I’d like to buy a new laptop to replace my Swift 1 SF113-31-P3P0. I’m looking for something that reacts quickly. I was willing to put 400$ into it. But I’m guessing that’s not sufficient.
There are a lot of choices, and I’m lost:
I saw:
Surface Book 3: 1,800$ => Thanks, the price is crazy!
ZenBook 14: 700$ =>t looks good though
HUAWEI MateBook D14: 600$ => Seems pretty good, but isn’t this brand blocked somewhere?
HP Pavilion x360 14: 600$ => Seems good, but I have a bias toward HP, so I’m wary
Swift Go 14 AIHP Pavilion x360 14: 750$ => Seems interesting too, but I don’t know, my Swift is crappy, so I have a subjective bias, and I don’t really want to buy another one
My last laptop was a ZenBook 14 there are many different moddles of this, i have seen certain models on sale from retailers like bestbuy for under 500. I did like it as a slim and light.
What general system specs are you targeting? What would make a certain cheaper laptop a no go for you?
Thank you for your advice and taking the time to answer!
I think I’m looking for something that has a 14" or 15" screen, weights < 2 kgs, has 4 hours battery capacity, is able to display 2160p x265 movies and that’s it. I don’t want it to to lag (mine freezes when I copy and write text and have like two tabs opened. When I use my webcam the flux isn’t smooth it’s laggy, and that irritates me - I need a reactive multitask capacity).
Ideally if it can transform in a tablet or fold, it’s a nice touch, but I’ve not seen anything price a normal price, so I think I’ll have to forget that for now.
I’ve seen ZenBooks 14 ranging from 600 € to 1400 € so I don’t really know what to get.
The Lenovo V15 seems surprisingly nice! But I’m not sure that can get it. I live in Europe, in France, and Amazon doesn’t propose shipment to France, of course. It doesn’t exist in the same exact name in Amazon France. It seems there are lots of variation of this laptop, with various processors, etc. And a very varying range of prices. I’m unsure what to select.
I can’t include links in my answer it seems. In France, the closest I found is one called “Lenovo Ideapad 1 15ALC7 15’’ FHD IPS - Ryzen 5-5500U - Ram 16 Go - SSD 512 Go”. Does that seem correct? It’s at 550 € in the site named “FNAC”
In general, should I look for a 16 Gb laptopwith a processor getting the same performance score as an AMD Ryzen 5 5500U hexa-Core? I’ve seen a variation of the V15 with a Rysen 5 7520, which scores 40% lower though. But I’m unsure if that matters or not.
If you want a new laptop, 400 bucks of whichever persuasion won’t get you far: you’ll find consumer-grade hardware designed to break shortly after the warranty runs out.
For a good new laptop of enterprise build quality you will likely have to spend upwards of 1000 bucks. If refurbished is acceptable, good units can be had for as little as 300 bucks. But you have to know what you want, and sometimes need to invest additional money into components such as more/faster RAM, faster wifi card, or larger/faster SSD.
That said, I have some experience buying refurbished Dell Latitude and ThinkPad T-series laptops; they tend to be fairly economical, and last forever with a little bit of care. My use case is rather simple, and I buy only with integrated GPU, but you can find models with dedicated GPU for slightly more money. 16GB RAM and 512GB SSD is good enough for me right now (browsing, watching videos, some text processing, some light programming, and the occasional VM) but your mileage may vary, of course.
thats a quad core zen 2 from amd, amds naming is down right preditory you basicly have to google the models from amd to find out what it actualy is.
if you actually want good perfromance avoid the celerons and pentiums from intel, also i personally would be looking for some form of 6 cores or better, the more recent the better.
The zenbook 14 i had had a ryzen 5 5500u in it battery lasted ~6-8 hours it only had 8gb of ram.
My personal take is that 8gb is not enough ram. you will have a better experience with 16gb. its why i upgraded myself. stuff is just using more memory these days.
Also note a few of these mobile products use soldered ram. the 5500u is one of them, so you cannot upgrade it later.
its not the same but an option, not sure i would pay much more than 500 for a 5500u based device you can find its bigger brother the 5700u which has 8 cores at 550 in some laptops.
ps the 56000u(6core) and 5800u(8core) are zen3 are both zen3 unlike the 5500u and 5700u which are zen2 if you see those at a good price i would look at them also.
heres a lenovo on amazon.fr for 541.66€ its using an 8core zen3 AMD Ryzen 7 7730U also 16gb of ram 1tb ssd. This one may be the closest i have found to what your looking for.
for refference despite the naming difference the 7730u and 5800u would perform probably identically.
To give another out of budget suggestion, I’ve been very happy with my refurbished Framework 13 laptop. It is nice that it opens an upgrade rather than replacement path and they have been around for long enough that I feel comfortable having folks check them out. I did have a main board failure and the total downtime was 24 hours and no cost to me (they shipped a new board out overnight after some quick tech support diagnostics). You can save some money by looking at their “factory refurbished” options on their site. Worth looking at but they are more than the stated $400 budget.
Same, T14 Gen 2. Intel version if you want support for AV1. AMD for better multi-threading. Probably what i’ll be upgrading my T480 to when the time comes
Pricing is now a bit scattershot, with all the sub-sku arrangements, that have come up. But some [lingering] skus, are in the 400-500 window, hitting all those good economy metrics. A main area to be grounded on, is menial add-ons [soldered RAM / single M.2 slot]. But they’re bit fairly solid construction, with healthy sized keyboard/trackpad
The Lenovo IdeaPad 1 with Ryzen 5 5500U, 16GB RAM, and 512GB SSD for 550 € is a good choice. It’s fast enough for videos, multitasking, and everyday use. Avoid models with Ryzen 5 7520U—they’re slower. Look for 16GB RAM, Ryzen 5 5500U or Intel i5 (11th gen or newer), and an SSD. Foldable screens cost more and aren’t needed.
and taking the time to answer!