Which of these gaming laptops would be better to purchase?

[End3RMan13]

So I've already got a pretty beefy PC, and I love it to bits. Because of reasons I'm going to be traveling a lot in a couple of weeks. I've been saving my money for a bit, and I'd like to continue gaming while traveling. While bringing my desktop is an option, I don't want to do it. It's simply to dangerous and to much of a hassle.

Cheaper by around 200 dollars: http/bit.ly/1QD0bYF

Better in a lot of ways, but a little out of my price range right now: http/bit.ly/1OkYAZO

I can make the money for the better one, but it might not be in time. Probably going to pawn old craptops if I should really get that one. If any Asus laptops or MSI laptops are better and cheaper, make me aware of those as well.

I want to be able to play Minecraft on high settings with shaders, although I already know both can do that to an extent at 30 FPS or more, so it really isn't much a big deal. Plus I don't use any other mods with minecraft when I do use shaders, so it really isn't that intensive anyway.

I primarily want to continue playing my heavier skyrim modpacks.

Probably some fallout 4 as well.

Maybe some Star Citizen later in the year, but I'll be back home so I have my desktop for that. Still would like to know how big the difference would be.

I also want to able to play DS3, although due to some bugs that's been having not sure how good either PC will be with that.

COD and CS:GO will run well no matter what. Can't believe I just used both of those titles in one sentence.


I need to be able to edit videos as well, so for this I thought I should probably go with the more expensive because of that 8 extra GB of RAM. The CPU' don't vary much, but the more expensive laptop has a noticeably better one. On newegg I realized that only one has a "turbo" speed listed, I assume that might be because of different CPUs?

I'm not very familiar with laptops or PCs in general, so I apologize for any mistakes I might have made.

 

[TechyInAZ]

Are you going to be doing a LOT of video editing? (Basically, is the video editing your going to do very demanding?)

Here is an MSI laptop that is not refurbished or open box, and has good specs for your gaming: http/www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834154112

The i5 is a quad core, and it has a GTX 960M for a very cheap price. This will easily suffice if the video editing you do isn't very demanding.

 

[End3RMan13]

@TechyInAZ

Probably not, it'll primarily be for gaming. Will the CPU be good enough for the skyrim mods I'm doing? Some I imagine will be very AI intensive, and I'm not clear on differences between I7s and I5s. My worries for this one and my cheaper one is the RAM, I know most of my games will be fine but I'm not sure about Star Citizen. I just don't know if SC will use more or not. I guess I can upgrade if not, or maybe install more RAM.

After comparing them, I've decided to go with yours. It has an extra USB port, which I really like because having two mice is fun.

What seriously sold me on it thought is that I did find the RAM was upgradable, and MSI even says how on their site.

Thanks

 

[TechyInAZ]

@TechyInAZ

Probably not, it'll primarily be for gaming. Will the CPU be good enough for the skyrim mods I'm doing? Some I imagine will be very AI intensive, and I'm not clear on differences between I7s and I5s. My worries for this one and my cheaper one is the RAM, I know most of my games will be fine but I'm not sure about Star Citizen. I just don't know if SC will use more or not. I guess I can upgrade if not, or maybe install more RAM.

After comparing them, I've decided to go with yours. It has an extra USB port, which I really like because having two mice is fun.

What seriously sold me on it thought is that I did find the RAM was upgradable, and MSI even says how on their site.

Thanks

Gaming actually has quite different requirements for CPUs than video editing. Because of how game engines work (at least for now), your typical game can only use 2 or 4 threads (cores) on your CPU. This is why everybody will recommend core I5s over Core I7s on the desktop front because the extra threads on the core i7 are useless in games.

Core i5s are quad cores only while Core i7s are quad cores with hyperthreading (8 threads). (Simply...think of them as 8 virtual cores)

As for modding, I don't know much about modding games (except really old games). From what I've researched, modding actually doesn't take much toll on your RAM as much as it does on your VRAM (video RAM for your GTX 960M). If you have more vram, the more you can mod. But again, I don't know much about modding, I could be missing some stuff.

The majority of MSI gaming notebooks do allow RAM and hard drive upgrades and make it really easy to do so. So if you need an extra 8GB of RAM, it's easy to swap/add in more RAM to that MSI notebook.

 

[1shado1]

Just curious, why did you consider the GL552 "better in many ways"?

 

[End3RMan13]

Just curious, why did you consider the GL552 "better in many ways"?

I guess in the end the specs aren't at all radically different, but the I7 and the 16 GB of RAM are what I was mostly talking about. All the other differences were rather minuscule.

 

[1shado1]

Just curious, why did you consider the GL552 "better in many ways"?

I guess in the end the specs aren't at all radically different, but the I7 and the 16 GB of RAM are what I was mostly talking about. All the other differences were rather minuscule.

Thanks! Agreed on the 16GB of RAM, but I THINK the CPU in the GL551 is still marginally superior to the 6700 in the GL552. If not, they are at least close enough to not make a difference in the real world. Although I could be mistaken...