Looking for decent gaming laptop under $800; is this a good fit?

[alawnchair]

I've been looking around for a desktop replacement that will allow me to play games such as Bioshock 2, Mass Effect 3, WoW on mediumish settings. One of my primary concerns is longevity; I'd like to get something that will be able to run new titles for at least the next two years. After playing around on the HP custom-build site for a while I ended up with the following:

-2nd generation Intel(R) Dual Core(TM) i5-2520M (2.5GHz, 3MB L3 Cache) with Turbo Boost up to 3.2 GHz
-1GB AMD Radeon(TM) HD 7690M GDDR5 Discrete Graphics(TM) [HDMI, VGA]
-8GB DDR3 System Memory (2 Dimm)
-750GB 7200 rpm Hard Drive
-15.6" High Definition HP LED Brightview (1366x768)
-Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit

with a total price of $760. Is this overkill for the kind of use I'm looking for, or is it about right? Will an i5 processor be able to handle newer games or should I go with an i7? Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

 

[mouse24]

I'm not to up to date on laptop cards but it seems that card does have issues with hp not updating drivers http/www.youtube.com/watch?v=LVu6M5bgYN8

But those are youtube comments and should be taken as such.

As to you question, will it play bioshock/mass effect/wow on medium, yes, very well I might add. I was playing wow on high @ 1920 x 1080 on a 5670.

 

[jaguarskx]

You will be fine with an i5 CPU. Most games will only use 2 cores. BF3 is one of the few games that can take advantage of more than 2 cores. If you do heavy multi-tasking, then getting a quad core would make sense. For example, I some times play games and encode videos at the same time on my desktop which has a quad core Q9450. I would never do that on my laptop which only has an i5-2410m.

 

[alawnchair]

After searching around a bit more I'm debating between the Lenovo Ideapad Y570($750):

-2nd generation Intel Core i7-2670QM Processor( 2.2GHz 1333MHz 6MB)
-NVIDIA GeForce GT 555M 1GB
-8.0GB PC3-10600 DDR3 SDRAM 1333 MHz
-500GB 7200rpm

and the Lenovo Ideapad Z570($600):

-2nd generation Intel Core i5-2450M Processor( 2.50GHz 1333MHz 3MB)
-NVIDIA GeForce GT 540M 1GB
-8.0GB PC3-10600 DDR3 SDRAM 1333 MHz
-750GB 5400rpm

Hard drive size isn't of great concern to me, I don't have large music/video collections or anything like that. Is it worth the extra $150 for the better video card and faster rpm hard drive in the y570?

Thank you for replying, I'm a bit clueless about this kind of thing so I appreciate your help.

 

[Guest]

buy the first one with 555m and i7

 

[tepigfan101]

That is a great laptop for the games you want to play. with a good processor and a good dram I think you should get it!