looking to get a modest upgrade over my current 3 yr old Asus N56VZ with Nvidia 650M
Requirements
-at least 1920x1080, not 100% convinced I need ultra HD or 4K
-best value in GPU I can get in a machine under roughly $2400
-touchscreen, undecided. How reliable are they? This is important!
I’m NOT a gamer and can’t stand the whole gaming aesthetic in laptop design,
primarily interested in
1 low Unity baking times and playback performance,
2 general 3D rendering performance and
3 screen quality
4 reliability
Have narrowed my choice so far down to 3 models. Was considering the Asus Zenbook, but can’t get past the glossy screen:(
1. MSI GS60 6QE GHOST PRO 4K
6th gen i7 16GB RAM
GTX 970M 6GB GDDR5
15.6" ultra HD
Starting at $1882.99
2. Dell XPS 15
i7 16GB RAM
GTX 960M 2GB GDDR5
15.6" 1080p non touch (ultra HD touch available)
Starting at $1,829.99
The last three laptops I purchased were referbished Korean brands off of Amazon and I was very happy each time. You can’t go wrong with a Korean laptop. Acer, Asus, or Samsung.
Avoid American and Japanese brands like the plague.
They always seem to have something seriously wrong with them like rediculous bloat, bad connectors, weak points on screens, poor battery life, over heating, you name it…
If you can hold off for a few months there are new AMD CPU’s and GPU’s from AMD and NVIDIA with smaller die sizes so they should provide a major step up in price/performance.
If nothing else they should push down the price of the laptops your looking at now.
At the same time I have Dell hardware, desktops and laptops both, that are well beyond a decade and still running. You will run into lemons at some point with just about every brand so make certain you read reviews for any device you’re preparing to purchase. Some have been known to have problems the manufacturer was deciding to ignore.
One example I distinctly remember was an ASUS case that shipped with a faulty PSU. It was well known to fail within months of purchase yet the company never bothered to correct the problem. The person who had the problem thought it was a motherboard issue and had spent new money on parts unrelated to the problem.
I’ve had better experiences with my last Dell laptop than my current Asus laptop. I’ve had a bad experience with an Acer Aspire. My very first laptop, a Dell, was a lemon with the power supply connector on the mobo. I believe Lenovo and MSI have good a reputation. I think the only definitive conclusion you can come to is not to get HP, and by association, Compaq, if that’s still a thing. We can all agree on that, right?
My own conclusion is that, like already mentioned, I think by @Ryiah , that although some brands have a reputation for being reliable or unreliable, you can still potentially end up with a lemon. Through my past experiences with my laptops, there’s no one brand you can turn to, and sometimes it’s actually the model/year of the product. It’s kind of like cars. Some years, the model is great, and other years, they’re just downright disastrous. I’m talking about the “93-99 Celica vs the 00-06 Celica”, or the pre vs post 2012-2013 Ford Fusion.
One of my friends, who works at a computer repair business, has frequently mentioned to me that Acer laptops have poor thermal design and are known to throttle at the drop of a pin. Her solution with one of the laptops she owned was to replace the thermal paste and create additional vents in the casing.
I don’t remember what was wrong with my Acer. Oh wait, I just remembered. It’d thrash all the time. It became unusable because it was just constantly accessing the hard drive. I tried all the tricks to prevent that stuff, like file cache options, or whatever Windows file indexing things there were, and just couldn’t get to stop thrashing. I think I even flashed it with a new disk image, but I can’t remember. Once I start having to consider using thermal paste on a machine that I’m not building, I’m moving on.
My current Asus complaint is the touchpad is downright unusable. What I mean by this is, when I got the laptop, I started typing super fast code, and it would skip characters. I tried typing slower, and it would still skip. I read about problems on my model, and most people disabled the touchpad in the bios (yes, we’ve tried driver updates), and presto, all keystrokes accounted for. It’s annoying for those times when I don’t have an external mouse, so I can’t really use it without one. Not only that, if I did have it enabled, the touchpad is flush with the palm rests, so I get inadvertent mouse movements. By contrast, I love the design of the Macbook Pro touchpad. Gotta give it up to Apple for at least designing some great hardware (at least from a UX perspective).
I’m not denying that. It’s just that they are in a middle ground where they can’t do high end stuff but also use lots of power. I went from powerful laptops to ultraportables and never have looked back(Unless it’s a 980 and then I would like it)
The 980M in my Asus Laptop is a power house which in many cases outperformed my desktop GTX 780… Thing is there’s a massive gap between lets say a 960M to a 980M and the other thing is the 980M is ridiculousy expensive.
Apparently AMD are doing a cheaper version of it which will be interesting.
I’ve been using an Acer laptop I bought roughly 7 months ago for school and unity. My primary selling point was the discrete GPU. However since day one there have been issues with the graphics. I’ve seen some weird stuff. The weird stuff seems to have cleared up, but more irritating things have appeared. Such as applications appearing completely white when being maximized (Windows 10 and 8.1).
It stutters sometimes when I’m playing music or multimedia.
Its a high quality laptop I’ll say that. I was impressed when I got it. There are a few features I wish it had that my last one had but other than these things its great.
When schools’ out I may send it in for repairs using warranty. Haven’t had the time to do that yet (school n’ stuff). The website for this particular model is pretty spotty. I couldn’t find a page for this one, making me feel like I’d bought a product abandoned not long after shipping, and some links were broken. The only way that I Could find any support was through one of the numerous bloatware applications most laptops come with these days. It is called Acer Explorer, and it allowed me to find that I still have a warranty and options in addition to finding what must have been a hidden page for it on Acer’s website.
Its nice. The faulty issues are a big stressor but I’m dealing with it. I can’t say anything for other Acer models, this is my first Acer machine.
