Help me help a friend.

[Attila the Bun]

He wants to know which laptop to buy.

The two choices are an Acer with an i5 540m and intergrated graphics or a HP with a Turion II P540 with a AMD Mob HD5470 gpu. In all other respects the laptops are virtually identical including price.

He says they play games like SIMs and watch a fair few movies and the usual email/facebook etc.

I'm stuck on this one as these 2 seem to have balanced out strengths and weakness.

Any opinions?

[scaryjim]

Any opinions?

Don't buy an HP. I've had two in the past and I won't be buying a third.

How much are the notebooks he's looking at? Both sound like mild overkill for his needs, and something with either a lower-end AMD dual core and the 4200-series graphics, or a Core i3, would probably do the trick, tbh.

[Attila the Bun]

Don't buy an HP. I've had two in the past and I won't be buying a third.
How much are the notebooks he's looking at? .

£500.

Both sound like mild overkill for his needs, and something with either a lower-end AMD dual core and the 4200-series graphics, or a Core i3, would probably do the trick, tbh.

To be honest there is a bit of epeen going on here but as it's taken him 2 months to decide on 2 I'm not going to rock the boat Would the i5's integrated graphics be good enough for the latest SIMs do you think...I wouldn't know as I don't play the game (too much like eastenders)

[scaryjim]

Assuming it's on a similar playing field to the desktop integrated from the Core i3 / i5 600, then it should be OK with some of the details turned down.

But if you shop around carefully, you can find real bargains like this Lenovo IdeaPad G565. It's currently got £150 off, which means that for just £400 he'd get a Phenom II triple core processor, 4GB RAM and discreet Radeon 5470 graphics.

But hurry, they've only got 3 left

[Attila the Bun]

I suggested this exact offer but he wants to get it from a "shop" not an etailer...there's no helping some people...I will re-suggest this as it's damn good for the money.

[Jasp]

Notebookcheck reports the GMA HD (Intels) as producing 91fps on low settings in sims 3, 32fps on medium.

The 5470 DDR3 on the other hand 124fps on low, 28.5fps on medium when paired with a 330m which I would expect to beat the turion.

But if the 5470 is paired with GDDR5 in the 5470 it should easily beat the GMA HD.

[ik9000]

Asus or Dell are the only two PC laptop brands I'd consider - MacBook Pros too, but they don't come cheap.

[Attila the Bun]

No joy...he's going for one of the two I first mentioned because he can get 2 years warrenty fromJohn Lewis.

[ik9000]

draw a line in the sand that when it stops working in 2 months time you absolutely will not give him any technical support whatsoever, but rather say I told you so, I told you so, I told you so.

[Attila the Bun]

draw a line in the sand that when it stops working in 2 months time you absolutely will not give him any technical support whatsoever, but rather say I told you so, I told you so, I told you so.

I think that is why he's going with 2 year warrenty so he doesn't have to come to me and hear "I told you so, I told you so, I told you so"