Worth investing in a laptop right now since or wait for new AMD APU?

takion94

Honorable
Jan 21, 2013
2
0
10,510
Dear Tom's Hardware users,

My current laptop is starting to give up on me slowly but surely. Slow startup times, weird screen flickers, battery only goes for like an hour even with light use etc etc. It still works and I do think it will be good enough for a couple years for office/watching videos, but the performance is just lacking for my needs. I'm planning on giving this laptop to my mother once I get a new one.

It's a HP Pav DV6 with:
i7-2670QM
8GB of DDR3 ram
HD 6750? Unsure about this. Nothing spectacular nonetheless.


So I ordered a new laptop but since AMD Ryzen has come along I started to doubt my decision.
The laptop will primarily be used for programming, school, watching movies and occasionaly gaming. The gaming part is mostly indie games where there's no need for gtx1080 performance, but more like meh I could play gta 5 if I wanted to without too much trouble.

The laptop I ordered is a barebone Clevo N850HK1 with:
i7-7700HQ
GTX1050ti
and seperatly ordering a 512gigs of intel PCIE ssd and 16GB of DDR4 ram.


All around for 1100 euros. The price is really good for what I get, no doubt about that. But I'm having serious concerns if I should wait for a AMD Zen laptop with maybe Vega GPU? I can still cancel my order and I do think I can use my current laptop till the summer.. But I'm not confident if it will be worth the wait since I've read that AMD aren't really great on laptops.

TL DR: Should I invest in a new Kaby-lake laptop or wait till Raven Ridge APU/Vega laptops?

Edited out Ryzen, for a second I thought the architecture was called Ryzen. Replaces with the Raven Ridge APU.

Thanks for reading.
 
Solution
I would go with Kaby Lake. It's performance is well known and so is the GTX 1050 Ti.

Not sure how well the Zen architecture stacks up to Kaby Lake at this point in time. I generally do not look into benchmarks until processors have been released and NDA embargoes are no longer in effect. Having said that, AMD traditionally had problems with heat and power consumption for their laptop APUs. Whether or not they will solve it when Raven Ridge is released remains to be seen.

If Ryzen performs pretty well against Kaby Lake, that will not necessarily translate to Raven Ridge if AMD cannot reduce power consumption and heat generation. That means Raven Ridge APUs would need to run at lower clockspeeds in laptops.

If you are willing to wait...

takion94

Honorable
Jan 21, 2013
2
0
10,510


Right before you posted I realised what went wrong. Edited it out. Also, your input has minimal value in answering my question. You could've known what I ment. Thanks though!

 

DSzymborski

Distinguished
Moderator


If you vote down people and chew them out for not reading your mind, you simply discourage other people from wanting to help.
 
I would go with Kaby Lake. It's performance is well known and so is the GTX 1050 Ti.

Not sure how well the Zen architecture stacks up to Kaby Lake at this point in time. I generally do not look into benchmarks until processors have been released and NDA embargoes are no longer in effect. Having said that, AMD traditionally had problems with heat and power consumption for their laptop APUs. Whether or not they will solve it when Raven Ridge is released remains to be seen.

If Ryzen performs pretty well against Kaby Lake, that will not necessarily translate to Raven Ridge if AMD cannot reduce power consumption and heat generation. That means Raven Ridge APUs would need to run at lower clockspeeds in laptops.

If you are willing to wait it out for Raven Ridge laptops to be released, then I simply recommend you use that time to save up more money to buy a laptop with something more powerful than the GTX 1050Ti.
 
Solution

bifow2k18

Prominent
Jun 18, 2017
1
0
510
AMD RX580M for laptops are going to be a serious rival for GTX1070M but with lower price, I recommend u to wait, cause GTX10xx will go down in price with AMD RX & Ryzen release