

If gaming is not a priority, then I would get the Toshiba with the 1080p screen for overall better general use.

The 1080p screen means that if she is using it to surf, read, write papers (assuming she is in school), then she can see more information on the screen at any single time. If she tends to do a bit of multitasking like maybe typing a paper and surfing the net to do research for that paper, then with a 1080p screen is great for devoting half the screen to the internet browser and the other half for whatever word processor she is using. It can still be done with 1366x768 resolution screen, but it will not display as much information on the screen.

When it comes to watching hi resolution video on a 1366x768 resolution screen vs 1080p, overall the 1080p will provide better visuals because the is no detail loss when watching a 1080p video. However, since a 1080p video cannot be display at full resolution on a 1366x768 screen the video will have to be shrunk down to fit the lower resolution, the means you loose some detail. At a casual glace most people will not be able to tell the difference in video quality. You would generally need to the same video displayed on a 1366x768 and 1080p to be able to see the difference. And there can be some people who will not be able to notice much of a difference. Generally speaking, the more detailed oriented the person is the more likely that person will notice the difference.