In the market for a new laptop

[CrimsonFox]

I finally got a low end gaming laptop. The Acer Nitro 5 for 600
Nice little machine

Currently looking for a gaming monitor now. I am hoping to get one on amazon but I'm having difficulty finding one with all the things I want

[Edward64]

Wife said she wants a new laptop for Christmas. Currently using a Dell 2/4 core. Has 16GB RAM but horrible screen, is about 4 years old so hoping I can sell it for $300'ish on ebay.

She wants a MBP, newer models with a significant upgrade coming supposedly in Fall. This will be the first Apple computer we'll be getting.

[Edward64]

Dell is now selling their Alder Lake desktops. Still a little pricey and especially since they are bundling GPU cards with it. My guestimate is about $300-$400 more than pre-supply chain mess.

My desktop is a i7-6700 with 16GB & SSD, so about 6+ years old, still perfectly functional for the basic stuff but wanting to get a 12th gen CPU to play Stellaris (e.g. without the really bad late stage lags). Also have a 750ti and so time to get something else.

All indications are the 12th gen Alder Lake CPU has really good performance.

I think I'll wait for the Memorial Day or Jul 4 sale when it (hopefully) won't be quite as bad.

We did not get a MBP for wife last BF sale. It would have been about $2K. She didn't want to spend that money and we agreed to wait. I'm thinking the next Air 3 sometime this year as I still owe her a nice Christmas & Birthday present.

[sterlingice]

My current laptop is on its last legs (well, either the screen or the screen cable) and I've been shopping around a bit and stuff is just, well, expensive right now, as to be expected. Doesn't make it any less annoying, though.

SI

[CarterNMA]

I hadn't realized until the other day when my wife mentioned it that my laptop is now 5 years old. It's an AlienWare 17" and it still working beautifully. I then realized that if I don't act soon (now?) I won't be able to get a Windows 10 laptop. I'm always slow to adopt new Windows version because I'm not a paid beta tester or QC/QA specialist. And to me W11 looks like they are trying to drift towards a Mac-like interface and eff that noise.

While I like my AW I'm more interested in getting a gaming machine from a different company. Does anybody have a good experience they can share? Also, anybody have any experience with ASUS laptops? I have a lot of ASUS products in my self-built desktops and have been generally impressed with them.

[rjolley]

I've had Asus ROG laptops before and they've been solid machines. Can't go wrong with them.

I currently have a Lenovo Legion Y740. When I got it, it was the best deal for the specs by far due. Their prices tend to be lower than other comparable laptops because they have frequent deals. The current gen Legion laptops seem to be following in that tradition. It has run everything that I've wanted to play with no real issue.

[Honolulu_Blue]

I just bought a MSI GE76 Raider. My latest gaming laptop was almost 6 years old, so it was time for an upgrade. I’ve had it for a few weeks now and love it. Runs great, looks good. I got it from Hidevolution - reseller.

All of my previous gaming laptops had been Sager/Clevos and had always had good experiences with them.

I really wanted to get a Lenovo Legion, but the build I wanted had a 4+ month wait for it, so I went with the MSI.

[sterlingice]

I also previous had a Sager/Clevo but they have really cut back on their offerings, sadly. I just recently picked up a Lenovo Legion 7 slim from Best Buy, but also threw in more memory (keep in mind they're going to be 1x16 so they're not the fastest memory), a second HD, and a better network card (apparently they got a bad batch of stock ones, if reviews online are to be believed). I also loaded Win10 - I bought a license and downloaded the media from Microsoft's site. Like H_B said, the waits for a custom one online are like 2-4 months so I had to make a couple of minor sacrifices in what I wanted or wait a while.

That said, I also don't do much gaming - I'm looking more for a content creator box so the 3060 was more than enough for me. I haven't had a chance to really put it through its paces though, as the last month has been really busy at work so I'm still operating off my old laptop and gradually building out the new one.

SI

[Honolulu_Blue]

My previous three gaming laptops were all Sager/Clevos, but I agree they have seemed to have cut back lately, which led to the change to MSI. I, also, looked closely at Falcon NW for a custom-made laptop.

I did just see that there are Legion 7i Gen 6 Intel (16") with RTX 3080 currently in stock at Lenovo.com. Looks like a great machine. Not cheap, but super solid. If it had been available a few weeks back, I likely would have picked it up.

[CarterNMA]

Thank you, gentlemen!

Seems I have a bit of homework to do. I would have never considered a Lenovo had I not asked.

Now I have to go see what I can learn from Kodos' post about his son's laptop.

[Edward64]

Got a new Thinkpad X1 Yoga for my wife, shipping date is next week. She's been using an old 2 core/4 thread Latitude for a while now so time for an upgrade.

I'm looking at a used Thinkpad T14S Gen 2 (AMD) myself. There are some relatively good Thinkpad deals out there but you have to check daily. There are some Legion laptops for gaming but no experience with them. See below link for the Lenovo outlet store.

logaze - watching laptops on Lenovo outlet

FWIW, my strategy now is to stick with laptops. They keep their value better and easier to re-sell (every 2-3 years) on eBay than a desktop.

[Edward64]

I love how we can start charging laptops with USB-C Thunderbolt or USB4. Do away with all that proprietary power plugs.

[Edward64]

Excited. My new X1 Carbon Gen 10 is sched to arrive this Thu and it'll replace my old i7-6700 desktop (circa 2015).

It's not a gaming laptop but the current iGPU is better than my old desktop discrete 750Ti so I should be happy with the performance.

[Tyanzun]

My laptop is HP and has been working on it for almost 6 years. Nowadays, it reacts to overheating and dead pixels on the screen. Currently, I'm planning for the Lenovo ThinkPad E14 to accomplish my work.

[Ksyrup]

It seems like there's the potential for a decent deal on a laptop in the next 2 months. Anyone seen any pre-Black Friday deals or know which manufacturers may be more motivated than others to deeply discount? I'm not in the market but mine is 3 years old and I'd upgrade a bit early if I can get a great deal.

[Edward64]

Gaming or regular laptop? Budget (great deal is relative)?

I'm partial to Thinkpads (non-gaming). I check the below link which "scrapes" their outlet store into xls format for easy filtering & sorting for 1+ year old models. Many of them still have warranty.

logaze - watching laptops on Lenovo outlet

I've also bought used from eBay and it turned out to be a good experience. But good deals on eBay are the 3+ year old models.

If looking for a new laptop, then I'd say wait till closer to around BF and create alerts/monitor Hot Deals - Slickdeals.net

[Ksyrup]

Leisure/gaming - although I don't do too much heavy lifting as far as games go. I still like to have the ability to ramp it up for a game if something looks cool.

[sterlingice]

I got a laptop a few months ago and I'll second Edward on Lenovo. I can't speak to the Thinkpads, but I went with a Legion and I've been really impressed with the build quality for the cost. Heck, during the early days of the pandemic, we got my son a cheapy Lenovo Chromebook and that thing has held up better than a lot of laptops I've seen

I mean, at the end of the day, stuff is becoming so white box where most of it is made by Foxconn and the aesthetic design and build quality is all that's different, even in laptops.

That said, I haven't been out shopping the last few months - I bought this at the beginning of the year and both the supply chain and changes in crypto use with graphics cards have made some pretty substantial changes to the market.

SI

[Ksyrup]

I've got a Legion now and it's been solid.

[Edward64]

Originally Posted by Ksyrup

Leisure/gaming - although I don't do too much heavy lifting as far as games go. I still like to have the ability to ramp it up for a game if something looks cool.

Something that I considered is a Thinkpad T14S Gen 3 with Ryzen 7 6850u. It has iGPU 680M which is currently the best iGPU you can buy with pretty decent CPU performance.

If I was in the market there is a pretty good deal now for $1,150 (see below link). The 32GB RAM will future proof for another 5+ years.

https://slickdeals.net/f/16091311-no...earchBarV2Algo

I'm more focused on "business" so I lean towards Thinkpads (can't beat the keyboards). If you are more "gaming" then go with the Legion.

[thesloppy]

I bought a laptop like 6 months ago & like everybody else here I heard great things about Lenovo/Thinkpads...but I bought a Gigabyte A5 X1 cuz it was on a very good sale, even in the middle of the GPU lean times. In fact I just looked it up & it is still going for $200 more than I paid for it. It's been great, but I pretty much treat it like a desktop.

[Edward64]

BTW, for Lenovo, if you have a Visa card, you can use link below

https://www.lenovo.com/us/members/en...isacardholders

More often than not, it gives better deals ($200+ off) than the regular site.

[rjolley]

I'll third the Lenovo Legion. Bought one just before the pandemic and with deals, I got a laptop that was better spec'd than anything else I could find for the cost.

Lenovo always has deals going on, so if you can wait a bit, it might be the best bang for the buck.

Also, I've been watching the Amazon Prime Days deals. There have been some interesting offers. And with the 40XX laptops due out, more deals for the 30XX laptops will be coming.

[Coffee Warlord]

I was so pleased with the Legion I got, I got a second one for my son.

[Honolulu_Blue]

I really wanted to get a Lenovo Legion, but when I was looking there were none available for months.

[Coffee Warlord]

Similar to laptop - I'm looking for a new windows tablet (good sized) for my dad. Any recommendations?

[Edward64]

Sorry, no experience with Windows tablets.

[Edward64]

Article is desktops but figure to put it here since there's not a dedicated desktop thread. I'd assume the laptop versions will also have a pretty good uplift.

Basically, if you are in the market for an intel desktop, you may want to consider waiting for the 13th gen sometime early next year. Performance increase is pretty good, especially in multi-threaded apps. Unfortunately, I don't need all that horsepower and can't justify it.

Core i5-13500 ES CPU Beats Core i5-12500 By Over 50 Percent In Early Multi-Threaded Benchmarks | Tom's Hardware

The Core i5-13500 poses to be one of the best CPUs, according to early benchmarks. A BiliBili content creator recently posted a video showcasing an engineering sample(opens in new tab) of Intel's upcoming mid-range Core i5-13500 Raptor Lake processor and what it can do in Cinebench R23 and CPU-Z. The performance characteristics of the new CPU are impressive, with the chip boasting a whopping 56% multi-threaded performance advantage over its Core i5-12400 Alder Lake predecessor, thanks to the inclusion of eight additional efficiency cores on the Raptor Lake chip.

We see this massive boost in core count clearly in Cinebench R23, where the chip in the Bilibili video hits a multi-threaded score of 19,891 points. It represents a whopping 56% performance improvement for the Core i5-13500 compared to the Core i5-12500, which scores 12,678 points in the same benchmark, according to Tech Notice(opens in new tab).

In CPU-Z's benchmark, the results are even more impressive, with the Core i5-13500 pulling out a score of 8,222 points in the multi-threaded benchmark, and is 61% faster than the official Core i5-12500 multi-threaded CPU-Z score of 5,108 points.

The single-threaded results aren't very imposing, with the Core i5-13500 pulling out a 9% lead over the Core i5-12500 in Cinebench R23, with a score of 1,901 vs. Tech Notice's score of 1,736 for the Core i5-12500. Unfortunately, we couldn't get a CPU-Z single-threaded result since the video's image quality was too blurry to make out any detail.

[Edward64]

Son got a new gaming desktop so he sold me his XPS 8940. Wife and I are primarily using laptops but he gave me a great deal (and desktop 1660 ti is better than my laptop's 780m).

There was an irritating noise coming from the CPU cooler. I can handle a steady hum but the noise was whiny (?) & fluctuated, and that bugged the heck out of me. Watched some YT and replaced the stock cooler with a Vetroo V5 for about $30. It also came with a thermal paste that I used.

Steady hum now while playing Civ 6.