Laptop suggestions

[Sarex]

I would go for the refurbished asus tbh, those specs are really tempting for that price.

[Keyrock]

I would go for the refurbished asus tbh, those specs are really tempting for that price.

Yeah, I'm going to go ahead an pull the trigger on that ASUS.

[Zoraptor]

What happened with ryzen mobile? Did it not meet expectations?

 

They're doing OK, though as Keyrock said their APU graphics while very good for integrated graphics (eg the 2400G's Vega11 is better than a discrete 1030 when even the best Intel integrated is a joke for gaming) is well below a decent discrete card especially since laptops tend to have bad configurations for Ryzen's design like slow, single channel RAM.

 

Zen 2 and 'proper' chiplet design ought to help with that a fair bit though when low margin laptop chips will get to 7nm will be a bit of a question. In theory chiplet design could mean 580/ 1060 level integrated graphics, but at the moment that's very much in theory. 

 

Mobile is also a pretty high inertia market, and Intel has dominated it for ages.

[Keyrock]

I got my ASUS lappy today. Looks awesome and weighs a ton. I love the brushed aluminum look. 

 

Now to check it out and make sure it's in working order, then I'll format the drives and install Linux on it. 

[Gorgon]

Anyone have experience with the MSI lineup. I know it's 'gamer' branding (yuck) but,  they are on the cheap side for having  proper graphics cards in them and a lot of them stick to 1080p, which to my mind is smart on a laptop.

[Gorgon]

Is this a good deal for roundabout 1800 euro. 

 

https://www.pricerunner.dk/pl/27-4493408/Baerbar/Lenovo-Legion-Y920-17IKB-(80YW002FMX)-17.3-Sammenlign-Priser

[Gorgon]

What should you buy to avoid the spectre CPU vulnerability and big impact patches. 

[Gorgon]

I just read up on it a bit and it seems like it amounts to less than 5%, so. Yeah. possibly still worth it getting an older CPU because of the price difference. 

[Zoraptor]

Spectre/ Meltdown patches affect some things more than that, but you would not generally be doing them on a laptop. For gaming and general usage they're largely irrelevant as the CPU isn't the limiting factor anyway in most cases.

 

All the 6000-9000 series Intels are the same architecture with almost no improvement core/ core apart from clock speed.

[Gorgon]

Got a cheaper Lenovo. Discovered they stuck 16 gb in it even though I only paid for 8, not complaining. '

 

It came with Macafee. luls, how is that still at thing.

[injurai]

Is it just me or is the current landscape of laptops pretty awful. Especially as someone who plans to throw linux on as my primary partition. I just can't find anything comparable to what Vaios used to be.

 

Where are my laptops with full keyboards, large track pad, 15 inch "bezel-less" non-touch non-glare IPS (or now OLED) screens with 1080p resolution (for battery), dedicated GPU that can fall back in the integrated GPU for further battery savings. A laptop that manages to be thin and well ventilated but not extreme to the extent it trims away remaining battery space. More laptops need to be built with magnesium alloy like the Vaios were.

 

My Vaio also has a CD drive and Disc-based Laptop HDD. Now with those M2 SSDs, and forgoing the CD drive, I don't get why we can't have a 20 hour batter 15 inch laptop in the similar form factor as then thinnest "2012" laptops would have been. Especially with the more efficient CPUs/GPUs that we have now.

[Zoraptor]

Vaios were expensive though, you paid a lot for the high specs and they sold a lot less of them than a cheap McLaptop.

 

I actually have a 2012 Vaio at the moment, an inherited one from an end of life corporate purchase and it was ludicrously over specced for the time. But it originally cost 3x as much as a decent desktop and despite being overspecced was slower even than the old 2008 core2duo workstations in the lab by a fair bit- and it only got used as a portable workstation a few times. Really nicely put together and it's lasted fantastically (after a MB replacement under warrantee) but a cheap laptop and a modern workstation would have been a better deal at half the price.

[injurai]

Desktops, especially costumes, are always better bang compared to a highly tailored laptop. I have the 2012 SVS15 Vaio which had a base price around $899. I then specced it up to $1250 pre-tax. Same price as my 2008 gaming rig (Core 2 Duo 3.33 E8600 Wolfdale w/ 9800 GTX+.) The laptop was about on par, better at times since it had more and faster ram, and a Direct X 11 compatible gpu. More cores too. Desktop obviously better with CPU intensive games like Crysis or Civ since not much threaded anyways around that time.

 

Thing is, to get what this laptop offered in any other make, it would have been $1800 at the time and they were heavy and thicker and non-IPS. The same specced MacBook pro was pushing $3000 at the time. I literally could not believe the deal that Sony was offering with these things. I still think my IPS screen is better than what most laptops offer today, and OLEDs haven't exactly rolled out to laptops yet.

[Zoraptor]

MacBooks' value is appallingly bad, for sure.

 

The Vaio I have is a Z3 of some sort, so ultraportable and it cost a lot for initial purchase so my view is a bit skewed price wise. I paid a nominal fee for it to cover admin; since Sony had exited the market it had no resale value.

 

And to be fair to Sony Vaios tended to be expensive because they did actually send new models out to here, most laptops sold here are EOL and rejects from the Australian market. And the custom models from Dell/ HP etc were also fricking expensive. It was also way cheaper than the most expensive laptop I've ever used, which was a cool 14,000NZD...

[injurai]

The Z series was indeed terrible value. It was the luxury ultrabook line, and you were mostly paying for the privilege of having Sony's product designers go ham. I remember a much worse Z costed way money than my fairly decked out S 15 at the time.

 

Looking a bit harder, it looks like the Dell G7 15 2019 is basically what I want out of a laptop feature wise, but I want that in a thin and light non-gaming form-factor. Something between the G7 and XPS 15 would be great. Maybe the XPS refresh this summer will be worth it, but I think it will still have the 3/4 keyboard, awful glossy touch display, and ****ty coil whine audio.

[Gorgon]

OLED has burn-in issues anyway. They are stating it up front to avoid warranty issues and basically just ask people 'not to display things that damage the screen' i mean WTF.

 

That's anything that has bright colors and is static on the screen. Like a hud segment in a game or a news ticker. 

[injurai]

Isn't MicroLED supposed to just surpass OLED tech anyways?

[mkreku]

After buying an OLED TV I now want OLED on everything.

[LadyCrimson]

I sometimes think about buying a newer (and better) laptop to replace the utter crap piece of plastic I bought last time, but when I look, anything remotely like what I'd want is $2000+ (and I don't want a laptop for gaming but what I want would still be in that range). And for me, more than $1200 for a laptop is like, no.

 

 

OLED has burn-in issues anyway. They are stating it up front to avoid warranty issues and basically just ask people 'not to display things that damage the screen' i mean WTF.

 

That's anything that has bright colors and is static on the screen. Like a hud segment in a game or a news ticker. 

Can't be any worse than plasma, and hubby's played countless hours of Borderlands on the one we still have. No perm. burn-in yet.

 

[injurai]

4K OLEDs are supposed to be rolling out for laptops this coming year.

[Keyrock]

Why would you need, or even want, for that matter, a 4k screen on a laptop? You are getting extremely diminishing returns when you push pixel density that high for an exorbitant price increase.

Edited January 27, 2019 by Keyrock

[smjjames]

On 1/23/2019 at 5:25 PM, LadyCrimson said:

I sometimes think about buying a newer (and better) laptop to replace the utter crap piece of plastic I bought last time, but when I look, anything remotely like what I'd want is $2000+ (and I don't want a laptop for gaming but what I want would still be in that range). And for me, more than $1200 for a laptop is like, no.

 

 

Can't be any worse than plasma, and hubby's played countless hours of Borderlands on the one we still have. No perm. burn-in yet.

 

 

I thought burn-in was only an issue for CRT monitors? Hence the whole 'screensaver' thing and screensavers just continued on with LCD/plasma because we all just got used to having them.

[LadyCrimson]

I think CRT burn in was mostly re: older (and especially the monochrome) versions of the 60's and 70's, and maybe into the early 80's. I've owned many many CRT monitors and color TV's in the past and not a single one ever had burn in issues even after countless hours of being always on. Which isn't to say it couldn't be an issue but it was pretty minimal for the most part in my experience.

Plasma's were very bad early on, became more manageable later.

Edited April 28, 2019 by LadyCrimson

[Deadly_Nightshade]

On 1/22/2019 at 4:44 AM, Gorgon said:

OLED has burn-in issues anyway.

This is a personal anecdote and shouldn't be treated as a universal truth, but I've had a laptop with an OLED display for a couple of years without any issues. Likewise, there are a few people at work with OLED models and none of them have reported any either.

[Humanoid]

Image retention is often conflated with burn-in. One is temporary, the other is permanent. To be sure, both can still happen on both (later) plasmas and OLEDs, but it takes some serious abuse to make it permanent. Using the brightest possible "torch" settings intended for shop displays can exacerbate the issue.