I have abandoned console gaming and wanting to move over to the master race - or PC Gaming. however, I do travel alot, so a desktop is unrealistic for me. I want to get a good gaming laptop or equivalent that wont break the bank (So $1500 - or less) I am interested in playing Skyrim Medium to High settings with mods, Also i would like to get into old school titles such as Counter Strike and a bit of G-Mod. Are there any laptops or components in laptops I should keep an eye out for?
I am GPU/CPU illiterate but i was thinking the Nvidea GeForce GT 740M may be suficient. If there is anything else i should consider, Let me know - any advice would be appreciated!
The MSI will be noticeably faster, but both will get the job done for what you requested. The MSI is also a pound or so lighter according to Amazon, and if you travel a lot this may be a worthwhile investment.
However, the Lenovo is significantly cheaper, which means you could take the saved money and invest in a sizable SSD for it, which would make it one hell of a laptop, and snappier than the MSI's 7200 RPM HDD.
Yes, both could be upgraded with an SSD. However to the best of my knowledge these laptops only have space for a single HDD/SSD, meaning the old HDD cannot be used internally.
One of the main reasons to get the MSI would be the higher RPM HDD.
Now, you could also get an enclosure for the old drive and have a good external HDD, which isn't a bad idea.
And with both laptops, be sure to get a good gaming mouse. The mouse alone can make or break your experience with PC gaming.
you could always get the new wd black2 drive, it's an SSD and an HDD both in the same enclosure, designed specifically for people in the same position as you.
The advantage of going SSD + external HDD would be that for a similar price they could get much more SSD capacity. I have problems keeping a 128gb SSD clean enough to hold more than an OS and 5-6 games.
For an identical price, one could buy a 500gb Samsung 840 Evo.
Yeah. A few games would fit on the SSD half, but space on it will be very limited.
a 120Gb SSD has roughly 111Gb of useable space.
my current C:\Windows folder is 21.6Gb, leaving close to 90Gb for media/games.
For reference, my Skyrim Legendary Edition (pirated, but I did buy the original) is 17Gb (mods included).
This is why I personally would take the 500Gb SSD over the 120+1tb. An external could be used to keep movies or other media, and 440Gb or so of SSD storage will be available for games and applications.