Hey all, I would appreciate any advice you guys could offer for purchasing a new laptop. I know next to nothing about computers and laptops.

Budget: $1000

I don't want a laptop that has terrible battery or weighs 5+ lb; it should be relatively mobile. I am more of a casual gamer, so average gaming specs would be just fine. Must have good wifi. Most importantly I would like it to last me a long time. My budget is a little flexible if there is a perfect laptop for me over $1000. I would welcome any general advice or recommendations of specific laptops. Thanks!

So far, I've looked at the IdeaPad Y410p however it is kinda bulky and reviews say the wifi isn't that great. It also looks pretty gaming intensive (but I am not a very good judge). Also I looked at the Asus VivoBook x202e which looks nice, but I'd rather spend more money to get a higher quality yet similar laptop.

You could try this one: http://www.xoticpc.com/force-qal51fhd-compal-qal51-back-order-p-4808.html
5.5lbs with battery and will be a decent gaming platform. Has more than 5 options for wireless cards, and if any of the specs aren't up to par for you there are plenty of options that will up the price but will make it a better gaming machine.

As you may have noticed getting something with a dedicated GPU under 5lbs is a very expensive combination in laptops right now because it is very desirable. EVERYONE wants something super portable with decent gaming performance, and the bottom line is making that happen is very expensive. Dedicated GPUs make a laptop heavier both for design purposes and heat dissipation. You need a good chunk of aluminum/copper to keep that dedicated GPU from melting itself and that adds weight, takes up space, and makes the footprint of the laptop larger by consequence. Getting a sub 1200$ laptop with good gaming performance and low weight is near-impossible right now due to the reasons I mentioned. You're going to have to cut a corner somewhere.

The only thing I found so far around your price point that is light is this baby right here:
http://www.xoticpc.com/sager-np7330-clevo-w230st-p-6163.html
13.3", 4.6lbs with battery, good gaming performance. Can't comment on battery or wireless stock, but for 30$ you can add a dual band AC wireless adapter to it in the customization. Keep in mind a 13 is rather small but if you want under 5lbs you probably aren't going to be getting a 15.6" like normal.

Hmm.. I was thinking something more along the lines of an Ultrabook that can play games decently. Those both look quite gaming intensive.

Maybe something like this: http://www.laptopmag.com/review/laptops/asus_zenbook_prime_ux31a.aspx. The price drops down to $800 if you get the lower resolution configuration. It seems like it could play games and is very light weight and has good battery. The screen is small but I don't mind. Are there any other glaring drawbacks to this type of laptop? And any other suggestions as per laptops similar to this one?

I don't consider anything under a 640/75xx acceptable for any sort of gaming and that review says it uses a 620M in its alternate configuration. You might as well get a laptop without a dedicated GPU at that point since you're paying for an overly minimal increase versus HD4000/7xxxG/D integrated. Keep in mind most reviews use ideal scenarios when doing their benchmarking and in real usage not every situation would be ideal. I strongly suggest at least the Sager NP7330, my second recommendation.

Also, maybe to put this conversation more in context...

I am not even sure what qualifies as what kind of laptop. Truly, I only want a good upgrade from my current laptop, while maximizing my budget. Currently I am an owner of the behemoth Dell Inspiron 9400 with an ATI Mobility Radeon x1400 graphics card, 2gb RAM, 105gb HDD, and an Intel(R) Core 2 CPU processor. It was a decent laptop maybe 5 years ago.

The bottom line is if you are going to do any sort of gaming and you want this laptop to last you awhile, getting a sub-par GPU is going to shoot you in the foot.

Is there any reason the Sager NP7330 is not looking good to you?


Edit:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/7144/msi-ge40-review-a-slim-gaming-notebook
This is a review of a rather nice MSI laptop and the end page gives some alternate recommendations as well. Anandtech is the #1 site for anything tech related, take their word as you would take mine.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Jul 20 2013, 8:26 pm by Excalibur.

The only thing I don't like about the Sager is weight/battery. Honestly it looks like a great choice, but I'm just trying to see all my options. That MSi looks amazing except for the price. Thank you very much for your help! I think now I need to do more research on my own and then I'll come back here later. The more I look at laptops the more I realize how little I understand about laptops...

If you're only looking for Medium gaming performance there's no reason for a dedicated gpu. Those only decrease your battery performance and increase heat generation which reduces the lifetime of the laptop.
The new haswells CPUs have an integrated graphics chip (HD4000) that can rum most new games decently on medium/high settings.

The other thing to make sure is that you get an SSD or hybrid drive for smooth desktop performance.

Ultrabooks should meet your requirements just fine.

Things to look at:
http://www.amazon.com/MacBook-MD212LL-13-Inch-Display-Version/dp/B007472CIK/ref=sr_1_1?t=slickdeals&tag=slickdeals&ascsubtag=3n_JnvmDEeKQAR5kXHyt6Q0_sEXe3_0_0_0&ie=UTF8&qid=1374955149&sr=8-1&keywords=MD212LL%2FA

http://www.amazon.com/Samsung-NP900X3C-A05US-13-3-Inch-Premium-Ultrabook/dp/B0098O6GD4/ref=sr_1_1?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1375236443&sr=1-1&keywords=samsung+series+9

http://www.amazon.com/UX31A-DH51-13-3-Inch-Zenbook-Silver-Aluminum/dp/B009AEYDZA/ref=sr_1_4?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1375236031&sr=1-4&keywords=asus+vivobook

I can vouch for the Series 9, it's what I have. Once I removed some crap called intellimemory it runs very well. The HD4000 can play civ 5, skyrim and StarCraft 2, albeit at lowish settings. These should all be very nice ultrabooks, with light weight, good screens, etc. You will be sacrificing a bit of the gaming, however.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Jul 31 2013, 2:10 am by Centreri.

I actually recommend the MacBook Air. The latest model.

It sports 4GB of memory, 128GB SSD, and the latest Intel Haswell CPU which offers a 12 hour battery life weighing in at 3 pounds. The new Haswell GPU plays Starcraft II on low settings offering 60 FPS which I think is damn fine. While gaming I get a 6 hour battery life which is also amazing.

I run windows on my Mac which is how I play these games. Not only that it is the best built ultrabook around.

The starting price is 999.99 after tax it will exceed your budget a bit. But playing casual games like Starcraft, League of Legends, Steam games this system has made me VERY happy. The battery life for school/work and gaming is just amazing while offering great graphics and a long lasting system.

10/10 in my books.

EDIT: Oh yeah don't forget the HD 5000 Haswell grpahics.. best ever!

Thanks for the responses. I still haven't bought a laptop actually as I've just been using my brother's old one but now that he has reclaimed it, I am back in the search. I hadn't actually considered the MacBook as I've just heard that Apple over prices everything. I'll be sure to check it out.

Thank you Cent for those suggestions. I was actually about to buy the third one you suggested but then I decided to wait.

Also could anyone elaborate on Nude's response. Do integrated graphics actually trump over dedicated graphics in certain aspects?
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This time I have a more specific question. Resolution vs specifications. I understand a higher resolution is better but also playing games at your native resolution is best. I am currently looking at these two specifications:

One laptop has an i7 processor with a GeForce GT 750M graphics module and is 15.6'' with a 1366x768 resolution (Acer Aspire V5-573PG-9610).
The other laptop has an i5 processor with a Geforce GT 720M graphics module and is 15.6'' with a 1900x1080 resolution (Aspire V7-582PG-6421)

Between these two laptops, what are the general differences I would experience within games and out side of games? Games such as Dota 2, not games such as Skyrim or Battlefield 4 (Idk if that makes a difference at all)

I am also comparing these two to two other laptops which I will probably bring up later.

Thanks again for all your help.

Well, I could as well...
Think of OnBoard graphics chips like mini graphics cards.
They are smaller in physical size,
their gaming power is smaller,
their power demand is smaller, (trump)

So this means they are useless for any serious gaming but need less power which is good for battery life.
Though the new Haswell chips raise the bar enough to be useful for light gaming.

About the "other" Laptop with GT 720GM discrete graphics. Forget gaming. It's not made for gaming.

A GT 750M is upper middle class in notebook graphics and as such will do decently in games which is greatly supported by the lower resolution of the laptop.
Keep in mind that in this graph it's compared to full graphics cards that can handle much higher resolutions and better after effects which pulls down the performance considerably, but doesn't affect the visuals *too* much.

Desktop performance should be similar for both laptops, although you'll have more space on the desktop with non-gaming variant due to higher resolution.

Baseline is: 720 for watching movies, office and internet, 750 for playing games on high-medium.

Thanks. I am not very good at this but I feel I am slowly making progress. A few more questions:

Can a Nvidia GeForce GT 750M play games at native-resolution 1900x1080 on medium-high graphics? ( ie Dota 2, not Skyrim)

Personal preferences, which looks nicer: 1366x786 on a 15.6 inch or 1900x1080 on a 14 inch.

What is the main difference between i5 processor and i7 processor? (in basic English terms)

Is gaming on a 14 inch laptop viable or is the screen too small?

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Dec 3 2013, 3:43 am by Bar Refaeli.

Plain Simple English:

The i7 has 4 cores as opposed to the i5's 2, modern intel processors use predictive pipelining, but predicting machine code branches still runs into irreconcilable control hazards, forcing full flush and updates to all cores participating in the pipeline, making a noticeable amount of overhead - if this happens a couple times in a row you may notice a lag spike. In addition, multi-threaded code is very difficult to write, so cores associated with the main processing line are used heavily while additional cores are almost not used at all - resulting in cores past two or three sitting pretty much idle (aside from the rare moments when dividing the machine code among cores is worth the reallocation from your background processes - which will need to resume operation shortly making the reallocation neccessary again soon, sometimes requiring the entire next level cache to be swapped out).

There are some i7s with 2 cores. The only difference between the i7 and i5 lines is "usually" things, like "usually" i5s don't have hyperthreading on desktops.

http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/processor-comparison/compare-intel-processors.html

Check Marks are good, and the higher the number, the better the processor is. It's so simple it's not worrying about. Laptop manufacturers won't put an i3 in with a GTX 780, though smart PC gamers do, since the i3 is more than enough to not bottleneck even the best graphics at high resolution.

CPU is both the most important part of your computer and the least important part (as long as it's a new processor).

qft.

To reword it without a CPU nothing in your Computer will work but when you get a modern CPU it doesn't matter which one. (Unless you have special applications like you are converting movies or rendering 3D scenes a lot, but even for that you're better off using the GPU if your application supports it.) Because outside of games CPUs are usually just idling and inside games the graphics card is the bottleneck.

Thanks guy. Great work.

I will say I did a statistics project where I tested overclocking/underclocking my CPU, GPU, and VRAM. When I ran futuremark, CPU gave me the largest increase, but I also was able to overclock that the most when compared to GPU and VRAM. GPU had a statistically significant effect, and VRAM actually did worse when overclocked (not statistically significant).

I believe my computer was being bottlenecked by the CPU heavily during my tests, however, so perhaps my experiment was completely flawed to begin with.