Good $750 - $850 laptop?

J.D

J.D

No Stranger To Love
So my dad broke my laptop about two years ago, and finally he's offered to buy me a laptop, with money my dying grandmother gave him specifically to buy me a new laptop. Of course, I'm hella excited. Essentially I want a laptop that can run Winamp, Firefox, and Team Fortress 2/Minecraft maxed out simultaneously; that'd be just grand. The ability to run Skyrim would be nice too. I have a preference for ASUS, and a severe hate for anything Gateway or HP. Anyway, any laptop that could fit all these needs would be awesome, and I'd greatly appreciate the help! :awesomejd:
 
A 14" Dell Vostro 3450 with an i5 2450M and a Radeon 6630m (with 1 GB dedicated VRAM) is right in the middle of well below your price range, leaving you headroom for buying more toys like RAM and maybe an SSD. :awesome:

Running TF2, max settings:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xb8qg5Bg ... ure=relmfu

Check out the Dell Outlet and Lenovo Outlet. They sell new laptops at a discount for a variety of reasons. (They could be from canceled orders, scratch-and-dents, or customer returns which saw very little use and came back within a month. The product page should tell you.)

General laptop shopping rules apply:

- Home-market laptops like you find in the big box stores are flax. No exceptions.
- Business laptops are awesome.
- If you're seriously considering a Vaio, just buy a Macbook.
- If you care more about performance than portability, you should be shipping for desktops.
- Upgrade the RAM yourself because it's much cheaper than upgrading through the OEM's customize tool.

e: Missed the sale price at first, but its' right in the middle of your price range at normal prices.

e2: An Asus U31 with similar specs is about $800, but it's a somewhat smaller laptop than the Dell.

e3: Also if my iMac G3 can play MP3s while browsing the modern Internet, any laptop with a real processor now will run them behind games just fine. :p
 
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Replace that Latutide with any other decent used Thinkpad, Latitude of HP Elitebook off ebay.
 
Any other requirements? All you really said is you want it to be able to max TF2 while playing music. What about size, battery life, disc drive, etc?
Are you looking for a certain screen resolution, or is 1366x768px good enough? At that res, pretty much any gaming laptop from the last 2 or 3 years should be able to max TF2. My ASUS G60-VX will play almost anything smoothly maxed or close to it at 1366x768. It has a 2.8GHz C2D (2.1GHz originally), 4GB RAM, GTX 260m. You can get one for about $500 on ebay if that's good enough and you'd rather spend the rest on something else. Any ASUS G-series with an i5 or i7 should be able to do even better if you want to use all of your budget.
 
I would certainly recommend an Asus G73. However, they seem to be kinda scarce right now. A refurbished one should be right up your price alley though. If you prefer a smaller lappy, the G53 is excellent as well. (And the G74 is God tier, but a bit out of your price range)

All that said, quite frankly, if I had that budget, as much as it pains me to say it, I would get an m11x.
 
Mako321 said:
http://www.sagernotebook.com/index.php?page=product_info&model_name=NP3260
Click to expand...
Holy flax, this is pretty awesome. Can anyone vouch for this?

And Sam, my stepbrother got an M11x a couple months ago, and I wasn't very impressed with it at all.

vskid3 said:
Any other requirements? All you really said is you want it to be able to max TF2 while playing music. What about size, battery life, disc drive, etc?
Click to expand...
I'm not too concerned about any other requirements, although matte screens are much much nicer than glossy screens.
 
And Sam, my stepbrother got an M11x a couple months ago, and I wasn't very impressed with it at all.
Click to expand...
Yeah, I understand. With that said, when I typed it, they were really the best small gaming capable laptop. Then I learned of Clevo's new box. It is glorious. 11.6" netbook chassis, i5-2450m standard, up to i7-2640m, and a *Can'tSayThisOnTV*ing GTX 650m 2gb gddr5 standard. With optimus of course. 8gb of ddr3 1333 standard. Basic model is $794.00.
http://www.xoticpc.com/sager-np6110-clevo-w110er-eta-4222012-p-4343.html
 
J.D said:
And Sam, my stepbrother got an M11x a couple months ago, and I wasn't very impressed with it at all.

vskid3 said:
Any other requirements? All you really said is you want it to be able to max TF2 while playing music. What about size, battery life, disc drive, etc?
Click to expand...
I'm not too concerned about any other requirements, although matte screens are much much nicer than glossy screens.
Click to expand...
Which M11x? If it was an R1, performance isn't super, but overall its a great mobile gaming laptop. The R3 is a beast and it would be one of my top picks if I could only have one laptop.

I don't know of any ASUS gaming laptops with matte screens. If you want a matte screen, bic's suggestions are probably the only ones you'll find with matte screens as options (that Sager has a matte 1080p option). For some reason, laptop manufacturers think the average consumer would rather see what's behind them than what is on the screen.

EDIT: That little Sager is sex (at least on paper). A much better deal than the M11x R3 (unfortunately, an 1366x768 mirror is still the only option). If the build quality is good, it would probably be my number one pick for a small laptop with some kick.
 
I looked up the benchmark for the mobile graphics that are on that laptop awhile ago - it's able to run Skyrim at Medium settings at 40FPS IIRC.
 
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