Hey guys ive been wanting to leave console gaming and get into the pc world and need some advice on what to do. Im going to college next year and am going to be getting a laptop with a budget of 2000. i wanted to know if it would be better to spend all 2000 on the laptop or spend 1400 on the laptop and 600 to build a pc. Thanks for any advice.
I would do exactly the reverse. Spend about 600 dollars in a laptop and build yourself a 1500 dollars pc. You would get a beast of a pc to do your work and gaming, and a laptop to have some portability.
Desktops have much better bang for buck than Laptops and you can choose the parts you want in a desktop build.
Im going to be doing engineering and need a really good laptop. i could shift the budget some but i need to spend atleast 1250 on the laptop
I've been looking at the MSI GX60 laptop, if your work uses OpenCL a lot then that looks like a good bang for buck.
Sadly, laptops are usually short term investments; they tend to break down and it's difficult and expensive to get replacement parts for them. Desktops will last longer, are easier to fix, and get you way more bang for your buck. If you put $1400 in a laptop and $600 in a desktop (assuming you do a decent desktop build), they should perform about the same, if not, the desktop will probably beat the laptop. If you want to go all-out on the laptop, I recommend you check out some of the custom gaming laptop sites out there, like Sager Notebooks ( www.sagernotebook.com ) rather then buying something like HP or Dell. Being able to customize your machine will save you a bit of money, because you can get everything you need with nothing you don't. If you buy a mainstream laptop, all the hardware scales together (with video cards usually trailing behind), meaning if you need a good GPU, but don't care about hard drive space, RAM, or screen size, you still have to pay for all that extra crap you don't need just to get a video card that will run games at half-decent framerates. My best advice though, is do your research, shop around, and only buy what you need, don't settle for something that's just "good enough", especially if it's overpriced.