Noob question: AMD Radeon R9 M265X vs. NVIDIA GeForce 740M

[hb4]

I'm fairly new to PC gaming and I can't really decipher the information currently out there comparing these two. I'm buying a new laptop and essentially can choose between these two. I'll probably have 12gb RAM and either a i5-4200U or a i7-4710HQ, depending how much money I have left over. If it matters, the display is a 15.6" diagonal and is 1920 x 1080. I'd really like to be able to run a game like battlefield 4 or skyrim on medium settings with like 40+ fps. Thanks so much for any guidance.

 

[IInuyasha74]

Hello

First, for CPUs, this will be easy to compare because they are the same maker and same architecture so that helps.
i5-4200U is a dual core, with hyper threading running at 2.6Ghz max.
i7-4710HQ is a quad core with hyper threading running at 3.5Ghz max.

For this, its pretty simple, higher the number the better. While the i7 is going to consume a lot more power and put off a lot more heat, it is going to have much higher performance. Making it a lot better for gaming.

For the Graphics cards, its a bit harder.
M9 M265X is made by AMD while the Geforce 740M is made by Nvidia. So the way they are built is drastically different and cannot be directly compared, so we have to rely a lot more on tests in games and other applications to know which is better.
Between these two the R9 265X is much faster and will give the best performance. Both of them can probably push more than 40 FPS on the two games you mentioned, but the R9 M265X will likely do it at high settings, while the other will have to use Medium settings.

The hard part in deciding comes to if the i7 CPU and the Nvidia GPU are in a laptop together, against the i5 CPU and the AMD GPU. The problem here is that you might get what is known as bottleneck. For example, even though the AMD GPU is faster, if the CPU it is working with is too slow, the final amount of FPS you get would likely be lower than the Nvidia GPU paired with an i7.

Long story short, if you can get the i7 and the AMD graphics card you will have a very fast laptop. On the other hand if you can only get the i7 with the Nvidia GPU, its likely going to be a better system to get still.