Laptop Megathread: Your laptop doesn't have Haswell? More like Hasbeen~

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > Laptop Megathread: Your laptop doesn't have Haswell? More like Hasbeen~

Red Bones: Aug 9, 2012; "I think he's a bad enough person to stay ghost through his sheer love of child-killing."

I'm planning on replacing my old laptop soon. I do a mix of low-end indie gaming, a lot of word processing, and photoshop and digital painting work. At the moment my current laptop is a bit too crappy to handle photoshop and digital painting programs without some annoying lag.

Are there any laptops below 2kg that are able to handle image editing and allow me to actually play some mid-range modern games? I tend to look into gaming laptops as they largely have the same technical requirements that are needed for image editing/media software. At the moment I'm weighing up the choice of buying a Razer Blade 15 or MSI GS65 Stealth, which would be able to handle all of those tasks but are still in a weight range (2kg) that would make them a bit annoying to travel with. The other option that I can see is a Razer Stealth 13, which is light enough to be very easy to carry, but I don't know if it has the technical specs to actually do much productive image editing work. Does anyone know if I could comfortably do a lot of photoshop work on the Stealth 13? I have been looking over reviews of it but they always just talk about whether it can run games or not, rather than how it would handle creative work.

# ¿ Aug 21, 2019 14:21

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# ¿ Apr 24, 2024 07:59

Red Bones: Aug 9, 2012; "I think he's a bad enough person to stay ghost through his sheer love of child-killing."

DrDork posted:

For the Blade Stealth, the dGPU is roughly twice as strong as using an integrated iGPU on a modern Intel CPU. So Photoshop will run better...but still nowhere near what a "real" GPU could do for you. Hard to say whether that's good enough, considering your other desires and what you've been dealing with on your current laptop. If you want a 13" laptop, though, it's probably about as good as you're going to get for your uses.

If you want a Razer Blade, I've got one up on SA Mart until I return it tomorrow. It's a solid laptop with a decent screen and great build quality. Much like the MSI you're looking at, actual battery life even with light use will be around 4 hours. Both of those laptops have rather strong performance, but honestly are probably overkill unless your Photoshop files are massive.

Both the Dell XPS 15 and Lenovo X1 Extreme gen 2 would also likely be good choices, as they have a GPU that's good enough to give Photoshop a good acceleration boost, while also having best in class build quality, great screens, and in the case of the X1E, is down around 1.5kg. Both also get substantially better battery life than the Blade / MSI.

Did you have a specific price range you were trying to hit, or any other requirements?

Thanks for the info! I'm from the UK so my price range is around �1500 max, although I can go over for something that meets all my needs. Screen colour accuracy is maybe a bit more of a priority than it would be in a gaming context because it helps in printing digital work, but it's really the weight that is the biggest thing. My current laptop is a 2.3kg mid-range 15.6" Lenovo from 2014, and having to lug it around during my degree wasn't great for my spine. Do you find that the X1 is meaningfully lighter than the Blade you bought? Ideally I want something light enough where I can, say, go work in a library for a while with my laptop and some books in a bag, and then go somewhere else afterwards without feeling like I need to drop my computer back at my apartment first. I don't know if the X1 would do that and the Blade wouldn't.

# ¿ Aug 21, 2019 15:35

Red Bones: Aug 9, 2012; "I think he's a bad enough person to stay ghost through his sheer love of child-killing."

Dr. Fishopolis posted:

just fyi, Photoshop cares a hell of a lot more about single core CPU performance than anything else, and gives very few shits about GPU speed. It's helpful to have a dGPU for it, but it doesn't affect every workflow and the actual speed of the GPU really, really doesn't matter. RAM is way more important if you're doing heavy lifting.

DrDork posted:

My assumption was that he was asking specifically about dGPU laptops because his workflow benefits from it, but you're right in general. Thing is, most all of those laptops are gonna be super close to each other in single-thread performance, since there's basically no reason to get anything other than a 8750H/9750H. Multi-core breaks 'em out a little, but not by a whole lot generally, and not in a way that's likely to impact PS performance much. Same deal with RAM: they're almost all DDR4-2666 (though apparently the Blade 2019, at least, can support 3200Mhz RAM; unsure about the others).

Also worth taking a gander at is the new MSI "Creator" line that just popped up: https://www.laptopmag.com/articles/msi-prestige-14-specs-price
The price seems very fair for the specs, a 1650 is more than enough to accelerate PS and whatever indy games you want, and 100% Adobe RGB with <2 dE out of the box is fantastic (link says 100% sRGB, everywhere else says 100% Adobe RGB). And at under 3lbs, it's about as light as you're going to get for a laptop capable of actually doing much of anything. I'd probably give it a shot just for the screen alone.

To be honest, I don't have a huge amount of technical knowledge so I didn't know the exact impact GPUs had on image editing, so this is very useful information, thank you!

The 14" MSI looks interesting but I can also buy a similar 14" Lenovo, the P43s, which also comes with an option for a 100% Adobe RGB screen, and as Lenovos are (I think?) a bit more reliably built and they have good keyboards, I would pick that over the MSI. I guess I will go find a laptop store and figure out whether the X1 Extreme or the P43s is a better fit for me for size and weight.

For the different GPUs, with the current laptop I can basically only run indie games, and now it is several years old even those can lag if they are more graphics and CPU heavy. If I want to buy a machine that can comfortably run say, the 2018 Assassin's creed at medium settings at >30fps, what kind of minimum CPU and GPU and RAM specs should I be looking for? Is that even feasible without comprimising other features in a laptop? What would the Lenovo P43s be able to handle with 16gb RAM and a NVIDIA Quadro P520; 2GB GDDR5 graphics card?

# ¿ Aug 22, 2019 13:53

Red Bones: Aug 9, 2012; "I think he's a bad enough person to stay ghost through his sheer love of child-killing."

What is the customer support and build quality like for MSI laptops? I'm considering buying the new MSI Prestige 14 once it's been out long enough to have some proper reviews written about it, but I know the gaming laptops they make are more on the cheap end of the market. Ideally I don't want to buy something that will just drop dead in a couple of years.

# ¿ Oct 16, 2019 19:02

Red Bones: Aug 9, 2012; "I think he's a bad enough person to stay ghost through his sheer love of child-killing."

Is there any indication of how long it'll take for the new AMD chips and the next generation of intel chips to filter into the laptop market? And when in the year do new models tend to get announced in general? I'm thinking of buying the Thinkpad X1E2 in the next couple of months, but I don't want to drop a ton of money on it and then find out there's something coming out in March that would do everything better for only a slightly higher price. Or a smaller form factor, as I'd rather have a 14" machine but there's not really anything that is very reliable with a dedicated graphics card at that size.

# ¿ Nov 20, 2019 20:18

Red Bones: Aug 9, 2012; "I think he's a bad enough person to stay ghost through his sheer love of child-killing."

Shrimp or Shrimps posted:

14" Asus laptop with thin bezels with AMD 4000 chips and RTX 2060 Max-Q with a high refresh screen (120hz), or you can get 60hz 1440p.

IIRC this will be the most gaming-performant 14" device, no? Sits pretty high on the footprint-to-performance curve, probably higher than the Stealth 13 with the 1650MQ.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_v5IzvVTw7A

Not feeling those led holes though, that's going to get so filthy over time. I'd slap a skin on it first thing.

A bunch of the laptops in Asus' proart lineup are ROG laptops with slightly different styling, too, so it might be that if you give it six months you'll be able to buy this with a plain lid and slightly less gamer-y styling as the 'proart 14' or something.

# ¿ Jan 7, 2020 20:28

Red Bones: Aug 9, 2012; "I think he's a bad enough person to stay ghost through his sheer love of child-killing."

Prices for the 14" ASUS gaming laptops got leaked. CAD$1,699 (~US$1,239) for a 14" with the GTX 1660 Ti Max-Q, and CAD$2,499 (~US$1,822) for the 14" with the RTX 2060 Max-Q. Although when they were announced it was said that there would be slightly cheaper models without the lightup display on the back of the case, so it might be possible to buy them for $50 less at some point, I suppose.

# ¿ Mar 11, 2020 22:35

Red Bones: Aug 9, 2012; "I think he's a bad enough person to stay ghost through his sheer love of child-killing."

I'll buy one when I see a version with the 1660Ti and the WQHD screen in black. The preorders in the UK seem to only have the WQHD in Black with the 2060 and I'd rather save the money. It's nice to know it doesn't have any massive glaring flaws though.

# ¿ Mar 30, 2020 21:12

Red Bones: Aug 9, 2012; "I think he's a bad enough person to stay ghost through his sheer love of child-killing."

I have had a lenovo ideapad since around 2016 and apart from a period between 2017-2018 where it would occasionally shut off unexpectedly (never figured out why and it has stopped doing it since), it has held up very well. Kind of slow and heavy now though, compared to more modern machines.

# ¿ Apr 22, 2020 10:17

Red Bones: Aug 9, 2012; "I think he's a bad enough person to stay ghost through his sheer love of child-killing."

I got a G14 today and I assume that one of the fans isn't meant to permanently be making a horrible high-pitched whining sound? I'm already going through the returns process to get a replacement unit sent, I just wanted to check that when people were complaining that the fans were annoying, they just meant "the fans are almost always running", and didn't mean "the fans are always on, and they are so high pitched they give me tinnitus".

# ¿ Jul 27, 2020 19:46

Red Bones: Aug 9, 2012; "I think he's a bad enough person to stay ghost through his sheer love of child-killing."

thanks for the info! It looks like mine was made in April. and yeah, I bought it from a local retailer so the return should go fine, I've already been told if the issue persists after a factory reset they'll refund or provide a replacement, and it did so :shrug:

. In a non-broken unit, is the idling fan noise loud enough to, say, be disruptive if I'm using it for word processing or internet browsing in a cafe or a library? Asking for 2021 when I can go to either of those things again.

# ¿ Jul 27, 2020 20:22

Red Bones: Aug 9, 2012; "I think he's a bad enough person to stay ghost through his sheer love of child-killing."

etalian posted:

I'm very satisfied with the laptop so far and it's also tough to find a comparable value for a new laptop with this fast of a CPU,16GB,1GB SSD, 2060 GPU all for $1450. It's does require some setting tweaking and other playtime out of the box to optimize performance.

The US price is very low, in the UK that model goes for $2600 (with the Ryzen 9) and $2350 (with the Ryzen 7).

# ¿ Jul 31, 2020 15:24

Red Bones: Aug 9, 2012; "I think he's a bad enough person to stay ghost through his sheer love of child-killing."

I bought and then had to return a G14 because of a busted fan. I'm just looking for a portable (sub-2kg, ideally 14" or so) laptop that can do fairly complicated 2D photoshop and 2D digital painting work and smoothly run indie games like Obra Dinn or Firewatch. I realised that the only AAA PC game I'm actually interested in coming up is Diablo 4, so I'm not sure if I really need a gaming laptop when I can buy something cheaper and buy a Switch with the excess money if I want to play stuff. I was planning on going back to university next year and using it in lectures/libraries so I'm not sure if I want to buy a G14 if I have to have the fans running all the time, or invalidate my warranty installing something that messes with the BIOS to switch the fans off when it's running on batteries.

If I buy something like the HP Envy 360 (13", Ryzen 4700, 16GB RAM) or a similar small laptop with a Ryzen 4700, what kind of performance can I expect out of it? Can I smoothly run low-end 3D games or edit a print-resolution image without photoshop lagging whenever I switch layers? That's all I really want out of a computer these days. I wish the G14 had an art model, I'd happily trade some performance for quieter fan settings and a more colour-accurate screen.

# ¿ Aug 25, 2020 20:40

Red Bones: Aug 9, 2012; "I think he's a bad enough person to stay ghost through his sheer love of child-killing."

dog nougat posted:

I'm in the market for a new laptop after not having a computer for several years.

I'd like to spend less than $800-$1000 if possible.

My use case is scanning and color correcting artwork and images in general, creating relatively simple vector images, and dabbling in digital illustration in photoshop or some analog as i don't feel like paying for the stupid adobe subscription. I dont really need it to play games, but it'd be a nice bonus to run some older stuff/strategy games i guess.

The HP Envy X360 w/ Ryzen 7 looks like it fits the bill, but is integrated graphics only. I don't know how well that does or doesn't affect image processing software these days. Beyond that I'm not really even sure what i should be looking for.

I saw this model today which is meant to come out around October and might fit the bill. Acer ConceptD 3, comes in 14" and 15.6", good screen for a cheaper laptop, mid-range-ish specs including a mid-range discrete graphics card, meant to retail for around $1000, maybe a little higher. If you want to wait around a month to see how the reviews for it look, it might suit you? There's always going to be compromises at a lower pricepoint, but it does look as if Acer is prioritising the needs of a customer looking to do content-creation work.

Also if you don't want to pay a subscription fee for Adobe, Clipstudio Paint is a very good alternative software for digital art and it's 50% off for a permanent license until Sept 8th. Pro (for painting and drawing single images) is $25 and EX (for animation and creating multiple-page PDFs, comics etc) is $109.

# ¿ Sep 6, 2020 14:15

Red Bones: Aug 9, 2012; "I think he's a bad enough person to stay ghost through his sheer love of child-killing."

Is Acer quality control and warranty and so on that bad? I was planning on buying an Acer soon, they have a 14" laptop I want and the 14" market is sparse enough that there aren't many alternatives.

I'd buy the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i pro instead but it's been sitting on the Lenovo website with "coming soon" and no clear release date next to it for the last month.

# ¿ Nov 25, 2020 10:58

Red Bones: Aug 9, 2012; "I think he's a bad enough person to stay ghost through his sheer love of child-killing."

Does anybody know what the build quality and warranty/service quality is like for Schenker/XMG laptops? If I'm buying within Europe?

# ¿ Dec 3, 2020 20:28

Red Bones: Aug 9, 2012; "I think he's a bad enough person to stay ghost through his sheer love of child-killing."

ant mouth posted:

I am looking for a new windows laptop. I recently got a new job and have to return the xps 15 9570 I have been using for the past two years. I use Rhino 3D, ZBrush, Blender, Nuke, Premiere, After Effects, Photoshop, and Reality Capture (photogrammetry software). I model, process scan data, rotoscope/composite, edit video, and render. I favor stability, good QC, and support. A coworker recently picked up the new xps 17. It is the same size as my 15 but felt a little heavier. I'm not entirely sold on it but it did seem nice.

Budget: 2000-3000
RAM: 16-32gb
Storage: 1T or smaller + expandable.
Graphics: An RTX card would be great but not totally necessary.
Screen: I need accurate color, but rather not go 4k.

HP has the zbook line, Asus has the ProArt line and Acer has the ConceptD line. Those are all creative-oriented workstation laptop lines and I think the higher end models tend to come with calibrated screens.

I can't remember if the other manufacturers have similar lines. I know in Europe lenovo sells a few "creator" branded variants of its laptops with calibrated screens too. I think MSI also sells "creator" branded laptops?

You could also buy one of those Wacom tablets with a compute unit that turns it into a giant tablet PC but I have no idea what those are like to actually use. I think I saw someone with one at an airport once.

# ¿ Dec 14, 2020 17:06

Red Bones: Aug 9, 2012; "I think he's a bad enough person to stay ghost through his sheer love of child-killing."

When is the CES announced stuff actually going to be available to buy? I have seen a bunch of laptops in 2020 I was interested in get announced as releasing on X month and then not actually be available to purchase until 3 months later. I don't follow tech news that often, so dunno if it's because everything was hosed by the pandemic or if giving very inaccurate launch dates is just standard practice for some bizarre reason.

iirc the G14 was announced CES 2020 and it wasn't available to buy until July or August, at least in the UK.

# ¿ Jan 13, 2021 23:13

Red Bones: Aug 9, 2012; "I think he's a bad enough person to stay ghost through his sheer love of child-killing."

LibCrusher posted:

Ima go the other way and say that a budget gaming laptop like a g7-15 would be best for video editing once they strip out all the dumbass gamer bloatware.

I would assume video editing requires a very colour-accurate screen, though, and some gaming laptops don't prioritise that.

# ¿ Jan 20, 2021 09:04

Red Bones: Aug 9, 2012; "I think he's a bad enough person to stay ghost through his sheer love of child-killing."

There's an article here stating the new ASUS G15 has a feature in the settings that allows the fans to be actually 100% switched off in silent mode. Is there any info on whether that will be in the 2021 G14 too? It was one of the things that put me off buying it last year.

# ¿ Jan 26, 2021 14:53

Red Bones: Aug 9, 2012; "I think he's a bad enough person to stay ghost through his sheer love of child-killing."

Harvey Baldman posted:

MY GIRLFRIEND has been using my old Surface Pro 3 laptop and pen to do a lot of illustration work lately. She seems to like it, but says it can be sluggish or prone to locking up on her sometimes. I've had the thing ages, not a surprise.

I'd like to get an upgrade for her, but I'm not sure where to go looking. I know from watching her use it that she'd prefer an all-in-one kind of setup, meaning computer and tablet and pen all in one. Do you guys have any recommendations? The newer Surface Pro machines don't look too bad...

If you want to go super high end, Wacom sells 13" and 15" all in one tablet PCs that are essentially cintiqs with a PC built in. Expensive, though.

# ¿ Feb 4, 2021 13:43

Red Bones: Aug 9, 2012; "I think he's a bad enough person to stay ghost through his sheer love of child-killing."

bull3964 posted:

Goddamnit, I think I'm going to buy a dual screen laptop.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iWh1gEKqL7g

I wonder if they could repurpose that secondary screen lifting/airflow mechanism for a single screen laptop. If you used it to raise up the keyboard deck on a regular laptop you might get a more comfortable angle for keyboard usage and the performance bump from the better airflow it provides.

I think in general it's cool that Asus has been more experimental than a lot of laptop manufacturers in terms of weird form factors and such, and after several years they've developed a viable model for a dual screen laptop. It's definitely sitting in the same market segment as those bulky 15" and 17" gaming laptops and workstations that cost three grand, are exclusively used plugged in, and get moved between desks and offices and so on. But if I was shopping in that market segment, I'd think about buying one.

# ¿ Feb 4, 2021 22:05

Red Bones: Aug 9, 2012; "I think he's a bad enough person to stay ghost through his sheer love of child-killing."

I bought a new HP Envy 14 to replace my old Lenovo from 2014 this week. I'm gonna test it out this weekend and maybe return it and buy the 2021 Zephyrus G14 instead if it can't run the art software I want it to, I'm not sure. The screen is really nice, and I didn't even realise it was a touchscreen.

Has anyone bought the ROG Flow 13? I had zero interest in it until this HP showed up, but now I've actually tried a laptop with a touchscreen for the first time in my life, I kind of want the dumb 2-in-1 baby ROG laptop. It looks pretty solid aside from the battery life. Is there any future in the proprietary port they're using to hook it up to the external graphics card? Or is it going to be made redundant in a year or two by improved thunderbolt ports?

# ¿ Apr 23, 2021 19:18

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# ¿ Apr 24, 2024 07:59

Red Bones: Aug 9, 2012; "I think he's a bad enough person to stay ghost through his sheer love of child-killing."

Cicero posted:

Is there such a thing as a basic gaming laptop with a webcam that's < 15" screen size and is at least sort of thin and light?

Acer Triton 300 se is the only thing that ticks all of those boxes on the market atm iirc. Its 14", got a webcam, got a gtx 3060.

Other than that, the biggest graphic card on a 14" laptop is a GTX 1650. XMG / schenker sells one, and the Hp envy 14 and the rog flow 13 fall into that category.

I'd advise just buying a little portable webcam and an Asus G14 though tbh, for what you're looking for. Its not like webcams are particularly heavy, you can just keep it in the laptop bag.

# ¿ May 10, 2021 11:39

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > Laptop Megathread: Your laptop doesn't have Haswell? More like Hasbeen~