Looking for a laptop

My wife has a totally sweet laptop her work gave to her. It's a 4th-gen Core i7, ultralight Dell and a fantastic computer.

...and it's completely locked down.

She has a standard user account and is totally and utterly locked out of making any changes on this system. When she's at home she can't change the network type from private to home, which meant that she had to call into her helpdesk and have them remote in just to add our home printer to her computer. I get the need for security, but when she's here at home Chrome can't even do its auto update.

I give up and her work wins, so I need to get her a basic laptop so she can do personal stuff. Here's what she does:

- web browsing (mostly GMail and Facebook, of course)
- photo management (Picasa will be installed but the database lives on my NAS)
- Simcity 5 (not the most graphically intense game but still a tough requirement)

My wife is actually quite tech-savvy so she'll be able to get the most out of this computer, but she doesn't need a ton of horsepower. Simcity is the curveball, because otherwise I'd just get her one of these. That would be more than enough, but I don't think the Intel 4400 graphics are going to cut it, let alone the Core i3.

Does anyone know about any great deals today/this week on 4th gen Core i5 laptops that could run Simcity?

According to the game specs, SimCity 5 only requires a Core 2 Duo, 2G of RAM (using a built in card) and an Intel 4100 integrated video card.

I can honestly say I've never played it or know how realistic those specs are, but the laptop you linked should be able to play it. How well is another question completely.

Yeah, I saw those specs but I'm never sure what to make of them. They always list minimum specs that are so low it's silly. Like "Minimum specs: Pentium 4, 512MB RAM."

This site lists the minimum and recommended specs. I'd love to know what those translate to in game performance...

AnandTech - Best $500.00 Laptops: Holiday 2014

Haven't read the article. I just saw it go by on Blue's News and thought it was timely.

Regarding gaming: The Intel 4100 card you mentioned will be crap for games, modern games will be a slide show. You should get a laptop with an actual gaming video chip. But even if you have a gaming chipset on a laptop, unless you're getting a top of the line super-gaming machine like an Alienware laptop, modern games will still be a disappointment. Modern games still target the highest performance *desktop* graphics cards, unfortunately. My laptop is fairly recent, it has an NVIDIA GeForce GT 735M with 2GB of video RAM, which is a middling gaming chipset, and I'm still unhappy with its performance. I'm playing Grimrock 2 on the thing right now, and it's very stuttery at times. I'm only tolerating it because the game doesn't need a high frame rate to be playable.

http://www.pcgamer.com/the-best-gaming-laptops-1/

PM me if you end up picking a new Dell, and I'll get you a stack-able discount code. This goes for everybody here.

I got a gaming laptop at the end of 2012, hoping to use it to play Steam games on the tv (at the time, I was thinking F1 2013 on a 60", yes please). It worked out rather well, but I didn't care for it for any games other than controller ones (needing to keep the screen open, having to have an extra mouse and keyboard, etc) but games with the controller were awesome. Regular games using the laptop as a laptop instead of a set top were all pretty good.

That experiment didn't last very long, the laptop became my 'no games installed, do your damn homework' computer. I am impressed with how quickly it renders and does the bullet dynamics compared to my desktop (rocking a Core i7-940 still).

I'll check it out, thanks!


Point taken, but I think the laptop I mentioned in my first post has the Intel 4400 graphics, not 4100. I won't be surprised if the answer is still the same, but I wanted to make sure. You keep saying "modern gaming," but really the only game in question here is SimCity 5. My wife has no interest in any other games (except, perhaps, Goat Simulator ).

I do have the opportunity to pick up this slightly older model laptop for a good price. It has a dedicated graphics card, so would that fit the bill?

Thank you so much for the offer! I might get in touch in the future if/when I switch to a laptop from my desktop setup.

One thing to look for, laptops with an Intel Iris Pro (5200) graphics setup. It's able to beat many NVidia lower end GPUs, such as the 730M series and pretty much matches what the dedicated midrange 650M can produce. The 5000 and 5100 are not quite as good, but still an impressive jump over where the 4000 series was.

Intel and Valve shipped the 5200 as the GPU for the developers edition of the SteamBox. The era of just automatically dismissing integrated graphics as a non modern game ready solution is ending. Though it's taken Intel a lot longer to get to this point then earlier projected.

Yeah, same answer. Intel integrated graphics in that series are orders of magnitude slower than ATI and Nvidia chipsets. The newest chips that Tom mentioned, the Iris Pro series, sound real interesting, but I don't know anything about them because I've never actually seen a laptop with one of them in there. Every laptop I've seen has either the older Intel video chips, or one of the Intel+NVidia/ATI solutions. I'd love to try one out some time though, see how it does.

I'd still consider Sim City 5 to be generally in the "Modern" category (2013 release), but here's the real question: What's she playing it on *now*? Whatever you get her should be of equal or greater performance. Your initial post didn't make it clear whether her *current* computer was the one with the 4400 chip.

Well, she's not playing it on anything now because she changed departments at work. Her old department gave her a Retina MacBook Pro! She was also able to wrangle admin access to that laptop out of her department's IT guy. She hasn't had such luck in the new place

Tom, I agree that the latest integrated Intel graphics are sufficient, particularly for SimCity, but like Tony I haven't really seen the 5000 series in the laptops I'm looking at. I haven't seen a $500 or less laptop with those chips.

So would the 640M and an Ivy Bridge Core i5 be sufficient for SimCity?

Okay, awesome, there's a site that lists benchmarks of various laptop graphics chipsets. Here's the 640m, including a Sim City benchmark (For Sim City 2013 which I assume is the retail name of the Sim City 5 you refer to):

http://www.notebookcheck.net/NVIDIA-GeForce-GT-640M.71579.0.html

According to that chart, with a 640m chipset, if she wants a smooth frame rate she will have to turn the graphics settings down (if any are available in that game), or play it in a smaller 1024x768 window.

So weird. I wouldn't have expected it to perform worse at SimCity than CoD Black Ops...

Thanks for the link. I was able to get that laptop for a really good price, so I ended up purchasing it. We'll see how well it performs.

Sim City 2013 was a brand new engine, and only shipped on PCs. It probably needs more optimization to run as well as it can, while still meeting the demands of the game. Even though it may seem simple, the vast variety of buildings provides challenges in the texture part of the engine. It's possible that an average GPU lacks enough memory to hold all the textures at once during parts of gameplay, and texture swapping slows performance greatly. It's sometimes one of the pains of developing a sandbox game, players can create some very performance taxing situations.

Call of Duty is usually reusing the previous years engines with a few more features added in. Odds are that codebase has had a long line of optimizations applied. CoD is also focused on consoles first, where they have to meet certain performance and quality metrics enforced by Sony/Microsoft/Nintendo. Porting it to PC is still a bit of work, but it also tends to bring over many of the optimizations. Textures in particular are going to be heavily optimized to fit into console RAM space and be able to be streamed off a slow optical disc. CoD is also not a sandbox game, so the scope of what needs to be run is always known ahead of time, allowing further optimizations. Lots of subtle tricks in map designs can hide loading times as players run along very specifically designed paths.

Sorry to drag an old thread up, but I have the same questions about the current laptop I'm thinking of getting for my wife. I've sold the Sony I bought her because it just couldn't handle SimCity and had other various driver problems.

I'm currently considering getting her the $999 version of the new Dell XPS 13. It has a Core i5 Skylake CPU, which I'm hoping should be pretty good for onboard video.

What do you guys think? Should this thing be able to handle some basic-level gaming?

I'd be tempted by the new Microsoft thing. Removable but real keyboard, etc.

That weird hinge thing though - I'd be worried about putting it in a bag or something and it getting "squashed"

I have the 2nd generation XPS13, with 1920x1080 screen, and absolutely love it. One caveat: the left side USB-3 port on most earlier versions of these machines can really only handle USB2 speeds, not USB3, due to poor design of an internal ribbon cable.

A buddy of mine got the next generation (same problem) with touch screen, and has been very pleased with it (running Ubuntu Linux).

The one you are looking at is one or two generations newer again, and they have probably fixed the USB port by now (looks like a full redesign).

Cheers
Mark

We've been seeing some stability issues with Ubuntu on the new XPS 13 (I don't have the details right now, though). Any tips?

No doubt I am displaying my invincible naivete here, but I bought one of these for SWMBO, and it has proven to be quite satisfactory, at about a quarter of the price.

No, it isn't as powerful as the Dell, but then how much power do you really need? Certainly it isn't as well made, it is actually somewhat cheap and flimsy, but handled with reasonable care there should be no problems. Overall, it is not as good a computer, but for a quarter of the price, I don't expect it to be.

In two years you can take half of the $730 you saved and purchase a new laptop that will be better than the current Dell is today.

tanstaafl.

I have a previous generation XPS 13 (9333) with an i7, 1920x1080 touchscreen, third party 8GB RAM and Samsung 840 Evo 500GB SSD. This runs Ubuntu 75% and Windows 10 25%.

The charger / adapter died on me once. There is occasionally a high pitched whining noise that comes from the keyboard backlight inverter (I think) which I can hear if I'm in an otherwise silent location. I had an issue where when the laptop was plugged in for a fairly long period I would get a electric shock of some sort from the metal frame that runs around the laptop, but this hasn't happened for a few months. After a couple of years battery capacity is 80%, and still lasts a respectable time in Linux with the screen low. Battery life in Windows is disappointing. Touchpad with built-in buttons requires much tweaking to not be infuriating in Linux. Palm rejection that works properly has only just arrived in the latest kernels.

Aside from all that, it is still awesome. Small, light, fast, great screen, useful touch functionality, and stands up to my daily abuse well. I forgive many of its foibles, and would buy another for sure as I do enjoy using it.

Some reasons why one might want to spend more on the XPS13:

• higher resolution screen (better on the eyes).
• longer battery life on a charge.
• backlit keyboard for use in dimly lit locations.
• faster processor, more RAM than most of the cheaper alternatives.
• tiny size and weight, very important for travellers.
• very fast SSD.

cheers

That's great, but for two years you are going to have to drag around a laptop that is bigger, nearly twice as heavy and doesn't have an SSD.

I think Doug's use case is quite different to Andy and Mark's and in particular not lugged around much. I know multiple people with laptops that have never moved from their home desk so portability is not really a concern.

My 12 year old son uses my 10 year old thinkpad. Still works nicely, though the battery is shot. He doesn't really mind - he likes to hide in the basement and doesn't really want to rove around the house with it. He's asking for windows 10, though.

Old tech can hold up with modest demands and a little bit of love...

-jk

Indeed, the one I linked is essentially the second generation of their remodel. The first gen was actually pretty recent, like last spring. It came out as a winner at CES last year because of its very small bezel and the fact that it has a smaller footprint than a MacBook Air but the same size screen.

This newer model updates the processor to the latest Skylake line, and adds a USB C port (with charging support, if I'm reading the specs correctly).


There's nothing wrong with that device if it meets your requirements. As someone who does tech support for residential clients, that's a philosophy I've come to understand deeply. There's plenty of gadgets that I love and use that I wouldn't recommend to 90% of my customers. I find out what they want to do first, then figure out what would fit that need and that situation. If you only need to browse the web, send some emails, and create some documents, there's absolutely no problem with that laptop you linked. The fact is that the cheapest computers these days are finally capable of doing everything that most people need. Heck, I've even set up a couple HP Stream laptops for people with kids, and those things are surprisingly capable! I think the single major complaint I have about them is that they need more disk space, but for $179 it's hard to complain. I bought one that does nothing but run my home automation system, and it's fantastic at that.


As previously stated, I need enough to run a video game at decent resolution and framerate. I don't know for certain, but I'd be willing to bet that the Asus you linked to would choke terribly on SimCity (the new one, I'm sure it'd play the original just fine ).


That's tough to say, but of course the point is that I need the power now, so I'm fine going for it. It's also tough to define "better" when we're talking about things like build quality vs size and weight along with all the specs.

I couldn't tell you. As you know, the only game I play is QuakeLive, and the few times I ran it on that Asus it handled it with no trouble. I assume that SimCity requires a lot more horsepower to run...

Relevant to practically nothing... I remember my engineer at the radio station running DOOM II on a 25MHz 386-SX with a whole megabyte of RAM. It ran, but not optimally. Ah, the good old days!

tanstaafl.

The XPS13 has been my travelling notebook for nearly three years now. In the meanwhile though, our primary machines here are circa 2008 Dell Precision M6300 notebooks. Big, beastly machines that stay mostly on their docks on the desktops.

Also cheap.. just bought another as a spare for CAD$220.

Cheers

Right I meant Doug's not lugging his around.

As for the M6300 I had one as a work laptop for about 4 years that did get lugged around the world many times on my back. That *was* a beast of a thing.