Notebook for general use and games

[wolfnails]

I've been out of the notebook market for a long while and used to average or higher notebooks having an additional GPU (Nividia/AMD). It seems now there are some great notebooks for $400-500 range but use only onboard I5's GPU, while $800+ range you start getting the additional Nividia GPU.

While the main purpose of notebook will be for general use, I would like to have some possibility for playing games on the go. I have a desktop PC for my main gaming/photo needs. I'm trying to set my expectations of what I could do before buying.

Example: (ASUS F556UA-AS54 15.6-inch Full-HD Laptop (Core i5, 8GB RAM, 256GB SSD)
https/www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B01CGGOUJM

Could this run the occasional Skyrim, Diablo3 type games on mid or low setting? Could it run Lightroom 6?

Thanks again in advance for everyone's help!

 

[jaguarskx]

See link below for some benchmarks. Skyrim is not listed, but the game will run. Lightroom is not list, but according to Adobe, the Intel HD 520 (see "510+") is supported.

http/www.notebookcheck.net/Intel-HD-Graphics-520.149940.0.html

https/helpx.adobe.com/lightroom/kb/lightroom-gpu-faq.html


With regards to Skyim, the Intel HD 520 should be able to play it. Last year a friend of mine wanted to buy Skyrim. His laptop which is basically the same as my laptop which has an i5-4200u, but no dedicated GPU so he had to rely on the Intel HD 4400.

I basically setup Skyrim to run on my laptop using only the Intel HD 4400 to let him test it out with a mix of low and medium settings (pretty sure textures were set to high) with shadows and anti-aliasing disabled (because they are rather demanding) at 1366x768 and 1600x900 resolution. I made changes to the SkyrimPref.ini file to adjust the graphic settings. It has been awhile, but I believe at 768p the game ran between 30 FPS to 50 FPS, while at 900p performance generally ranged between 25 FPS to 40 FPS. It ran decently enough for him at 900p so he decided to buy the game.

The Intel HD 520 is a bit more powerful than the Intel HD 4400. It is difficult to say how much better performance will be since it can vary from game to game.

 

[jaguarskx]

For not much more money ($550), you can buy the following Acer Aspire E 15 which basically has the same specs as the Asus, but it has a dedicated nVidia 940MX GPU.

http/www.amazon.com/Acer-Aspire-NVIDIA-Windows-E5-575G-53VG/dp/B01DT4A2R4/ref=sr_1_1?s=pc&ie=UTF8&qid=1464372765&sr=1-1&keywords=acer+940mx

 

[wolfnails]

Thanks for the help both were great help!