Looking for Beast Laptop! Under £400

Rapist

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1. What is your budget?
I am willing to spend maximum of £400

2. What is the size of the notebook that you are considering?
Size does not matter.

3. What screen resolution do you want?
Large screen. I prefer widescreen for gaming and playing videos

4. Do you need a portable or desktop replacement laptop?
I need a desktop replacement laptop

5. How much battery life do you need?
I prefer long hours but it has to be more then 3 hours

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)?
I want to play GTA Sanandreas at high settings, GTA IV and fifa etc at low settings. I would like to play the new games.

7. What other tasks do you want to do with your laptop? (Photo / Video editing,watching movies, Etc.)
Watching movies, School work, Downloading lots of videos, burning high amount of video data to dvd

8. How much storage (Hard Drive capacity) do you need?
About 320 min. IT can go upto any amount, I am not concerned.

9. If you are considering specific sites to buy from, please post their links.
I want to go to stores where I can buy a laptop or reserve it. I am looking for good specs like here. http://www.argos.co.uk/static/Product/partNumber/5083840/Trail/searchtext%3ECOMPUTING+CLEARANCE.htm#pdpFullProductInformation
I wish it had a good grafix card.

10. How long do you want to keep your laptop?
For atleast 5 years before I upgrade again

11. What kind of Optical drive do you need? DVD ROM/Writer,Bluray ROM/Writer,Etc ?
I need a DVD tom that can write DVD.

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 prefer Acer and Samsung. Sony is good too IMO. I hate Dell and Toshiba because they are large and bulky and they overheat easily. They cost alot aswell. Then they fry there own components and you have to buy a new laptop. :cry:

13. What country do you live in?
I live in England, Manchster

14. Please tell us any additional information if needed.
It HAS to have i3 processor. I dont want to go with slow processors. I prefer 4 GB ram. And about 320 GB hard disk space or more. I would like a large keyboard for gaming.

I need the laptop for mainly gaming, surfing the web, playing downloading and burning videos to disk. I absolutely hate lag so that is why i want 4GB ram with i3.
 

bbgink

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Umm, your budget so tight.
I've found http://www.amazon.co.uk/Toshiba-Satellite-L650D-11R-Notebook-DVDSMDL/dp/B003V4AQOM/ but the price is £429.99 It is ATI HD 5650 graphic laptop
Notebookcheck.net said "ATI HD 5650 graphic gaming performance is sufficient for high details in nearly all DirectX 10 games (only Crysis and GTA4 are not fluently playable in high details – see gaming list below). Upcoming and current DirectX 11 games (like DIRT2) may not run in full detail settings. That means some of the new DirectX 11 features (Tesselation e.g.) may not run fluently on this gaming graphics adapter. Currently the HD 5650 is a good gaming pick for well priced laptops with a 15 inch screen and a resolution of about 1366×768."

BTW,You may search another site focus "ATI 5650 laptop" may find the cheaper.
 
More of a pussycat budget than a beast budget.

9. Your 'good specs' example only has the Intel HD Graphics options which is pretty much a non-gaming graphics card.

The laptop bbgink found for you is about as good as you can get at your budget range.
While it's OK for gaming now you can't expect that to last over five years.
General purpose / home office tasks? No problem.
Gaming? ehhhhhh, not so much.
 
The laptop you linked has Intel HD Graphics video chip.
We don't know what games you hope to play but we can point out that Intel HD Graphics is pretty far down the performance list. It can't quite be considered a 'gaming graphics card'. It's fine for 2D board and card games, home office and work tasks. And it's quite good for an entertainment laptop. But it's just not getting the job done in gaming (it's the last on the list below).


 

Rapist

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I would like to play GTA IV and some old games from 2001 - 2008 or 9 perhaps.
Can you find me a good laptop with grafix card? Now I am thinking about sacrificing the i3 processor for a laptop with good grafix card. Is the sacrifice worth it?
 
It's the graphics card that drives up the price more than the CPU choice.


You might find something in the HD 5650 range that isn't too far off what you want to spend.
An older C2D laptop CPU would be a fair choice is it means you can afford the better graphics card.
 
Probably. But some of the refurbs are returns that were only used for a very short period. Others may have been in use for weeks, or months even.
Refurbs are usually better choices than used laptops off Ebay.

Still, consider only as a last resort to get the performance you want and make sure you understand the return policies and warranty notice.
 

Rapist

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I will take a look at the refurbs. So far, I found a good i5 500 GB + 4GB ram for 400.
I Did some research into grafix cards. I want one that will play GTA IV
500GB + 4GB ram + i3 or i5 and a grafix card that will play GTA IV
I hope you can find one for me. I can pay upto £450 and refurbs will do the job.
 

Bacterius

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Here is a link to a USD $1100 gaming laptop. It's a little over your budget though.

http://www.xoticpc.com/force-extreme-840-flextronics-arima-w840di-p-2495.html?wconfigure=yes

You will want these customizations:
- CROSSFIRE ATI HD3870 (2) 512MB - almost double the power, for free (its a promotion it seems)
- 4,096MB Memory
- 500GB 7200RPM

This computer has a quite fast quad core which GTA IV likes very much and the GPU should be able to successfully play the game very well at medium settings - you might even be able to take a shot at high settings. New games should work at med/high settings, and GTA san andreas will obviously work at high settings, as well as fifa.

You want the ram upgrade because 2 gigabytes is not enough, and it's only $35 to upgrade so better be safe than sorry (if you run out of memory, the computer will slow to a crawl as the hard drive will be used as backup memory - and it is immensely slower (memory is 4000 megabytes a second, your hard drive will be around 80 megabytes a second)).

The laptop has 16:10 widescreen (1920x1200), so that's good.

Battery life should be more than 3 hours if you're doing light stuff like browsing, listening to music etc... you cannot expect any laptop to have more than an hour or two of battery life if you actively game on battery. It's just not possible.

You get a 500GB *fast* hard drive - not the fastest ever, but it gets the job done pretty well.

Last, but not least, the laptop can burn dvds (yeah!).

Total price, discounted: USD $1065.

So yeah, if you're willing to stretch your budget, to around £650, you will be able to get this laptop which in my opinion would work well for you.

Now, it's your choice: you can go with a £400 laptop that might not perform as well as you wish, nor last as long as you want (so you'll end up buying another £400 one in two years), or you can go with this less cheap one and have it work longer.

Now I'm not being influential I'm just explaining, because the fact most people tend to overlook is that when they play it cheap and go with a budget laptop they often end up buying another budget laptop a couple years later and end up paying more overall than if they had chosen the right one first hand. I've had a few friends do the same thing - it isn't cool. The market is playing on this and tends to take out small but important features out of budget laptops, and when users realize it they tend to buy another laptop which will of course be a budget laptop (cheaper, right?) with that particular feature but missing another one, etc... as a result the customer loses and the market wins. That's how it works unfortunately.
 

Rapist

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Thankyou for the informative detailed responce :)
I agree with you on the last paragraph. I am only getting a dell HD video card -.- That wont play any game. I tried it on my cousins 5336 Asus and the game was lagging with above average settings. I think I will wait and stretch my budget. I get £10 a month pocket money so it will be a little difficult :(
 

Bacterius

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If you're above 15 you could try working during the weekend, for instance working at mc-donalds the whole of saturday afternoon is pretty much worth £30, and you'll make the money in no time!
 

Bacterius

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Mate, the first one has one of the worst graphics cards ever which will struggle on low settings on any game, and the second one has integrated HD graphics which is even worse. Neither of these two laptops will offer you satisfactory gameplay. I'm sorry to bring the bad news but you are not going to find a £400 laptop that can play games. There is a necessary overhead with laptops and the first real gaming laptops (i.e. that will play most of your games at low/medium settings decently) start at £520 at least. It's just the way it works.

I know these laptops are cheap, but these will do anything you want (playing movies, browsing, dvd burning, etc ...) EXCEPT gaming. Yes, laptop gaming has a price. And no, there is no workaround except saving a couple hundred pounds and getting a better laptop.