Need a Laptop for College

[saxguy67]

Title says it all, I need a laptop for college. I'd like to keep the price around or under $2000. I'm not a huge fan of apple macbooks (had one and want something different). My only request is that it is slim and powerful with a 15ish inch screen.

Besides this, I am also wondering if it is worth getting a higher screen resolution laptop (4k) instead of a 1080p screen. Would there be much of a noticeable difference?

 

[TheFinalEpic]

Apple macs are overpriced pieces of junk IMO, they lack performance and make up with small form factor (which you pay premium for).


Get 1080P, 4k does not matter in a laptop and it is a gimmick at best. All it does is consume more GPU power on your integrated graphics than it has to. Get a duo core at around 2.0-3.0 ghz each (quad core will just consume more power/ most laptops are duo core anyway, even the expensive ones), i5 will server you fine as i7 on laptops don't mean much, then 8gb (I go for 16gb ram to be safe but you will rarely even reach the 8gb ). The speed of ram does not matter in most cases but most will come with 1600 mhz, which is the universal "sweet spot" for ram.


If you can GET AN SSD No matter how much ram or CPU power you have, if you have a hard drive, your laptop will feel like a slugghsih 10 year old computer, but with an SSD, you feel like you got a premium computer.

If you can't find one with an SSD, buy one with a hard drive, then buy a 850 evo 256 gb (90 dollars) and replace it, you'll have to take apart your laptop which is quite easy imo but daunting to new people. So if you dont want to do that, try to get one with an SSD.


I got a gaming rig at home and a laptop for school. The specs for the laptop is i5-5200u (2.2 ghz Duo core), 16 gb 1600 mhz gskill ram, 850 evo 256 gb, 17 inch screen. It's blazing fast with no hick ups whats so ever from any tasks. Costed me 550 dollars not including taxes.

 

[Solandri]

It's tough to say since you don't give us much information to work off of. What are you studying in college? What tasks do you need the laptop to do? How important is gaming to you? What sort of battery life do you need?

Based on "slim and powerful with a 15ish inch screen" and the $2000 budget (which is a lot), I'd say look at the Dell XPS 15 and HP Spectre x360 15. They are both around the weight of the 15" MBP (4.2 - 4.4 lbs), about 1-2 pounds lighter than most 15.6" laptops (the MBP is 15.4").

http/www.notebookcheck.net/Dell-XPS-15-9550-Core-i7-FHD-Notebook-Review.158875.0.html
http/www.notebookcheck.net/HP-Spectre-x360-15-ap011dx-Convertible-Review.159134.0.html

For "powerful" you should get a quad core (probably i7, but there are now i5 quads for laptops). But be aware that they put a serious dent in battery life. The MBP and XPS 15 manage to get decent battery life from a quad core by including massive 90+ Wh batteries. Most 15" laptops with a "normal" battery (around 40-50 Wh) will only get about 4-5 hours battery life with a quad core.

4k resolution isn't as important on PCs as it is on a Mac. Windows uses subpixel rendering for fonts (called ClearType). That essentially triples the horizontal resolution, so a 1920x1080 screen acts more like a 5760x1080 screen.
https/www.grc.com/ctwhat.htm

The higher resolutions are more important on a Mac because OS X doesn't do subpixel rendering. One of the core markets for the Macs are page layout artists. They need to know *exactly* what the text on a page will look like before it's printed. Subpixel rendering will shift fonts slightly left or right to line them up with the subpixels. That's unacceptable for professional layout work so Apple opted to use more precise (but blurrier) font anti-aliasing. As a result, the only way to improve the appearance of fonts on a Mac is to use a higher resolution screen.

So generally I recommend going with a 1080p screen on a PC laptop. The exception would be if you do extensive graphics work like Photoshop. The extra resolution can help there (can view a larger photo at native resolution, without needing to rescale it for the screen resolution). Or if you do a lot of programming and your eyes are good enough to read tiny fonts. Programmers generally like being able to see lots of code at once.

 

[Jangerr]

I got the 9550 with i7, 4K, 960m and 16gb ram. It's incredibly good with just one big problem: the fan is almost constantly on. It really is pretty silent, so it won't bother you at home, but in class it's too noisy (for my taste). I bought the best setup because I don't have a pc anymore, but if you want to use it for college, get an i5 and no gpu.

 

[saxguy67]

It's tough to say since you don't give us much information to work off of. What are you studying in college? What tasks do you need the laptop to do? How important is gaming to you? What sort of battery life do you need?

Based on "slim and powerful with a 15ish inch screen" and the $2000 budget (which is a lot), I'd say look at the Dell XPS 15 and HP Spectre x360 15. They are both around the weight of the 15" MBP (4.2 - 4.4 lbs), about 1-2 pounds lighter than most 15.6" laptops (the MBP is 15.4").

http/www.notebookcheck.net/Dell-XPS-15-9550-Core-i7-FHD-Notebook-Review.158875.0.html
http/www.notebookcheck.net/HP-Spectre-x360-15-ap011dx-Convertible-Review.159134.0.html

For "powerful" you should get a quad core (probably i7, but there are now i5 quads for laptops). But be aware that they put a serious dent in battery life. The MBP and XPS 15 manage to get decent battery life from a quad core by including massive 90+ Wh batteries. Most 15" laptops with a "normal" battery (around 40-50 Wh) will only get about 4-5 hours battery life with a quad core.

4k resolution isn't as important on PCs as it is on a Mac. Windows uses subpixel rendering for fonts (called ClearType). That essentially triples the horizontal resolution, so a 1920x1080 screen acts more like a 5760x1080 screen.
https/www.grc.com/ctwhat.htm

The higher resolutions are more important on a Mac because OS X doesn't do subpixel rendering. One of the core markets for the Macs are page layout artists. They need to know *exactly* what the text on a page will look like before it's printed. Subpixel rendering will shift fonts slightly left or right to line them up with the subpixels. That's unacceptable for professional layout work so Apple opted to use more precise (but blurrier) font anti-aliasing. As a result, the only way to improve the appearance of fonts on a Mac is to use a higher resolution screen.

So generally I recommend going with a 1080p screen on a PC laptop. The exception would be if you do extensive graphics work like Photoshop. The extra resolution can help there (can view a larger photo at native resolution, without needing to rescale it for the screen resolution). Or if you do a lot of programming and your eyes are good enough to read tiny fonts. Programmers generally like being able to see lots of code at once.

Ill be majoring in engineering (undecided at the moment). I'll be using it for manly class work and maybe some light gaming. I have a great desktop computer, which I will most likely take up with me to the dorms if I want to play games. Another question that I'm wondering is if I want touch screen capabilities. I think it would be nice to be able to take notes, for example on the x360 folded flat like a tablet, but at the same time I like taking notes the old fashioned way with paper and pencil.

I'm also looking at the asus ux501vw.... Whats your opinion on that laptop? Ive also looked at the 2016 razer blade (14"). It seems like a decent laptop but in past forums everyone seems to hate it.

Another benefit of the dell xps laptops, is that the bookstore at my college sells them, along with a 4 year protection plan. It isn't a deciding factor but would be pretty nice...