Laptop question

[PoorOldSpike]

I'm going to buy a laptop for surfing and watching youtube and stuff, but it'd be nice if it could also play high-end games like PC2, so I recently sent this email to my local computer shop-

"Hi, I want to buy a laptop but only if it's powerful enough to play high-end strategy games and flight sims, do such super-duper laptops exist?"

And this was their reply-
"Yes they do , start at £799 and go up to £3000!
gets higher spec and game frame rate as you spend more. So depends on your budget?
this sort avail at £1199 inc vat-

· Intel Core i5-9300H Quad Core Processor
· 17.3" Full HD IPS 144Hz Anti-Glare Screen
· Microsoft Windows 10 Home 64-bit
· 8GB DDR4 2666MHz RAM
· 256GB M.2 NVMe SSD + 1000GB HDD
· Dedicated GeForce GTX 1660Ti 6GB Graphics."

What do Slith members think, will those specs do the job or should I spend more?
And will it have enough onboard hard drive capacity for a bunch of games?
And will I need a fan thing to keep it cool? Are fans noisy?

PS- I plan to plug the laptop into my big 27" monitor, I can do that can't I?

[Waffenamt]

Hi, I have a Surface 3 pro which is going on 5 years old and I was a bit miffed when I found the built-in video card was inadequate to run PzC2. It meets my needs for everything else so I wasn't going to lash out the cash for a gaming laptop just for that. Since I purchased the FM edition from Steam and it runs beautifully on my main PC which has an Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060 I thought I'd try Steam-streaming to my Surface. With this technology the image is mirrored to the Surface's monitor and only the key clicks and mouse moves are used. It actually works as described so I just need to fire up PzC2 in Steam on my PC (up to where you hit start, and then fire it up on my Surface via Steam and and it gives you the option to Connect to the PC. It works fine on Ethernet or 5 GHz wireless (and I have tested as little on 2.4) . The screen on the surface is pretty much identical to what shows on the PC and there is no discernible lag. I just wanted to quickly relay this information, but I can provide more technical details and screenshots if anyone is interested.
The bottom line is that this just works, and you might be able extend the life of some older laptops. That being said I'm using an old Surface 3 Pro, but it should work with other laptops with similar specs or better.

Regards

[fluffybunnyuk]

Avoid Dell. They typically use a power throttle 1-pin signal in the power cable.
Get something with a good base clock speed ... 1.6ghz junk wont cut it.
Dont worry about the storage. You can always swap a HDD for an SSD. It just involves a screw and pulling/out/old drive usually.
Get something with a graphics card, something thats not integrated.
A 15.6 inch or 17 inch screen is good.
8GB of ram as a base. But check its upgradeable. The option to change up to 16gb in the future can be useful.

In covid sales i'd be looking at £700-£1000 range for that. Nows a good time to buy a laptop on heavy discount. Expect to pay a little bit more for 17inch.

Buying a good laptop is hard work. Usually a part or 3 is junk on it to cut corners on the price. I always look for the cut corners on upgradeable things like DVD/blu-ray reader/writer drive, HDD (not an SSD), undersized 4/8GB RAM. All of those are usually easily remedied.

[Vorskl]

Man, to play hi-end games you must have a dedicated GPU and preferably 16GB of ram. The processor is not so important - i5 or i7 will do the job.
Here is what I bought a year ago at ~ $1000
Lenovo - Legion Y540 15.6" Gaming Laptop - Intel Core i7 - 16GB Memory - NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 Ti - 256GB Solid State Drive
and it's more than enough for PC2 and some machine learning applications for which I use its GPU
Note than playing PC2 requires a lot of power, so you must use a software like Throttlestop to adjust your PC voltage (true for any modern game laptop)

Also, to appreciate the game, buy a large monitor - something 23' will cost you around $130; unless you're going to play racing games, then 'fast matrix' is really unimportant, so look for a cheaper model.
Any other question - just message me