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I'm looking at getting a new laptop, as my three year old gaming laptop is now worse than a $200 Chromebook in CPU power, its NVidia GPU is significantly worse than the latest integrated Intel GPUs, etc. (I have an Alienware M11X.) The features I'm looking for are: 1. An i7 processor. 2. A GPU at least as powerful as an Intel Iris, with a decent heat-to-capability ratio. (ie. if I can double the speed at a cost of more than doubling the heat, I don't want to do that.) 3. A display with higher resolution than full HD. 4. 15" or smaller, smaller is preferred. 5. An SSD. 6. Lowest price I can get within these specs. Don't give much of a crap about battery life. Candidates examined include: Sager NP7338 (does everything right except tops out at full HD - this is currently the front runner) the new Alienware 13 (tops out at an i5 processor contrary to all the excited previews, price is kinda high anyway) Some kind of Zenbook (holy poo poo is it hard to find out the available specs of these fuckers. GPUs seem typically a bit weak, seems to have a very high "frustrated with bad quality control and warranty policy" user ratio.) Razer Blade (expensive, reportedly runs very hot, but meets all the criteria) Apple things (meet all of my prior stated goals like a boss, but they can't run all the games and I like to program on Windows) Any suggestions? (For context without looking things up, the Sager with 16GB of RAM, a 240GB SSD and a TB hard drive is <$1400. The Alienware 13 brought to comparable spec but with a higher resolution screen and a worse processor is about $1650. Razer to that kind of spec is ~$2200.)
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Nov 9, 2014 20:43
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system protocol posted:Lenovo Y40 and Lenovo Y50 are good gaming laptops that a lot of love from goons. I'm just not a big fan of it's squishy keyboard. Good suggestion though, a $700 one of those looks about price-per-performance comparable to the $1300 Sager. Edit: by which I mean, processor benchmarks a little over half the score, GPU is about equivalent, hybrid storage rather than proper SSD, half the RAM. So a lot of ~half, for ~half the price. They sure don't make it easy to meaningfully compare these things these days. roomforthetuna fucked around with this message at 23:00 on Nov 9, 2014 |
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Nov 9, 2014 22:57
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dissss posted:Why do you think you need an i7? If it is because you need four cores be aware that not all mobile i7s fit the bill as the lower voltage ones are all dual cores anyway. If I'd got the three years ago equivalent of a mid-range i7, that would probably be about equivalent to (or maybe just would actually be!) today's low-end i5 and I wouldn't be needing something new just yet. Captain Pike posted:(Specifications page buried in obscure location: CPU: i7 ULV)
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Nov 10, 2014 02:08
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roomforthetuna posted:Still stuck with full HD resolution as well. :/ So that's the new front runner, thanks system protocol for getting me to take another look at Lenovo.
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Nov 10, 2014 05:54
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dissss posted:What processor is in your old system?
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Nov 10, 2014 06:19
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dissss posted:Sounds like that was just a bad machine to buy at the time - it isn't anything like buying a mid range i5 today (especially an 'M' suffix model which is what I think ends up in most non-ultrabooks) I think it's partly because that U330 CPU and a GT 335M GPU were selected as good enough to run most games at the time on medium-high settings, and the requirements of games have been progressing fairly evenly with respect to CPU and GPU, but the difference is you can turn down most of the stuff the GPU does, and you can't turn down the physics, so you can get a lot more mileage out of a sub-par GPU if you're willing to compromise than you can out of a sub-par CPU where you can't compromise. So I try to run a game, it's maybe bottlenecked at the GPU, I turn off shadows, turn down the resolution, turn off antialiasing, now it's gonna be bottlenecked at the CPU. You're probably right that an i5-4510U isn't comparably bad adjusted for year. The benchmarks for a single threaded application aren't very different at all. But with aggressive multithreading becoming more popular, the jump from 3993 for the Alienware i5 to 7954 for the Lenovo or Sager i7 looks like it could be a pretty big deal. (Especially considering they're both cheaper than the Alienware 13 anyway!)
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Nov 10, 2014 07:03
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dissss posted:Sure, nothing wrong with going for a quad-core but just be aware you are making trade offs - it'll run hotter and you won't get the same battery life you would with that 4510U (and obviously 15" systems are less portable than 13") I don't care at all about battery life beyond "long enough to finish what I'm doing in the event of a power outage", and care only a little about portability. Oh hey, laptopmag has some heat numbers under gaming load. Alienware 13 has an 80 degree touchpad, 85 degree G-H keyspot and 110 degree underside. Lenovo Y50 has 85 degree touchpad, 100 degree G-H and 100 degree underside. Still couldn't find any heat numbers for the Sager NP7338. (Which, incidentally, has an i7 in a 13" machine.) Edit: the first keyboard on this Alienware M11X had fingerprint indendations melted into the SDJK keys. That's some good heat control. roomforthetuna fucked around with this message at 07:57 on Nov 10, 2014 |
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Nov 10, 2014 07:53
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Flipperwaldt posted:Heat is another reason a quad core i7 doesn't offer you a lot more value for money. I haven't seen the magic word mentioned (only implied, I guess) in this discussion yet, but in a normal laptop (non-ultrabook), the i7 will both get very hot and start to throttle in under a minute of full blast. Which is why cpu benchmarks aren't telling you the whole truth for straight up comparing performance. And also "this machine got hotter [because the fans on the other one kicked in sooner and made a lot of noise]" or "this machine got hotter [because the other one throttled already]". I can see how it's hard to give a meaningful comprehensible comparison.
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Nov 10, 2014 16:24
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KozmoNaut posted:And 1366x768 is OK on an 11.6" display.
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Nov 14, 2014 02:33
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VulgarandStupid posted:How many other things do you need to be doing while getting your Facebook stalk on? That doesn't just stop you from doing other things, you can't even see the proper details of the one thing you're doing.
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Nov 14, 2014 02:44
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Bob Morales posted:I have a Lenovo $100 coupon code if anyone can use it (and if it's even transferable)
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Nov 15, 2014 02:19
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Syle187 posted:Is getting a graphics card such as the 840M going to make much difference vs integrated graphics? It seems like, benchmark wise, either a game runs acceptably on a lower resolution with low to medium settings, or isn't very playable either way. I'm not sure the jump from integrated to a lower end card makes much of a difference. Am I wrong?
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Nov 19, 2014 03:19
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Syle187 posted:I haven't seen much in the way of integrated offerings besides HD 4400, and HD 5000. Most everything I've seen with better than that already comes with a dedicated card. Which should I avoid? eg. taking the G3D marks from videocardbenchmark.net, some things you might be considering have these scores: GTX860M at the medium-high end of dedicated GPUs: 1887 Intel Iris 5200 Pro, at the high end of integrated GPUs: 1230 the 840M that you mentioned: 871 HD5000: 604 HD4400: 534 And my old GPU from a gaming laptop of 3 years ago, that still does okay (the old processor is more of a bottleneck), GT 335M: 492. (This is adequate to play Grand Theft Auto 4 on medium-low settings at 1376x768. The CPU I have couldn't keep up with the physics though.) For things getting towards the poo poo end that you can still get today, a Radeon R2 on an AMD processor scores 298. A Radeon R5 scores 391. An Intel HD 3000 scores 308. Is the jump from 604 points to 871 points worth the price and heat difference? I don't know.
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Nov 19, 2014 04:22
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Kharmakazy posted:Not surprised there's not more chatter in here considering all the sales going on are crap.
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Nov 27, 2014 21:29
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Saint Fu posted:I wouldn't order it if it was up to me. For some dumb reason it's either an M4800 (i7-4800MQ, AMD FirePro M5100 gpu, 1920x1080 screen) with an HSSD or an E5400 (i5-4310U, integrated graphics, 1366x768 screen) with an SSD, trying to decide.
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Dec 8, 2014 16:39
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So I got my Y50 with the 15" 3Kx2K display, and am thoroughly enjoying (after finding the weird hidden option for "stop loving zooming everything what good is a high resolution display if you're just making everything look the same") having super insanely small text. It's done a good job of running everything I've tried it with so far (though I haven't tried any AAA games yet). Keyboard is pretty decent. But what the gently caress is up with this goddamn trackpad. First mistake, it's the stupid "no buttons" kind, which I can just barely tolerate on a macbook. But it's so much worse than the macbook one - first annoyance, the default "become unusable for a second after any key is pressed" setting, which is helpfully called something totally unrelated like "palm tracking". I eventually found that by trial and error. But then the default setting for right clicking is "two finger tap" except no, it's loving not, it's "have two fingers on the pad while you push it down until it clicks". I hate the big clunk noise of clicking these things. The macbook does actual two finger tap, but I couldn't find a setting for the Lenovo to detect actual taps (of two fingers - it does tap for regular click). It's also total poo poo at figuring out what movements I have made on the pad compared to a macbook one - very janky and unpredictable. I was really quite against the touchscreen model, but with this lovely trackpad I find myself wishing I'd shelled out for it now.
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Dec 14, 2014 08:59
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Further trip reports on the Lenovo Y50 UHD - still enjoying the insane high resolution in the form of very very small writing. Still hate the touchpad. Been playing Alan Wake at medium settings and medium-high resolution (I think I picked 1920x1200, so not all the way up at the 3K). I'm confident I could turn some things and up and still have a smooth experience, but I'm equally confident I wouldn't notice the difference. Most impressive thing is that I can play for 3 hours and the machine barely even gets warm. Also enjoying, though it's not really to do with the laptop, that Windows 8 complains that I'm running low on memory while playing Alan Wake even though I always had more than half of the 16GB unused. Apparently this is just something that Windows 8 does, and you can turn it off using the group policy editor if you have Pro, or with creating some keys with regedit if you don't. Thanks Microsoft. I've already had to do 4 regedit hacks and use 2 third-party programs to make the operating system usable.
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Dec 18, 2014 06:47
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Dick Fagballzson posted:Are you using any kind of scaling with the 3K resolution? I gave up on scaling on my 1440p X1 Carbon. It just seems to create too many issues. I've just been leaving it at 100% at 1440p, which is actually still readable but small, and zooming as needed. I have set the kinds of windows I do programming in to use 12pt fonts rather than my usual 10pt, that's the only concession I've made to the limitations of eyesight. (A Chrome "Hangouts" window is less than two inches wide with these settings.)
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Dec 19, 2014 07:28
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DoctorWhat posted:So my brand new y50 is The Lenovo partition has nothing to do with the hybrid-ness of the drive, that's essentially a really big cache you can't see, which tries to figure out what things get loaded the most and keep those things cached so they load at SSD speeds. (According to an article I read it takes a couple of days of use before you start seeing the hybrid being any faster than a regular HDD).
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Dec 28, 2014 03:58
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, but what's the deal with the SSHDD? What... IS it? It's got two partitions, one labeled "C" that's about 850gb and one that's 20-ish GB and labeled "lenovo". What's the relationship there? What's "Lenovo" for?
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Vegastar posted:Has anyone gotten any hands-on time with the UHD Y50? Are the screens less awful in them? If the screen quality is more on par with my Y2P, that'd be just excellent and probably worth the extra cash. This is the first laptop I've ever plugged a mouse into. Edit: link to more positive trip report 2 from earlier roomforthetuna fucked around with this message at 01:22 on Jan 2, 2015 |
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Jan 2, 2015 01:18
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DoctorWhat posted:Yeah the trackpad on my y50 is dreadful, too. The "no visible buttons" trend needs to die.
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Jan 2, 2015 01:23
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FISHMANPET posted:Does the Y50 do the Optimus thing, and if so is that still terrible? I had a powerful Dell Laptop with Optimus previously but it would often fail to run things on the Nvidia GPU or games would crash as the system switched between the two in the middle of the game. My favorite feature of the Y500 was that it didn't have Optimus so I had full performance all the time. There's a new feature in that control panel (versus my previous laptop's version) that lets you set a folder to use the specified GPU rather than setting individual binaries, but it's not recursive so you can't just set it on steamapps and be done. 
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Jan 2, 2015 19:12
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Bunleigh posted:I just got a job where I'll be traveling occasionally and staying in hotels for up to a week at a time so I want to get a laptop I can play some games on. I see everyone recommending the Y50 so I'm checking those out now. My wife has a Lenovo with one of those horrible mushy clickpads, do the Y50s have that?
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Jan 9, 2015 04:15
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Suggestion for people considering Y50s - if you're buying direct from Lenovo, you can probably add on an ebates cash back. There was a 15% special over Thanksgiving, I'm recommending it now because it finally paid out, didn't want to say while it was still in flux. Right now it's 8%, which is still a good $100 off a middle-of-the-range Y50, and applies on top of whatever other discounts. (Is it acceptable to give my referral link while recommending this? Doink. Happy for it to become a chain if anyone picks it up.) I don't know whether I had to nag ebates to get them to chase up Lenovo to issue the rebate, but probably. So it's a little bit of extra effort too. Probably still easier and quicker than a typical mail-in rebate.
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Jan 10, 2015 05:07
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Fuzz posted:You can't stack discounts, and the Winter Sale is WAY more of a discount, so you shouldn't bother with all of this.  Specifically, I got the Y50 UHD with SSD for $1399 (which is the same price it is now "you save $400" and has been that way since before Thanksgiving), got $209.85 cash back from ebates, and Discover had 5% cash back for online shopping at the time so that was another $70+ in cash back too (the plus because the Discover cash back also applies to the sales tax). (Though now Lenovo's ebates cash back is only 6%, down from the 8% when I said yesterday.)
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Jan 10, 2015 23:35
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Fuzz posted:I dunno, I applied the coupon code from that site you linked and it erased the Winter Sale discount code. Unless I don't understand how this (really shittily designed) rebate site works. The main thrust of ebates, when it's just a flat "here is some percent cash back on your purchase", which I wish they'd stick to because their coupons are rubbish, is that you search for the site you're about to shop at, click through to the site from the "shop now" link (no coupon code), make your purchase as normal (don't come in again from a different external link), then they get a referral reward, then they pass most of that reward on to you. (Edit to reiterate: which takes a couple of months and you may or may not have to do the "where's my cash back?" form when it's been a month.) roomforthetuna fucked around with this message at 04:21 on Jan 11, 2015 |
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Jan 11, 2015 04:19
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Fuzz posted:Well yeah, but 45 is crazy low, especially on a flat panel where you're kinda locked into the native resolution.
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Jan 16, 2015 02:54
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The Iron Rose posted:An 840m won't play anything well at all, for a similar price you could get a desktop which has easily 3-4x the performance. If you really don't move the laptop much absolutely get a desktop. A good monitor is a hundred bucks, you can get cheap speakers for like 20 bucks, same with a mouse. You can build a perfectly serviceable computer for 700-$750 dollars, and one that will outclass just about any laptop without a 970 or 980m dGPU in terms of performance. (And vice-versa; if you decide you just need a better screen, you don't have to get a new computer too. And if something breaks you can more easily replace it piecemeal.) Also if you like a big-rear end screen, the desktop will almost certainly have a bigger, asser screen. To add a data point to what The Iron Rose said, I find the 860m is pretty good for games at 1080p, but I haven't been playing any of the *latest* latest games. It does fairly new games (eg. Saints Row 4 from late 2013) perfectly smoothly at 1080p with everything on high quality though. This is on a Lenovo Y50. I'd agree that if you want to play games you want to go to the 860m because the price difference isn't that big. (Though the cheapest Y70, for the 17", at Lenovo is $1200 - they all have a touch screen which in Y50s is a $200 price hike.)
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Jan 22, 2015 03:35
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DoctorWhat posted:Right-click the desktop and select "NVIDIA Control Panel". Then select "manage 3D settings" in the sidebar, and "Global settings" in the main window. Choose "high-performance NVIDIA Processor" under "preferred graphics processor", and click "apply" in the bottom-right of the window.
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Jan 31, 2015 02:35
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Value matters too. Edit: Apple wins on software?! Edit2: Oh, I guess if they're measuring on "software the laptop manufacturer installs" rather than "software the machine will run" then that's fair enough because everyone else deserves to score negative points on that metric. roomforthetuna fucked around with this message at 06:11 on Feb 10, 2015 |
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Feb 10, 2015 06:08
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Gwaihir posted:Aside from the "Up the nose view" webcam that XPS 13 is really god damned sexy.
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Feb 15, 2015 18:24
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Flipperwaldt posted:You might consider the battery management stuff if you're worried about the battery's longevity and you're going to leave the laptop plugged in 99% of the time. (Of course, now I can't find that button because it's somewhere stupid.) roomforthetuna fucked around with this message at 17:46 on Feb 26, 2015 |
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Feb 26, 2015 17:27
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roomforthetuna posted:I think it's also the Lenovo power management stuff that includes the "run the fan fast for a bit to blow dust out" button, which is a great idea for a button.
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Feb 26, 2015 17:55
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The Iron Rose posted:With a start menu replacer there's literally no difference between the UIs of Windows 7 and Windows 8.
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Feb 28, 2015 04:11
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Grimson posted:edit: Just googled it, the other two pieces are flipboard and a dropbox 1 year 20 gb trial, both unobtrusive. there's no point in reinstalling
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Mar 1, 2015 00:15
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Chas McGill posted:It's the i7 I don't understand - seems like it would only be worth it if you installed another OS?
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Mar 12, 2015 15:32
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marjorie posted:What do you guys think of the placement of the arrow keys on the Lenovo Y50? I like that the keys are bigger than a lot of notebooks I've seen, but they're kinda smushed in there. Has anyone had issues finding them blindly during use?
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Mar 14, 2015 00:37
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marjorie posted:Good to know. I'm thinking of pulling the trigger on this, but I can't decide between two configurations. One of the differences is that one model has a "WIFI AC Wireless (2x2)" card, while the other had a 3160 card. I'm not really sure to which model of wifi card the first configuration is referring (so it's tough to research). Do you know which one you have and if you've had any issues with it? Unfortunately, my router is located on the opposite side of the house from the place where the laptop will typically reside, but my circa 2010 laptop has no problem getting a good signal.
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Mar 14, 2015 03:10
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The Iron Rose posted:A 860/960m will offer you very respectable performance, but you're not going to be able to play all of the most recent games, much less turn up the settings on them.
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Mar 14, 2015 17:01
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Hadlock posted:That should last you basically until the heat death of the universe, if you treat it right. 860m is not king of the GPU but it gets what, 42fps in BF4 @ 1080p? Yeah I think you did pretty good. Not sure what you're going to do with a quad core i7 and 16gb of ram but if you want to model black holes you should be safe
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Mar 20, 2015 03:50
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