£500 Laptop for Games

[Rookie1986]

Hey guys,

I'm asking for a friend here, he's got about £500 to spend on a "gaming" laptop. I've tried to tell him that no laptop in his price range will play any modern games respectively and that a desktop system is the answer to his PC gaming but he is adamant that it must be a laptop. If he had about 3 times his budget I would point him towards a nice 17" Alienware but since this is not the case I'm not really sure what to recommend. I've seen a Dell Inspiron 15R and that's about as good as I can find and it still comes in at about £10 over his budget. I've tried to tell him that even saving and stretching his budget to £600-£700 would make a huge difference but he's very much a "I want it now" kinda guy. Are any of you guys able to help find him something that isn't total trash?

Thanks,
Rookie

[Trash Man]

Have a look at the Dell Outlet page.

I picked up this last month for £582

XPS L702x
Graphics : 3GB NVIDIA GeForce GT 555M Graphics Card
Carry Case : Not Included
English Windows 7 Professional
Silver Anodized Aluminum
AntiVirus: McAfee SecurityCenter 30 Day trial version
Processor: Intel Core i7-2670QM (2.20 GHz with Turbo Boost up to 3.10 GHz)
Display: 17.3-inch Wide FHD (1920 x 1080) WLED LCD
750 GB SATA Hard Drive (7200RPM)
Misc
Wireless: Intel Centrino Wireless-N 1030 (1x2 b/g/n+ Bluetooth Combo Card)
Back Up Media Not Included
Battery : Primary 9-cell 90W/HR LI-ION
8X DVD +/- RW DRIVE
6 GB Dual Channel DDR3 SDRAM 1333MHZ (2 DIMMs)
Misc
English Windows 7 Professional SP1 (64 Bit)
Misc
Certified Refurbished

If he does not mind a refurb, he will get a lot more for his money. You still get a 1yr warranty and you can extend to 3years if you wanted to.

[kalniel]

http://www.pcworld.co.uk/gbuk/hp-pav...84802-pdt.html

[Zhaoman]

Yup I would also recommend Dell Outlet. It has some amazing deals sometimes and you can't go too far wrong as a first port of call. How serious is he into his gaming? Onboard gpus from Intel and AMD are really quite impressive now; I got a Dell XPS 15 from the Outlet last summer for £360 with a Core i5 2410M and I can play Skyrim comfortably on medium settings on the HD3000 gpu.

[Golden Dragoon]

http://www.pcworld.co.uk/gbuk/hp-pav...84802-pdt.html

That seems very good for the price, the graphics ability of the cpu alone is good enough for alot of people, and a 7450 1gb as well should make it even better

[scaryjim]

... a 7450 1gb as well should make it even better

Apart from the 7450 apparently only being a 160 shader part, and therefore considerably weaker than the fGPU on the A8!

You should get a small boost from it in dual graphics, I guess, but frankly alongside an A8 APU it's a bit of a waste...

[Golden Dragoon]

I hadn't even noticed that, I simply assumed that they would stick a better dedicated chip in that the integrated, though without seeing benchmarks that may still be true, 160 shaders @750mhz with I assume a 128bit* memory bus to 1gb dedicated xxxmhz gddr* could still end up better than 400 shaders @444mhz with a 128bit shared bus with the processor @ 1333mhz

*according to google it is a 800mhz mem clock, but doesn't specify the bus witch or gddr type, so here are my quick calculations:
64bit gddr3@800mhz 12.8gbs
128bit gddr3@800mhz 25.6gbs
64bit gddr3@800mhz 25.6gbs
128bit gddr3@800mhz 51.2gbs

[kalniel]

It does bench OK, so I think it's not a bad option. Obviously, it's not even as powerful as a GT555, but then they're not available for the price. In that budget that's about the best you can get, and it will be able to play games (albeit not on especially high settings).

But yes, odd to put an extra chip in that's not really any more powerful than the APU. Not sure how well dual graphics mode works.

edit: OK, it's crossfire for DX10/11 basically. Should be quite good for some gaming then.

[neonplanet40]

Another dell outlet recommendation. You can get a very good laptop for 500! They usually come with an nvidia 550m which I have been able to play most games on

[007]

yes, dell outlet should be my 1st 'the value' choice too.

If you need laptop for gaming, look at it not only through the prism of specification since other things such as cooling , responsive enough display, reliability record are as much important.Gaming put a massive strain on almost all components and only quality ones can survive .Most laptops priced ~ £500 are just home multimedia systems and ARE NOT designed for heavy gaming.I wouldn't go for anything lower quality than Dell XPS but in reality, having such money to spend, I would probably just build a desktop.