Looking for a laptop: balancing budget with performance

[13_CBS]

Greetings, folks!

I'm looking for a Windows laptop that I hope can balance between a decent budget (hopefully no more than 1300 US dollars) and good performance. By "good performance", I mean that the most resource-intensive thing I plan on putting this laptop through is running the game Titan Quest while also running recording software such as Fraps.

FYI, the minimum requirements for Titan Quest are...



•Windows® 2000 or XP
•1.8 Ghz Intel Pentium IV or equivalent or AMD Athlon XP or equivalent
•512 MB RAM
•5 GB free hard drive space
•64 MB NVIDIA GeForce 3 or equivalent or ATI Radeon 8500 series with Pixel Shader 1.1 support or equivalent
•DirectX® 9.0c compatible 16-bit sound card
•8x or faster CD-ROM drive
•Keyboard, Mouse


Recommended requirements are...



•Windows XP
•3.0 Ghz Intel Pentium IV or equivalent
•1 GB RAM
•5.0 GB or more free hard drive space
•128 MB NVIDIA GeForce 6800 series or ATI Radeon X800 series or equivalent
•DirectX® 9.0c compatible or Soundblaster X-Fi series sound card
•8x or faster CD-ROM/DVD drive
•Keyboard, Mouse


Any suggestions?

[Icewalker]

I won't give you specifics as to what kind of this or that piece of a computer to get, as it would require research which I'm sure other people can speak for on the spot better than I could even after some study. But! Lenovo is a fine company for reasonably priced functional machines, I found, that's what I got.

And, an important note: if you phone the company before buying the computer (even one you design yourself from choices on their website) and say you're considering buying it, but were wondering if you could get some money off, they will often drop the price about 10-15%.

[Serpentine]

The one I got - and am on now - was listed in Choice Magazine as the Best Cheapish Laptop or something like that. It's a Dell Something Something.
...
If you really want me to, I'll look up exactly what later
Anyway, I can't remember what specs it meets, but I think I made sure it was good enough to run Spore, if that helps.

[Skeppio]

I'll have to check the specs on mine. I've had it for a couple of months. It's a Windows 7 and it runs Team Fortress 2 and Bioshock without trouble or lag. I'll give it a better look after work.

[Erloas]

Those system requirements are low, probably almost anything over a netbook would fit that.

You have a fairly good sized budget so I would up your expectations quite a bit for gaming performance. I would probably look at some newer games you might want to run and redefine your minimum specs or cut cost drastically, whichever way you choose.
Other things to look at is size considerations, some people want a smaller easier to carry laptop, some people want a full size keyboard and larger screen and don't care about weight. How much of a consideration is battery life?

As it is, there are probably hundreds of different computers that would fit your requirements as presented now. Also most people that do advise on computers get tired of doing all the leg work for someone else. A much better option would be to pick 4-5 computers that look good to you, post them here and let us give the pros and cons of each system.

Personally at the price range you gave I would probably look at Asus laptops, but as I said, a very wide range of brands and models will fit what you have currently specified.

[13_CBS]

Thanks for the quick replies, folks!

@ Erloas: Hrm...how much of an extra strain is something like Fraps on a computer? My laptop was able to run Titan Quest just fine until it also had to run Fraps.

[Erloas]

Honestly I'm not sure what Fraps takes to record. I think it is CPU and filesystem bottlenecked more then GPU limiting. Fraps dumps a huge amount of data to the hard drive and it might slow things down if it can't be written to the drive as quickly. In that case you are going to want to make sure to get a 7200RPM hard drive, most laptops default drives are 5400RPM. It is a lot easier to get a laptop with a better CPU then GPU, but in normal gaming situations the GPU is generally the limiting factor.

If your current computer isn't much above the specs for the game that would explain why FRAPs hits your performance a lot.

I would probably look into the triple or quad core processors. A SSD might be good, but they tend to not have a lot of space (and video files as they are created are huge) and their write speeds aren't that great so in this specific case it might not help much compared to a normal HD.

[Syka]

I'm currently using an Asus UL50VT and couldn't be happier. The techies I know are pretty much the only people I've talked to who know Asus...and all have had good things to say. If I'm not mistaken, they are also one of the few computer manufacturers who have most of their stuff made in-house.

But yeah, I can recommend Asus. I've had it for about 3-4 months now with no issue. I remember by this time, my Dell was already going screwy.

[Thrawn183]

I recommend keeping an eye on slickdeals.net for a little while. Eventually something decent will pop up.

[13_CBS]

I've taken a look at Asus laptops, but their G7__ and G5__ series seem to be of suspicious quality despite combining good price with excellent performance. Research indicates that they come with BIOS problems, and lots of people seem to be having hardware troubles. So Asus is right out.


Any thoughts on Sager? This one I found looks promising:

Intel i5 processor: 2.40GHz

4 GB of DDR3 SDRAM

Graphics: Nvidia GeForce GT 330M (1 gig of GDDR3 memory)

320 GB of 7200rpm hard drive

All for 1020 US dollars.

Thoughts?

[Erloas]

Well I've never had any problems with any of the Asus products I've bought. Though I haven't bought any of their full products, but I have bought multiple motherboards, and video cards from them as well as a wireless card and haven't had any issues with them.
I'm not aware of the BIOS problems you are referring to.

As for Sager... its not a company I've heard of (well I think I remember a similar name from a related industry, but I've never seen any computer components or products from them). The specs look pretty good, but I couldn't say anything for quality.