• Gaming laptops between 800$ and 1000$
• Gaming laptops with unique combination of features
• Gaming laptops with top gaming performance for the money

Scroll to see more laptops

MSI GT60-0NE (680M)

15.6 (matte, 1080p)

Current deals / Direct link

1700$-1800$

1700$-1800$

GTX 680M, I7-3630QM, 12GB, 750GB 7200RPM

Blu-Ray Burner

• Highest gaming performance for a single GPU laptop.
• High quality Killer 1202 WiFi network adapter – excellent for LAN parties
• Blu-Ray burner
• 2-year warranty
• Very good thermals
• Good DynaAudio sound system
• Battery performance is not great but acceptable

• Might be noisy for some people
• Still, pricey

1, 2

FORCE 16F3 (36-024) (680M)

15.6 (matte, 1080p)

Current deals / Direct link

1550$

~1630$

GTX 680M, I7-3630QM, 8GB, 750GB 7200RPM

• Highest gaming performance for a single GPU laptop.
• Gaming performance / price ratio is excellent.
• Good thermals for such a laptop.
• Lots of configuration options, including some nice screen upgrades
• Good enough sound system (as the MSI GT70)

• Not quiet
• Some upgrades are overpriced
• Noisy under load

1

Alienware m17x-R4 (7970M)

17.3 (glossy, 1080p)

Current deals / Direct link

1750$-1800$

1850$-1900$

Radeon 7970M, I7-3630QM, 8GB, 500GB 7200RPM

• Very high gaming performance with the Radeon 7970M
• Good thermals and no throttling
• Very good build quality
• Good keyboard
• Good touchpad
• Screen has good viewing angles
• Good set of connection ports
• Distinct style

• Highly overpriced - you can get the same performance for 300$-400$ less
• Heavy even compared to the rest high end laptops
• Shouty style
• Glossy, reflective screen
• Battery performance could be better

1, 2, 3

Eurocom Racer 2.0 (7970M)

15.6 (matte, 1080p)

Current deals / Direct link

1510$

~1600$

Radeon 7970M, I7-3630QM, 8GB, 500GB Hybrid HDD or 128GB SSD

High quality AUO 95% adobeRGB coverage screen (included in price)

• Gaming performance / price is very good.
• Radeon 7970M performanceis very high, rivaling the GTX 680M
• Very good matte 1080p screen included in price - good for professionals
• Hybrid HDD/128GB SSD for low price.

• You can get more gaming power for your money, if you are not interested in the extra features
• Noisy under load

1, 2, 3

Sager NP9150 (7970M)

15.6 (glossy, 1080p)

Current deals / Direct link

1370$ (cash)

1450$ (cash)

Radeon 7970M, I7-3630QM, 8GB, 750GB 7200RPM

• Gaming performance / price is excellent with the Radeon 7970M
• Radeon 7970M performance is very high, rivaling even the GTX 680M.
• Many configuration options
• Windows 7 option

• Upgrades are not cheap (SSD, for example) – The Eurocom Racer 2.0 might be a better choice

1, 2, 3 (P150EM)

matte screen (+30$)

Sager NP9150 (675MX)

15.6 (glossy, 1080p)

Current deals / Direct link

1280$ (cash)

1360$ (cash)

GTX 675MX, I7-3630QM, 8GB, 750GB 7200RPM

• Gaming performance / price is excellent with the Radeon 675MX
• GTX 675MX gaming performance is very high.
• Many configuration options
• Windows 7 option

• Upgrades are not cheap (SSD, for example) – The Eurocom Racer 2.0 might be a better choice

1, 2, 3 (P150EM)

matte screen (+30$)

CyberPower Fangbook X7-100 (675MX)

17.3 (matte, 1080p)

Current deals / Direct link

1350$-1470$

1350$-170$

GTX 675MX, I7-3630QM, 8GB, 750GB 7200RPM

• Gaming performance / price ratio is very good
• Good thermals for such a laptop.
• Good enough sound system (as the MSI GT70)
• Two HDD bays
• Two mSata connection ports

• Not quiet.
• No extended warranty available
• Noisy under load

MSI GT70-0NC (670MX)

17.3 (matte, 1080p)

Current deals / Direct link

1200$-1350$

1300$-1350$

GTX 670MX, I7-3630QM, 12GB, 750GB 7200RPM

BR-R

• GTX 670MX gaming performance
• With the extra features – very good value for the price
• Good thermals
• Blu-ray player
• Screen’s horizontal angles are good, high contrast, almost all sRGB is covered.
• Good sound
• 2-year warranty
• Two HDD bays
• Two mSata connectors
• Sometimes very good deals

• You can get a better gaming performance for this price, if you don’t need the OS, blu-ray player and 2-year warranty.
• Noisy under load

2-year

1, 2

Eurocom Racer 2.0 (GTX 670MX)

15.6 (matte, 1080p)

Current deals / Direct link

1220$-1350$

1300$-1420$

GTX 670MX, I, 8GB, 500GB Hybrid HDD / 128GB Crucial m4 SSD

High quality AUO 95% adobeRGB coverage screen (included in price)

• Gaming performance / price is very good.
• GTX 670 (and up) gaming performance
• Very good matte 1080p screen included in price - good for professionals
• Hybrid HDD/128GB SSD for low price.

• Noisy under load
• Battery performance might be not so good

 1, 2, 3

Asus G75VX (670MX)

17.3 (matte, 1080p)

Current deals / Direct link

1250$

1250$

GTX 670MX, I7-3630QM, 8GB, 1TB 5400RPM

• Excellent performance for the money
• Excellent thermals making the G75 throttling proof
• Low noise
• Very good build quality
• Comfortable keyboard
• Two HDD bays

• Heavier than other 17.3 laptops (not by much)
• 5400RPM HDD and not 7200RPM, but you can replace it yourself
• Sound issues?

1

replace the HDD with a fast one.

Lenovo Y500 (I7, GT 650M SLI)

15.6 (glossy, 1080p)

Current deals / Direct link

1000$-1050$

1000$-1050$

2xGT 650M (> GTX 670MX) , I7-3630QM, 8GB, 1TB 5400RPM

• Gaming performance for the money is extra ordinary and above any other laptop in this list, for most games
• Good sound system
• Low noise

• Might get pretty hot under full load (use a cooling pad)
• Not light
• Battery performance is not good
• Trackpad in first models was very problematic
• 5400RPM HDD
• Glossy screen

1

replace the HDD with a fast one.

MSI GX60 (7970M)

15.6 (matte, 1080p)

Current deals / Direct link

1050$-1200$

1050$-1200$

Radeon 7970M, A10-4600M, 8GB, 750GB 7200RPM

BR-R

• In Many games, the gaming performance is very high with the 7970M, exceeding anything else in the price range
• Blu-ray player
• Good thermals
• Good DynaAudio sound system
• Good battery performance(5 hours surfing)
• Two HDD bays
• CPU is replaceable with next gen. AMD CPU.
• Good build quality

• Performance in some games is limited due to the A10 cpu, but note that drivers have improved.
• Might get noisy under full load

2-year

1, 2, 3

Sager NP9130 (670MX)

15.6 (matte, 1080p)

Current deals / Direct link

~1080$ (cash)

~1150$ (cash)

GTX 670MX, I7-3630QM, 8GB, 750GB 7200RPM

• Very high gaming performance for the money
• Very good screen upgrade option for low price (95% adoeRGB Gamut)
• Good build quality

• No backlit keyboard
• Only 1 HDD bay

See NP9150 reviews

Lenovo Y500 (I5, GT 650M SLI)

15.6 (glossy, 1080p)

Current deals / Direct link

900$

2xGT 650M, I5-3230M, 6GB, 1TB 5400RPM

• same as the I7 version, only with an I5 and 6GB RAM.
• Extremely cost effective

• Might get pretty hot under full load (use a cooling pad)
• Not light
• Battery performance is not good
• Trackpad in first models was very problematic
• 5400RPM HDD
• Glossy screen

1

FORCE 16F3 (22-001) (I7, 670M)

15.6 (matte, 1080p)

Current deals / Direct link

960$ cash

~1040$

GTX 670M, I7-3610QM, 8GB, 750G 5400RPM

• Good gaming performance for the money with the GTX 670M
• Highly configurable
• Good build quality
• Good sound with DynaAudio speakers

• There are higher performers for the money
• No backlit keyboard included
• Battery performance is so-so

1 (GT60)

HP Envy dv7t-7300 (I7, GT 650M)

17.3 (matte, 1080p)

Current deals / Direct link

950$-1100$

950$-1100$

GT 650M, I7-3630QM, 8GB, 750GB 5400RPM

Blu-Ray player

• Good build quality
• Very good 1080p screen with good viewing angles and high contrast
• Good gaming performance for the money or a 17.3 gaming laptop
• Backlit keyboard
• 2-year warranty
• Blu-ray player included in the price
• Not bad thermals

• Might be somewhat noisy
• Not the best gaming performance for the money, if you consider also 15.6 laptops

2-year

1 (dv6t-7200)

Dell Inspiron 17R SE (I7,  650M)

17.3 (matte, 1080p)

Current deals / Direct link

950$-1100$ (depends on coupons)

950$-1100$

GT 650M, I7-3630QM, 8GB, 1TB + 32GB mSSD

32GB mSSD

• Good build quality
• Good backlit keyboard
• Two HDD bays
• 32GB mSSD cache drive
• 1080p screen has good viewing angles and high contrast, even compared to other 1080p screens
• Good gaming performance for a 17.3 laptop in this price range

• Gaming performance for the money is good but not great.
• Included battery is relatively small
• High temps

1

Asus N56VZ (I7, 650M DDR3)

15.6 (matte, 1080p)

Current deals / Direct link

900$-1000$

900$-1000$

GT 650M DDR3, I7-3630QM, 8GB, 750GB 7200RPM

Blu-Ray Player, small external subwoofer

• Very good build quality
• Very good matte 1080p screen
• Very good backlit keyboard
• 7200RPM HDD as a default
• Blu-Ray player
• Good gaming performance for the money (not the best though)
• Good looks
• Very quiet even under load

• Not the best gaming performance for the money
• Might get a bit hot under load (shouldn’t worry you)

1

Sony Vaio S 15.5 (I5/I7, GT 640M LE)

15.5? (matte, 1080p IPS)

Current deals / Direct link

900$-1000$

900$-1000$

GT 640M LE, I5-3210M, 8GB, 750GB 7200RPM

Extended battery now on B&H

• Very good build quality
• Very good IPS 1080p screen with very good viewing angles
• Lightweight 4.42lbs laptop
• 750GB 7200RPM
• Good battery (at least 4 hours surfing through WiFi)

• Gaming performance is much lower than what you can get for this pricerange

1

Lenovo Y500 (I7, single GT 750M)

15.6 (glossy, 1080p)

Current deals / Direct link

800$-850$

800$-850$

GT 650M, I7-3630QM, 8GB, 1TB (optional: 16GB mSSD)

Optional: 16GB mSSD

• Gaming performance and value for the money is good with GT 650M and I7.
• Good sound system
• Glossy screen
• 16GB mSSD
• Backlit keyboard
• Low noise

• Might get pretty hot under full load (use a cooling pad)
• Not light
• Battery performance is not good
• Trackpad in first models was very problematic
• 5400RPM HDD
• Glossy screen

MSI GE60-0NC (I5, 650M)

15.6 (matte, 1080p)

Current deals / Direct link

850$-900$

850$-900$

GT 650M, I5-3230M, 8GB, 750GB 7200RPM

• good matte 1080p screen
• 7200RPM HDD
• not heavy compared to other 15.6 gaming laptops in the level
• Gaming performance is good for the price.

• Might get hot under full load
• Battery performance is so-so
• There are faster options for the price (look aside)

1

HP dv6t-7000 Select Edition (I5-3210M, 650M)

15.6 (matte, 1080p)

Current deals / Direct link

750$-900$

GT 650M, I5-3210M, 6GB, 640GB 5400RPM

• Good matte 1080p screen with good viewing angles
• Relatively good battery performance
• With some good coupons, good gaming performance for the money
• Windows 7
• Nice looks

• Without coupons the price isn’t that good
• 5400RPM HDD as a default

1

Backlit keyboard upgrade

Alienware m14x-r2 (650M)

14.0 (matte, 768p/900p)

Current deals / Direct link

950$-1075$

950$-1075$

GT 650M, I5-3230M, 6GB DDR3, 500GB 7200RPM

• Very good build quality
• Very good keyboard
• Good gaming performance (not the best for the money)
• 900p screen with high contrast and relatively good viewing angles
• 14.0 form factor
• Default 7200RPM HDD

• Though 14.0, not lightweight at around 2.8-3kg
• 900p screen colors are not good and the screen is glossyt (although it is not a bad one)
• Bulky
• Gaming performance for the money is not as good as other laptops

1, 2

900p screen upgrade

Asus G46VW (660M)

14.0 (matte, 768p)

Current deals / Direct link

900$-950$

900$-950$

GTX 660M, I5-3210M, 8GB DDR3, 750GB

• 14.0 form factor
• Very good gaming performance for the price
• Excellent cooling system
• Good battery
• Very good build quality
• Good touchpad and keyboard

• Screen is average at best. Disappointing for such a high end laptop
• Compact, but not lightweight
• 5400RPM HDD

1

Replace the 5400RPM HDD

Sager NP6165 (I5, 650M)

15.6 (glossy, 1080p)

Current deals / Direct link

820$ cash

~900$ cash

GT 650M, I5-3230M, 8GB, 750GB 7200RPM

• Highly and easily customizable
• Two HDD bays
• Good gaming performance for the money (espeically if you don’t need Windows OS)
• Very high quality 95% adobeRGB Gamut screen upgrade option

• Not the best gaming performance for the money
• Bulky, not as light as others
• Battery performance isn’t that good

1 (user review)

Screen upgrade

Dell Inspiron 15R SE (I5/I7, 7730M)

15.6 (matte, 1080p)

Current deals / Direct link

600$-800$

600$-800$

Radeon 7730M, I5-3210M/I7-3630QM, 8GB, 750GB 5400RPM

• Matte 1080p screen
• Good build quality

• Battery performance
• Gaming performance is lower than competitors significantly

1

Asus N56DP (A10, 7730M)

15.6 (matte, 1080p)

Current deals / Direct link

750$-800$

750$-800$

Radeon 7730M, A10-4600M, 8GB, 1TB 5400RPM

small external subwoofer

• Good matte 1080p screen with wide horizontal viewing angles
• Cool & Quiet
• Excellent keyboard
• Big trackpad
• Very good build quality

• Gaming performance for the money is lower than competitors
• The trackpad buttons are unified and sometimes are not very comfortable to use
• 5400RPM HDD

1

Lenovo Y400 (I7, GT 750M)

14.0 (glossy, 768p)

Current deals / Direct link

700$-750$

700$-750$

GT 750M, I7-3630QM, 8GB, 1TB 5400RPM (sometimes with a 16GB mSSD)

Optional ultrabay with another GT 650M

• 14.0 form factor
• Highest performance for the money in this price range
• Sometimes includes a 16GB mSSD for around the same price
• Optional ultrabay with an additional GT 650M GPU

• Average 768p laptops screen..
• Although a 14.0, not lightweight

Acer V3-571G-6622 (I5, GT 730M)

15.6 (glossy, 768p)

Current deals / Direct link

600$-630$

600$-630$

GT 730M, I5-3230M, 4GB, 500GB 5400RPM

• Very good gaming performance for the money with the I5 and GT 730M (~GT645M)
• Low noise
• Good keyboard

• Average glossy 768p screen (low quality)
• Not lightweight

1 (w/ 1080p), 2

HP dv6z-7200 (A6-4400M, 7670M)

15.6

Current deals / Direct link

535$-685$ (w/ 1080p)

535$-685$ (w/ 1080p)

Radeon 7670M, A6-4400M to A10-4600M, 640GB 5400RPM HDD

• Very good matte 1080p screen
• Good battery performance
• Good thermals
• Good looks

Dell Inspiron 15R SE (I5, 7730M)

15.6 (matte, 768p)

Unavailable currently

550$ (before tax and shipping)

550$

Radeon 7730M, I5-3230M, 6GB, 750GB 5400RPM

• Very high gaming performance for the money
• Good build quality
• Low noise
• OK keyboard, good trackpad

• Tax & shipping make add significantly for price
• 768p screen
• Not always available

1

iBuyPower Valkyrie CZ-17(675MX)

17.3 (matte, 1080p)

Current deals / Direct link

1300$-1350$

1300$-1350$

GTX 675MX, I7-3630QM, 16GB, 750GB 7200RPM

BR player

• Excellent gaming performance for the money
• Good build quality
• Good matte 1080p screen with very high contrast
• OK keyboard, good trackpad
• Blu-Ray player

• Not quiet
• Not light (not heavier than compatitors though)
• Though screen is relatively very good, it is not for professionals who need adobeRGB covered

12

How to choose a gaming laptop for yourself

And how to use this filtering system. If you’ll try to use the filtering, you’ve probably noticed that the laptops are not ordered according to their price. Actually, it is a real problem how to arrange this list according to the laptop’s quality since each one of us have different needs and while one will prioritize high mobility over top performance, another one might prefer it differently.

So, I tried to place each laptop more or less according to its total value for most people, in my opinion. For example, the Gigabyte P2542 is placed lower than the Lenovo Y580 because the Y580 costs 250$-300$ less and although the P2542 has a much better screen, it still seems to me to be a less interesting find for most of the people.

When you choose your laptop you are trying to get the best gaming laptop (in this case) for your money and needs. Therefore, you need to think it over once or twice and define for yourself what are your needs (performance, weight, screen quality, battery) and what is the budget. Sometimes you need some more opinions and I suggest discussing your thoughts and questions over the forum - this way your can refine your choice. But generally, the laptops in this table are – again, in my opinion – the most interesting ones to be counted as the best gaming laptops currently available.

The post Best Gaming Laptops appeared first on Gaming Laptops Junky.

If you are on a tight budget, the K55N offers a lot. The quad A8-4500M CPU packs a lot of CPU power and its integrated 7640G GPU is equal the HD4000 giving some gaming capabilities for low end gaming. For 400$ it’s a good deal.

The post Asus K55N 15.6″ gaming laptop, A8-4500M, 7640G GPU, 4GB DDR3, 500GB HDD fpr 380$ appeared first on Gaming Laptops Junky.

Tthere are some more variants for these models (with or without SSD and so on) and I’ll update when they will be more available in the US, but these are probably the most interesting of the bunch due to having the highest performance and 1080p screen.

So lets draw a little table with some raw and reviews info:

The first thing to note is the portability features of these laptops: the Series 7 is on the lower end in terms of weight compared to other gaming laptops in the same size. Add to this the very good battery performance for their measures – especially the 15.6″ models with around 11 hours of surfing the web through WiFi (!!!) and you got yourself a wanderers gaming machine.  You’d also note that they are relatively thin. The case, however, is well built and sturdy. All these features summed together make a very strong case for the Series 7. Important thing you should note and will be a disadvantage in the long term is the unremovable battery. In three years you’d want to replace it probably. I might be mistaken.

OK, I know what you are going to say, that the Samsung Series 7 is not something new and why do I so excited by the new models. Well, first, you should work on your attitude. Secondly, the previous models were actually not interesting enough for me to recommend them as gaming laptops choice and they were certainly not the best in their class except maybe their battery performance. For example, the 15.6″ model (850$-1000$) although equipped with a nice combination of an I7 and our beloved GT 650M, had a poor screen quality (see here) and had throttling issues which render the theoretically good gaming performance into uncompetitive compared to the compatitors (like the now gone Y580, the Y500, MSI GE60 and all the others top gaming laptops in this price range) and even without the throttling problems, the screen’s quality alone should be a deal breaker.

Now lets talk a bit about the two 770z models and the Radeon 8870M GPU due to its higher performance. The Radeon 8870M, according to latest NBR benchmarks is something between the GT 650M and the GTX 670M with an average sitting probably around the 660M. Yes, this is quite a range and yes, this is disappointing but I really think we should wait a little more to see what its optimal performance due to driver efficiency and so on (NBR didn’t tested it with the latest beta drivers).

Moreover, if you recall the Radeon 8790M performance tests by TechReport you will see that they achieved much higher results in BF3 with higher settings (medium settings, 1440×900, 4xAF) than the Radeon 8870M in the NBR BF3 tests (!) so I really think this is not the correct picture, as we’ve seen few times from the NBR tests for some reason. I suspect that with better drivers and maybe better testing methods we could see the 8870M shining. By the way, I’m pretty sure it is highly overclockable and can be overclocked to the levels of its desktop sister – the Radeon 7770 (1000MHZ core) which should give a significant boost, given the thermals are ok.

Another word about the gaming performance – the 17.3″ model has a throttling issue, at least according to NBR which prevents it from reaching its full potential. This is quite annoying. The 15.6″ model has relatively good cooling, especially if you consider the slim case and low weight and the NBR tests didn’t reveal any throttling though the CPU under full load was set to 2.4GHZ which is the base clocks of the specific I7 meaning no turbo boost took place. This also affects the performance. Anyway, a cooling pad should solve it at least partially.

Last important parameter is the screen. Both the 15.6″ and 17.3″ models have a very good 1080p screen. sRGB color palette almost covered which is very good for the common gamer / consumer (less for professional photo editing). The contrast levels are very good to excellent with the ~900 and ~1450 for the 17.3″ 770z7e and the 15.6″ 770z5e respectively – both excellent ratios and should be the standard qualily in my opinion – stop selling us junk screens! and to make the the package complete, both screens’ come with very good viewing angles, especially the 15.6″ which at least according to the NBR review, are excellent with virtually no color changing. The 17.3″ horizontal viewing angles are very good and the vertical less but generally they are on the higher end of the gaming laptops screens.

Last thing, the competitors. Two part answer: if you in for highest gaming performance for the money, you should look elsewhere . But, if you are after a highly portable laptop with very good gaming capabilities, you have several options with the Samsungs being probably the top in their price range with the following competitors:

• Gigabyte U2442 very slim and lightweight 14.0″ gaming laptop which according to the NBR review has a so-so screen at best. Top model “F” includes a GT 650M GPU. The screen kinda throws it out of the race.
• Sony Vaio S 15.5 which is slim, lightweight (4.5 lbs!), nice looking and has good 1080p IPS display, but the battery performance is lower but it’s much because of the small battery – you can purchase an additional battery. The price is right for such a laptop, but you get lower gaming capabilities.
• Asus Zenbook UX51VZ 15.5″ gaming laptop with GT 650M, very good 1080p IPS display, very sleek, SSD as a default, no throttling in the common case, low weight and very good build quality.

Probably there are some more out there, but these Samsungs as a whole package currently offer the best combination of gaming performance and portability for the money in this price range (something like 1000$-1400$) and soon will be added to the “best gaming laptops” section. Currently the 770zs are a unique and needed combination and they give you what you except.

Finally, my main conclusion from these new models is that the competition become more and more fierce and though we are far from getting a really good package for reasonable price, we finally start seeing manufacturers throw into the mix more thoughts and effort with better screens combined with good performance and portability which till now I didn’t really see. I guess we’ll see more such things soon.

The post New interesting gaming laptops – the Samsung Series 7 Chronos 770z5e and 770z7e (and the 780z5e) appeared first on Gaming Laptops Junky.

Nice deal. Several units are available and if you are ok with a refurbished laptop then this is a good one. You get an I7-3630QM, GT 650M, 8GB DDR3 and the 1080p screen for 615$.

The post Refurbished Lenovo Y500 with 1080p screen and GT 650M for 615$ on eBay 16/04/2013 appeared first on Gaming Laptops Junky.

As for the Y400 and Y500 themselves – generally, a very cost effective gaming laptops which give you a very good gaming performance for you money. In the case of the Y500 you also get an 1080p screen. The Y400 is the same old 768p one probably, but you still get a lot of power for your money + good build quality + the option for an ultrabay with an additional GPU.

The post Lenovo Y400 and Y500 gaming laptops are upgraded with a GT 750M GDDR5 GPU appeared first on Gaming Laptops Junky.

Here is the form you have to fill

512GB: The cheapest OCZ Vector 512GB is this for 500$. Not cheap if all you want is a good large capacity SSD, but I list it anyway.

128GB: Newegg and TigerDirect. Makes more sense. If you were to buy the FC3 game, you actually get a very good SSD for a price of a slower SSD, which is a good deal.

The post OCZ Vector SSD deal – buy an OCZ Vector SSD (128GB and up) and get a free FarCry 3 appeared first on Gaming Laptops Junky.

Best Deals

Best gaming performance per price:

Lenovo Y500 with GT 650M SLI (1000$, I7 + GT 650M SLI, 1080p), MSI GT70-0NC (1220$, I7 + GTX 670MX, 1080p) Asus G75VX (1250$, I7 + GTX 670MX, 1080p), CyberPower Fangbook X7-100 (17.3″, 1235$, GTX 675MX, I7-3630QM, Windows OS), ), Dell Inspiron 15R SE (550$, I5 + 7730M, 6GB)

Gaming laptops Deals :

the names of the more interesting ones in terms of performance per price are bolded

• Y500 (15.6″), 1000$(!) – I7-3630QM + dual GT 650M GDDR5, glossy 1080p screen, 8GB DDR3, 1TB HDD, backlit keyboard. Excellent gaming performance for the money.
• MSI GX60 (15.6″), A10-4600M, Radeon 7970M, matte 1080p screen, 8GB DDR3, 750GB 7200RPM HDD, blu-ray player, Windows OS. Excellent deal since you get a lot of gaming performance for almost any game way above other offerings.
• MSI GT7-0NC (17.3″), 1220$! I7-3630QM + GTX 670MX, matte 1080p screen, 750GB 7200RPM HDD.
• HP dv6t-7000 SE (15.6″), 775$ (1080p), I5-3210M + GT 650M GDDR5, very good matte 1080p screen, 640GB HDD.
• CyberPower Fangbook X7-100 (17.3″), 1235$, GTX 675MX + I7-3630QM, 8GB DDR3, backlit keyboard, 750GB 7200RPM HDD, 1080p screen and Windows OS. Simply an excellent deal for such a laptop with such a gaming performance. I’d say it is my favorite 17.3″ high end gaming laptop.
• Y400 (14.0″), 720$- Top performance for the money with GT 650M GDDR5, I7-3630QM, 8GB DDR3 and 1TB HDD +16GB mSSD cache drive and docking bay option.
• Dell Inspiron 15R SE (15.6″) – for 550$ you get the very good Dell Inspiron 15R SE with I5 and Radeon 7730M. This is an excellent deal. The 15R SE has a good build quality and for 550$ it has no competitors. No 1080p screen though. The Samsung one has a GT 730M GPU which should be faster in some cases, though.

Refurbished / Dell outlet laptops:

SSDs:

• All Deals

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OK -I still have the Eurocom Racer 2.0 with GTX 670MX and I7-3630QM, see full review here. Some benchmarks have already been posted – the notebookcheck benchmark including many GPUs and more. This is another benchmark.

But two more interesting benchmarks are this and this, comparing how Crysis 3 runs on different CPUs. The pcgameshardware.de site benchmarked Crysis 3 on various machines with different CPUs and the same GPU – the GK110 (the “Titan” core). The idea was to check how much benefit the Crysis 3 makes from having more cores. I checked it too, with the same CPU – the I7-3630QM, setting the “affinity” through the Windows Task Manager.

Lets start with the benchmark.

The first parameter is the “system” option in the Graphics menu, the second is the Anti-Aliasing, the third is the Texture Resolution.

Now, for the number of cores test. The benchmarks from pcgameshardware.de clearly show that the Crysis 3 game can make use of additional cores to the point that the AMD cpus become a very cost effective solution. This is interesting as there are no such games that actually make a good use of any number of cores you throw at it.

The CPU cores test:

1. First test: Not CPU bound. The graphics settings are high simulating realw-world gaming. “System Spec” = high, FXAA, TR = “”high , 1080p. First part of the game in the “Cell” facilities.

I didn’t manage to reproduce the pcgameshardware results with the I7-3630QM. You can see that there is no use above 3 cores, but that’s probably not the whole story. First of all, I only used the I7-3630QM and not a CPU with more than 4-non HT cores, like pcgameshardware.de used in the benchmarks.

Secondly, and I think more important, it might be that with the hardware PCGH used, the cpu limited the frames rates. PCGH used the GK110 (the Nvidia Titan core) which might be so powerful for these settings that the CPU is actually the limiter. This thought is supported by other benchmarks, like the Guru3D benchmark. You can see that with these settings, the GTX 690 and Titan perform the same, although significantly differ in performance (Anandtech benchmarks for example).

So, I ran one more test, now with an even lower resolution of 1024×768 (lowest possible), all settings on the lowest possible. This is the part of “Welcome to the Jungle” where the security tower locks on you and fire these missiles all over These are the results:

2 cores + their HT (4 logical cores): 25-34 *Not sure the HT cores were used. see below
3 cores + their HT (6 logical cores): 50-60, mostly 55-60
3 cores, no HT (3 logical cores): 43-50
4 cores, no HT  (4 logical cores): 50-60, mostly 55-60

We can see that with these settings the ability of Crysis 3 engine to take advantage of more cores is more pronounced even up to 4 cores. However, it is also obvious that in the more common case (people who don’t have a Titan/GTX 690 GPU or do not play on 1024×768 resolution) it is also quite obvious that more than 3 cores won’t benefit you too much or not at all and there is no reason to think of more than 4 cores. That said, if you have a reasonable GPU, even if it’s a  high end one, like the GTX 670MX.

(Strange) Crysis 3 behavior when setting affinity

Using 2 cores + 2 HT cores yielded strange behavior. Only two cores (non-HT) were used by Crysis. When activating 3 different cores (with or without their HT), all of them were used to some extent from time to time. I don’t know if it’s a Windows issue or a Crysis issue. I have a filling it won’t happen with an I5 if you won’t mess with the affinity as other benchmarks seem to support it.

Also, it is quite obvious that there is a priority for non-HT cores to be used over HT cores, but that might be just the Windows 7 algorithm.

Testing HT cores vs non-HT cores in Intel Ivy Bridge I7

First of all, I must mentioned that the test didn’t go very well. Setting the cores through the “set affiinity” option in Windows 7 task manager sometimes resulted in only part of the cores activated, as described above. I don’t know if it’s a Windows bug or some Crysis behavior.

But judging by the lot of other benchmarks over the web and what we already know, the HT cores do not add to the performance in Crysis 3 as well as non-HT ones.

For example, the PCGH benchmarks show that the AMD FX-4300 performs better than the I3-3220 in their Crysis 3 CPU test. But a lot of other benchmarks over the web (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) including PCGH benchmarks themselves (last one) show that the FX-4300 is slower for gaming in all the other games, as we already knew. However, remember that the FX-4300 is clocked much higher than this I3 and for the same clocks, you’ll probably won’t see an advantage.

More example is the AMD FX-8350 whichperforms better than the very fast Intel I7-3770K with 4 cores and 8 threads (4 HT).

This suggests that the HT cores has a much smaller advantage in Crysis 3 compared to non-HT ones. Although this is not surprising, it is not that obvious that the FX-4300 will perform better as the Intel cores are faster for gaming across the board and in the last few years, almost any Intel CPU outperformed the direct AMD competing CPU with the same count of cores, including the recent generations of AMD and Intel CPUs – check other games’ benchmarks.

That’s a great progress and I hope we’ll see more and more games developers make use of more cores.

Conclusion and what kind of system do I need for Crysis 3

Currently, for Crysis 3 you better have a 3-cores CPU and above, meaning an I3 / I5 or an AMD A8/A10. The good news are that at least in the Crysis 3 case, we should not see a too significant advantage of the Intel I5 lower models over the AMD A10-4600M / A8-4500M CPUs.

It’s true that the tests we’ve seen above show that the AMD quad FX-4300 performs better than the I3-3220 (which is something like the mobile I5-3230M), but the A10-4600M clocks are about the same as the I5 and therefore I don’t think it will have any advantage. Remember that the FX-4300 CPU has a 500MHZ higher clocks than the I3-3220 in the tests above, which seems like the difference in performance.

As for the Intel CPUs – better take the I5 as it has much higher core clocks potential but anyway – you can’t really get an Intel I3 with a high grade GPU system.

There is one noticeable system with an AMD A10-4600M and it’s the MSI GX60 that is equipped with an AMD Radeon 7970M. Should be quite a catch for Crysis 3. Other good machine you should consider are usualy located in the sub-500$ gaming laptops section.

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The recommended high end gaming laptops list will now be found in the best gaming laptops new comparison system. Please use it.

This section is for those of you who wants very high performance gaming laptops. The recommendations will be for gaming laptops that are equipped with the GTX 675M GPU and up – GTX 680M and Radeon 7970M. The best of these laptops offer very high performance per price and maybe even highest than the midrange gaming laptops (GT 650M like) – unlike desktop configuration probably. The GTX 680M and Radeon 7970M have no problem performing even as high as twice the GT 650M / GTX 660M / Radeon 7850M GPUs laptops, but some of them actually cost less than twice.

If you’re not sure you want these laptops, you have to do you research. But as a quick quide – do you want highest settings for each and every game, probably even for the next two years? Are you good with high weight of 7-9 lbs? Are you good with average-at-best mobility in terms of battery running times?

If you answered the first question “yes”, then you have to ask yourself why and answer again. If you still answer yes – that is the place for you. The other two question are packed within the first one as of today.

If you’ve answer “no” then go to one of the other articles, like the under 1000$ gaming laptop to get very high gaming performance in almost any situation but also saving money and have higher mobility in terms of weight and battery.

Anyway, I suggest that you consider buying a cooling pad. Better get the temps a little lower, even for a 800$ gaming laptop.

GTX 675MX / GTX 680M vs Radeon 7970M gaming laptops

So, currently I’ll recommend buying a GTX 675MX and especially GTX 680M solutions over the Radeon 7970M for those of you who don’t want to wait for good drivers, hoping they will make the 7970M as fast as the 680M unquestionably (notebookcheck benchmarks show it is as fast and even faster if you eliminate the Enduro problems, but these benchmarks quality might not be the best).

If you are good with almost highest performance until good drivers will come up and you also prefer to save these 250$ (probably before the end of the year), than take the 7970M.

UPDATE: The new drivers really improved the performance of the 7970M. These numbers will be probably even better as there are still some differences between the hotfix supplied to Anandtech and the official 12.11 drivers. Also, according to Anandtech, AMD promised there will be more drivers releases and we have a good ground to believe that the numbers will be improved since some numbers are really strange, like in the Diablo 3 results in the Anandtech test, where you can see that the 7970M performs about as half as the 680M – doesn’t make sense at all.

Currently, the performance of the 7970M is good enough so some gaming laptops equipped with the 7970M can be recommended (like the MSI GX60), because the performance you get for the price is quite good.

About the GTX 680M vs 7970M thing. Compared to the GTX 680M, the Radeon 7970M sometimes equals it and sometimes not with the average in favor of the GTX. According to the Anandtech benchmarks, the Radeon 7970M excels in titles where AMD had worked with the developer to optimize the game to its hardware (like sleeping dogs, Dirt Showdown and more) and other benchmarks confirm it. Same for the GTX 680M. But that’s not the only case. Skyrim, too, see better performance with the 7970M and BF3 numbers are very close to each other. So, the GTX 680M is generally faster currently, but the 7970M is really fast and and it’s a matter of price really.

Moreover, based on the numbers we have so far, we can say that the 7970M should be at least as fast and probably considerably faster than the slower GTXs – GTX 675MX and GTX 670MX. Maybe that’s why Nvidia released them so quitely. This makes my mind about the MSI GX60 we’ve already mentioned, because for its price you’ll only get GTX 675M / 670MX level performance.

Important updates

1. New in the front – the new Kepler based GTX 670MX and GTX 675MX. The GTX 670MX should easily bang the GTX 675M on head, as far as I can see. That changes things. And talking about fronts – I sure hope they will stay in the gaming scene alone.
2. MSI GX60 with AMD quad A10-4600M and Radeon 7970M for 1200$ – the cheapest with 7970M by far and the benchmarks are flattering if you are going for high-end-extreme-details-1080p gaming.

Recommended GTX 675MX / GTX 680M and Radeon HD 7970M laptops (Under 1800$)

Everything on 1080p and max settings. 1400$-1600$ for basic configurations

About the GTX 675MX – it will give you probably something like +20%-30% (averagly) compared to the old GTX 675M, but will consume much lower energy. It’s still much lower performance compared to the 680M. The GTX 675MX should also be slower than the 7970M.

Fire in the hall:

Recommended GTX 675M / GTX 670MX laptops

Get a very high performance gaming laptop and save some bucks (price: 1100$-1300$ for basic configurations)

The new Kepler based GTX 670MX and GTX 675M should have about the same performance with the 670MX consuming considerably less power plus I think you can probably OC to such a level you will see its impact.

UPDATE:

The new MSI GX60 (CompSource, newegg, J&R, Adorama, , XoticPC) with A10-4600M and Radeon 7970M is now available and delivers excellent performance for 1200$ – that’s a new bar for 1200$!

I’ve included the GX60 although it has a Radeon 7970M GPU and not the 675M / 670MX, because it’s in the same price range.

I want a new Windows 7 copy:

NOW ALL “FORCE” gaming laptops come with free Windows 7!

Complete list

image source

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1. Lenovo Y500 with an I7-3630QM, dual GT 650M configuration, 8GB DDR3, 1080p screen, 1TB HDD and Windows OS for 1025$

2. The same Y500 only with an I5-3230M and 6GB DDR3 memory for 900$ which is far more cost effective in my opinion and this should be your first choice

The cost effectiveness of the Y500 with a dual GT 650M GPUs is very high as far as gaming performance goes. You get a gaming performance higher than a GTX 670MX (and usually below 675MX) in most cases, including BF3, Sleeping Dogs and Boderlands 2 and GW2. According to the notebookcheck benchmark, one weak point is Dirt: Showdown where you get a something like a single GT 650M performance. read review.

The direct competitor, as I see it, is the MSI GX60 which now also sells for 1050$-1100$ and includes an AMD A10-4600M CPU, Radeon 7970M, matte 1080p screen, 750GB 7200RPM HDD, blu-ray player and a Windows OS – the GX60 also has a very high gaming performance (like BF3) but in some cases the A10 probably is too limiting. It was not tested yet with latest AMD drivers which improves the performance A LOT.

For around 1000$, both the Y500 and GX60 are my favorites.

The post New Lenovo Y500 listings – a dual GPU for the masses! appeared first on Gaming Laptops Junky.

2. The HP dv6t-7000 : I5-3210M + GT 650M GDDR5, matte 1080p screen for 775$. For those who don’t need extra features, it is an excellent choice.

The post Please note: two very good deals – MSI GX60 and HP dv6t-7000 appeared first on Gaming Laptops Junky.

Introduction & Specifications

Welcome to the Asus N56DP-DH11 laptop. This is the mild midrange gaming laptop Asus has to offer and it sports a Radeon 7730M and a A10-4600M for around 800$ including a Windows 8 OS. This combination might not be the bets for gaming at this price range, but with this laptop Asus tries to buy our hearts and eyes (and pockets) with several features like the good looks, external subwoofer, nice matte 1080p screen (90% sRGB gamut from my testing, probably like the N56VZ) and the good thermals, noise and battery levels.

First, a summery:

Lets start with the review

Build quality, Case and design and looks

The case is made out of plastic. The plastic itself is sturdy enough, although not the most hardened one. Anyway, not really a problem. The screen surrounding panel is strong enough and pressing it didn’t yield any distortion in the screen. The outer lid, like in many other laptop, is not too hard and will  - for reason unclear to me, this is very common.

The looks are good. The silver and black colors combination make it look modern enough and  although made of plastic, the N56DP has a somewhat metallic looks to it.  The outer lid has a light brushed finish.

Keyboard & Touchpad

The keyboard is backlighted with a white light. The keys are well separated and typing is very easy and fluent. The keys feel nice and I didn’t feel uncomfortable and it felt good right from the first click. No clicks were missing. Also, the keyboard does not producde much noise. I wish the Eurocom Racer 2.0 keyboard was like that.

The touchpad is a quite big multi-gesture touchpad and it is also quite comfortable, at least for me. It is responsive ad the touching it doesn’t feel annoying. However, the touchpad includes the left and right buttons under the same surface, so you might click it by mistake, since you don’t see where the touchpad itself ends. That’s annoying, although looks good.

Sound & Speakers

We are talking 2.0 Bang & Olufsen speakers system + SonicMaster subwoofer. Now, I’m not sure about the subwoofer. You can hear it, but only if you place it near you – don’t except hearing the subwoofer while wondering around your house and there is no volume option to it. Anyway, the subwoofer produces subtle low audio which really adds to the sound.

As for the 2.0 speakers. The sound is somewhat on the richer & balanced side of things, the mids and highs are ok to good (laptop good, not audiophile good) and you can really hear music with this thing. The highs sound plasticy or distorted sometimes (you can hear, for example, in songs like “fashion” or David Bowie). Also, it sounds like there is some kind of obstacle between you and the sound, like the speakers are actually located deep in the laptop body and not so near to the surface (they are near to the surface, don’t worry) – we can’t say it is the speakers fault ofcourse, it might be the sound chip which is the Realtek “high definition” something, no exact model – probably the ALC 269. I guess the chip used isn’t one of the best ones, though it wouldn’t really add to the price. Bottom line, ok to good sound, but for a 800$ laptop a bit disappointing. This is common even with 1000-1500$ laptops, though.

General Subjective Performance Experience

First, the Windows has to configure itself and it takes some time. After that, the laptop is very responsive, but the Asus nonsense software and the installed McAfee AV makes things a bit slower, so I disabled the AV. Booting times are ok and after that the laptop is fast for common use and it is enjoyable using it. Even switching constantly between games (like Skyrim) and the desktop didn’t seem like a problem.

Gaming Performance

EDIT: It seems that the new AMD 13.1 Catalyst package has some problems. Installing the new drivers resulted in having and old version for the 7730M in the device manager (the old 8.X driver from 8/8/2012 instead the newer 9.12 from the 19/12/2012). Also, BL2 stopped working for me. I’ll have more updates on this later

I won’t do synthetic staff, only games benchmarks. For syntethic benchmarks, you can check the notebookcheck records (or other sites). The settings I used are non-standard ones (like in the notebookcheck case) and there is a reason for it – I tried to test and find the most interesting settings for each game. For example, I didn’t spend time on testing 768p resolutions as it won’t look good. If you have an external monitor you’d prefer to use, it would probably have a higher resolution.

Cinebench 11.59, OpenGL and multithreaded:

Test Methods & Drivers

Graphics drivers – 13.1 AMD drivers from AMD site.

OS – Window 8 6.2.9200 build 9200, fully updated

Though I used FRAPS and benchmark tools, the FPS rates are simply the ones I got after trying many scenes in each game, trying also to push the limits and making it hard for the GPU, so we can get the minimal FPS rates too. Now, this is not an Academic test, since, for example, you might get some minimal FPS at some point which is way lower than what I wrote at some specific point, but it won’t reflect the actual gaming experience. Same for average. I stated the range I got and what was my feel playing the game.

Future reviews might include a graph of the FPS rates. What do you think? Is it necessary?

Now, for some numbers.

World of Tanks (WoT)

The advantage of WoT is that you can play it with lower than 24 FPS, due to the nature of this game.

LoL (League of Legends)

It seems that the best option in this case is the 900p (or 1680×1050) one.

If you have an external display with such a resolution, that will be great. I tried many settings combinations with 1080p and 900p, but it seems that you won’t get smooth experience with 1080p resolution whatsoever. This is somewhat strange that you can lower all settings besides the resolution and still get not that very good FPS rates.

Skyrim

TF = Texture filtering

These numbers are the lowest I got. In scenes like caves (less stress on the GPU), the FPSs are higher. Unlike the Nvidia control panel, the Catalyst doesn’t currently have the ambient occlusion option, so I didn’t use it (does anyone know something about it?)

Very high settings are available with the Radeon 7730M. In some specific cases, like in some frozen woods where a lot of frozen leaves and snowflakes are apparent, the performance gets lower, but since you probably won’t stop and try to appreciate the finiest details (if it’s even possible), I suggest lowering the settings and / or using some performance mods, like that, so in these cases, the textures will be lowered automatically and you won’t suffer such a performance hit.

I also suggest giving up the AF (or AA, but AF preferred)  or alternatively using ‘high’ settings instead of ‘ultra’ as I suspect the difference for the eye is actually not very pronounced for almost no one.

EDIT: using the new 13.1 Catalyst drivers, the performance has increased actually, even in the heavy textured frozen woods.

Far Cry 3

I actually don’t find this game to be enjoyable, but it’s a benchmark after all.

The 900p resolution made things a little better and playable, but this is still strange.

Borderlands 2 (1.2.2)

Note: With the official stable 12.10 drivers, the FPSs were way lower and stood on around 8-9 FPS (All highest, no AF/AA, Ambient occlusion on), so download the new 13.1 drivers. I’ll post two settings and then explain:

Checking many other configurations, it seems that the most effective wa y to get good FPS rates is lowering the resolution a bit. You can also play in window mode, so the pixels won’t get mushed and all. I truly suggest using AA in this game as the graphics of BL2 benefit a lot from AA even on 1080p resolution. It also doesn’t seem to have to much effect on the FPS rates.

Sleeping Dogs

It is interesting to see that on extreme setting, many systems produce only very low FPS rates. The Eurocom Racer 2.0 with GTX 670MX didn’t give us more than 10 FPS too, this is strange and probably related to game implementation. For Sleeping Dogs, just use ‘Normal’ AA settings and you are good and the game will be very playable on 1080p resolution with this system, which is great.

Screen & Screen quality

We are talking a matte 1080p screen here. I don’t know what is the model as I don’t want to disassemble the laptop currently, but it is a matte 1080p screen and from the screen testings, it might be the same as in the N56VZ, maybe the Samsung 156HT01-201. In the tests (w/ DataColor Spyder 4 Express), this screen achieved a 90% sRGB color gamut and 66% adobeRGB color gamut. Not for professionals, but very good colors for the eye.

To my eyes, the colors seemed rich enough, the maximum brightness is high (I set it on 40%-60%) and the contrast is good too, although I don’t have exact numbers. Horizontal viewing angles are very good and vertical viewing angles are not bad, but colors get distorted much quicker. Tilting upwards, the colors are distorted but no too much. Tilting downwards making the colors more washed and distorted. Subjectively, it seems that brightness distribution is good, also when tilting the screen, so no black corners, for example.

I’ll add pictures of the screen later this week.

Colors:

and some pictures of the screen displaying some colorful 1080p image:

Thermals & Noise handling

Thermals – The thermals of this laptop, as expected, are quite good. Using the OCCT Linpack test, the cpu temperatures topped at around 67C and after a while went down to around 64-65C probably due to the fan spinning faster. At idle, the laptop usually stands on around 42-50C, depending on what you are doing and the room temperature. I wish more machines were like that.

Noise – This laptop is very quiet. When idling/low use (like writing/surfing the web), you’ll hear a very low ‘woosh’ sound when it is quiet around, like at night. Under load, this sound will become more noticeable but not annoying.

Battery

Working with this laptop, surfing the web using WiFi and settings the screen on 40%, I got around 3.5-4 hours of play. I guess that disabling the WiFi, dimming the screen to the lowest level and restricting the use to none or simply reading, you can get around 4.5-5 hours.

Overclocking (7730M)

My tests didn’t yield any significant impact on performance. I could overclock the DDR3 memory up to around 990MHZ and the core up to 690-700MHZ without getting any errors. I didn’t see noticeable effect in the tested games. Maybe a few FPSs in Borderlands 2. I’m sorry.

Conclusion

What makes this laptop distinguished above others for this price is probably the combination of the added value for this price – nice external subwoofer, 1TB HDD, the good matte 1080p screen, very good keyboard and comfortable/big touchpad, not-too-bad speakers (which I suggest replacing with 50$ speakers), backlit keyboard, the stylish looks and the very good thermals / noise levels. Only for 800$ which you can get from the store (like from J&R) and save the shipping and tax. Now, for this price or a bit above, you can get considerably faster laptops for gaming, even with a matte 1080p screen (like the HP dv6t-7000 1, 2).

But again, for 800$ you probably won’t find such a features combination. Bottom line, if you are looking for more gaming performance, you can spend 100-150$ more and you are not loyal to Asus too much, then there are other options for around 800$-1000$, but if you are looking for a very good balanced package and don’t want to spend more than 800$, this is a very good option for you.

The post Asus N56DP review (Radeon 7730M) appeared first on Gaming Laptops Junky.

Here is the Y500 review including the benchmarks

The GT 650M SLI is actually faster than a GTX 670MX which technically not very surprising as the 670MX should be roughly 50-60% faster than a GT 650M, but still – a very good performance.

Now it remains to see what will be the price for this pleasure.

For 230$ it is a very cost effective addition, but you’ll get the performance gains only in specific games

The post new Y500 benchmarks with GT 650M SLI using the new Y500 docking bay – faster than GTX 670MX! appeared first on Gaming Laptops Junky.

Introduction

Well, the Eurocom Racer 2.0 is a high end 15.6″ gaming laptop based on the Clevo P150EM barebone, same as the XoticPC Sager NP9150 (and more). It can be configured with any current GPU from GTX 660M to GTX 680M and Radeon 7970M. The default configuration, which is also the one that is tested is as follows:

The cost is currently 1375$ and there is a 50$ discount or the next week, so the price can be very good if you want its features – the high quality AUO lcd upgrade for a good price and the Hybrid HDD (and the diamond 24 thermal paste too). If you configure it with the I7-3610QM you can save another 37$ and the non-upgrade matte screen will save you another 69$, so actually, if you want to compare the Eurocom to other P150EM laptops, you have to think what you can get for around 1220$ – and you’ll get less than the Eurocom Racer 2.0 (true for the posting date)

Build quality, Case and design and looks

Lets start with the case build quality. The case is made entirely out of plastic, but a very sturdy one and I’m very satisfied with it. Most of the case won’t bend even under high pressures and I wouldn’t be afraid if someone mistakebly punch it. However, the upper part of the plastic surrounding the lcd screen itself is suseptible to pressure but the more anoying part is the outer lid – while not soft, it is not as tough as it should be and can be easily bend if you lay some concentrated pressure on it, like in the case of a hit by an elbow . Unfortunately, it is the case with all P150EM laptops and also many others, like the Lenovo Y580. Other than that, the laptop is very sturdy and build quality is convincing. The looks are solid and personally, I find it very pleasing to my eyes and the plastic has a somewhat metallic looks. It does not look outdated to me. Saying that, I’d like very much a metal case and especially a sturdy outer lcd panel lid. It is a matter of taste and I think you should decide for your own.

Keyboard

The keyboard is a (blue) backlit keyboard which is very comfortable. At first it seemed to me that the keyboard is too stiff and I missed a lot of clicks. I still think it should have been more sensitive, although it is my own opinion and taste. I find that I need to press harder than what I want. Other than that the keys return back fast and you can type fast. The blue light is a good thing too. That’s all.

Sound & Speakers

The Eurocom Racer 2.0 comes with Onkyo 2.0 speakers + a subwoofer. The subwoofer is located in in the bottom of the laptop. The sound itself is ok for casual use, but certainly not good, the high and low tones are not good and distorted, the mids are much better but anyway, don’t expect anything. People over the web say it is also the internal soundcard fault, but I can’t find what is the exact soundchip model right now so I can’t say anything accurate except that when trying the same low-cost headphoens I have now connected to the Racer 2.0, the music sounds better, but still not good – the mids and highs sound dry, no life in it (I know, subjective) and the lows sound hollow.

Comparing the audio quality with low cost headphones is not a good comparison, but anyway, it seems that that both the speakers of the Eurocom and the internal soundcard aren’t that good – as all the other P150EMs, I guess. Kinda strange, a good Realtek 888/898 and up soundchip can do magic the cost is just insignificant. Why Clevo doesn’t use it? Anoying. Important to say – I’m not an audiophile.

General Subjective Performance Experience

The Racer 2.0 is very responsive. Using Windows 7 OS, I feel very satisfied with the user experience. The OS boots in about 15-20 seconds – it’s not in the SSD league, but still fast. Coming out of hibernation is a very fast process. I didn’t feel like things get stack and so on.

Gaming Performance

I won’t do synthetic staff, only games benchmarks. For syntethic benchmarks, you can check the notebookcheck records (or other sites).

Test Methods & Drivers

Using Nvidia Driver 310.70, Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit fully updated.

Although I recorded the FPSs with Fraps, I didn’t really used them or presented the graphs. I just used a general FPS range. I’m interested in general performance, not specific FPSs, which are anyway depend on the game scene and such things and moreover, I don’t have enough systems to compare to one another. You can get exact numbers from other sites that benchmark and post results, like notebookcheck, Anandtech and more.

For each game, I also wrote how I felt playing, if it was smooth or not.

World of Tanks (WoT)

Well, either it is a driver issue or an inefficient engine implementation, changing the the settings doesn’t change the FPSs almost not at all. FPSs kept at about 15-17FPS, no matter the AA settings. The settings level has a small impact. I think this is some driver + the new WoT v8 bug. I’ll update if there will be any fix.

Anyway, the game is highly playable on highest settings

LoL (League of Legends)

highest settings, 1080p resolution, a lot of units fighting and 5-6 players at a scene – around 45 FPS. Usually around 55-60 FPS for lighter scenes

Skyrim

TF = Texture filtering

AO = Ambient Occlusion

I’d suggest using highest settings from the game settings and turning on AO and 2xAA (I used Nvidia control panel, but you might be able to do that through the UI with some mod). These are anyway very very high settings. With 1080p resolution on a 15.6″ or 17.3″ you won’t need to much AA anyway.

Far Cry 3

Borderlands 2

Fun game

GTX 660M will do the job too

Sleeping Dogs

The AA really kills the Sleeaping Dogs performance, but other than that, you’ll get high fps with everything on and no AA. Even with medium level AA it is very playable and in the worst case you can lower the settings a bit.

Screen & Screen quality

The AUO B156HW1 V.4 is a very good 1080p screen. Subjectively, the contrast is very good and the brightness is high too, especially for indoors use (currently it is set on 40% and more hurts my eyes). Currently no objective brightness and contrast tests are available, but I’ll add them later. The screens viewing angles are very good, with a but. The horizontal viewing angles are excellent (although for a TN panel) and you can rest assure that several people can sit side by side and watch a movie, for example. The vertical viewing angles are good, but not as good – when flipping the screen upwords (so you are closer to the lower part of the screen) the screen maintaines most its vitality, but when flipping it upwords, the picture fades quicker. However, keep in mind that it is a very good screen anyway. The colors are excellent subjectively and objectively. Using Datacolor Spyder4Express the screen achieved an actual 94% adobeRGB color coverage and 99%-100% sRGB coverage. NTSC coverage was also something like 90%. So, this screen can be good for professional use too, using Photoshop / Premiere / GIMP and so on.

EDIT: after using this screen for two weeks, I’m unsatisfied. Although not Eurocom fault (all other barebone laptops manufacturers offer such an upgrade), it strikes me as somewhat awkward that an ‘high quality’ 1080p screen colors’ change and get distorted so easily on the vertical line. Even my old 2007 LG something desktop LCD has better viewing angles in the colors aspect. Also, it is a 95% adobeRGB gamut screen, but what’s the idea of having a  very accurate 95% gamut screen if the colors change when you move you head a little upwards or downwards?

Saying that, the brightness and contrast are high – no question there. The reading is easy and the colors do look good, but still, I feel this shouldn’t be like that.

Thermals & Noise handling

The temperatures of the Racer 2.0 are quite good. During games, even the most tasking, the GPU temperature didn’t rised over 72-75 C and while gaming, CPU didn’t get over 75C too. The laptop case itself remained very cool and I didn’t feel uncomfor in my legs or fingers (typing). Note that currently the ambient temperature in my house might be on the lower side, but still. Using OCCT the CPU temperatures got to around 75-82C (depends on the core) – remember that that this is under full load. I didn’t check with Linpack, but the cooling system seems to do its work. No throttling was recorded which is good.

The following the hottest core during OCCT Linpack. Maxed at about 83-85C. However, it was when I held the laptop in the air – on mu laps, the cores got to as high as 88C. So, you should probably use a cooling pad if you intend to do a linpack test.

Noise - in idle state, the laptop is quite and the fan sometimes spins lightly and you can hear it. It won’t matter while concentrating or playing a game, but it might be anoying ( I find it a bit anoying in the silence of the night). under heavy load you can, ofcourse, hear the fan spinning, but personally it didn’t bother me while playing LoL (for example). Anyway, in a not very quite environment (like in the day), the fan noise won’t be too noticable.

Battery

Unfortunately, for some reason, it seems that the Racer 2.0 just sips its battery. I don’t know if it’s a matter of drivers or what, but the the Racer 2.0 lasts only 2 hours and 15 minutes under the “battery eater reader” test. It seems very strange to me as other Clevo P150EM based laptops last longer. I’m pretty sure it is some kind of drivers / bios / Windows thing.

Overclocking

I used MSI Afterburner to overclock the core and memory. The maximum I tried to overclock is 20% for the CPU and about 70% for the GDDR5 memory based on the fact that even the GTX 660M GDDR5 can do it and the result was that it is can be overclocked to such a degree (no error during OCCT, games, 3DMark 11).

I didn’t had any success in disabling the clocks limits in MSI Afterburner and nvidia inspector, for some reason, keeps throwing a “divided by zero” error and I can’t use it. So I used a max overclock of 20% for the core as a benchmark, but I’m pretty sure you can take the 670MX much higher if you will. Anyway, this is just a show of the capabilities of the new Kepler cores and how much effect it has on performance.

For benchmark I used 3DMark 11 basic edition and Skyrim. The tests are – stock, 20% cpu core OC, 20% cpu and memory OC, and 20% cpu OC and 30% memory oc – in order to check bottlenecks.

Skyrim benchmark is just wondering about riverwood. BL2 benchmark is running, fighting and standing near the sanctuary.

We can see that the memory bottlenecks the abilities of the cpu to some degree, but you won’t gain too much gaming performance by simply OCing the memory itself.

I used Skyrim as a benchmark without too many mods and that probably has an effect. Maybe mods that make a good use of the GPU will result in higher differences in FPS. Borderlands shows some nice improvment. When both the cpu and gpu are overclocked by 20%, we really get 20% bump in performance, at least in the scene I’ve tested. Although it is scene dependant, when doing the same in a scene (like running from specific point to another specific point), the gain is good – 15-20% easily.

The overclocking is easy and you can get good performance gain, in case you need it – like when playing on the edge of 24 frames per second in an FPS, like BF3.

Now, what about the temps?

We can see that the temps are still good. Remember that currently it is quite cold at my home and you might get higher temps. I do not use any cooling pad and the laptop is on my legs, warming and gets warm in return.

Conclusion

Several conclusions. First, if you need a laptop that will last long time on one battery charge – that laptop ain’t for you. Although I’m pretty sure that the battery issue has something to do with drivers / Windows / bios, currently this is the situation, and Eurocom reply to me didn’t unveil any future plans to handle it (although they might be working on a fix).

Now, regarding the laptop’s performance. First of all, you’ll get your GTX 670MX and I7-3610QM/I7-3630QM performance – this comes as no surprise. I didn’t notice any throttling, which is a good thing. Compared to the competitors (MSI GT60, Sager NP9150) the Racer 2.0 offers the Hybrid HDD / 128GB Crucial m4 SSD, Diamond thermal paste and the AUO screen upgrade for low price. sometimes they also have some nice discount, so if you want the advantages Eurocom has to offer, you get a very good laptop for a better price, loaded with some nice features (SDD/Hybrid HDD) for a good price.

For a 15.6″, the Racer 2.0 offers a very good package and generally, you can’t go wrong since it is at least as cost effective as the Sager offerings. If you are interested in an 1300$ laptop and you don’t need windows OS included in the price, this is an excellent choice. Sometimes there are good coupons on the MSI GT70, but without coupons available, this is easily a good choice.

If you are interested in the GTX 680M performance level, I’d suggest checking other options in the price range, like the MSI GT70 – but it is a 17.3″ and not a 15.6″ laptop.

The post Eurocom Racer 2.0 Review (GTX 670MX) appeared first on Gaming Laptops Junky.

Also remember that you can get an additional discount with Barnes&Nobles gold account or something like that – link inside.

Another excellent deal is the HP dv6t-7000 with GT 650M and an I5-3210M and a very good matte 1080p screen for 750$. You get a very good machine and an excellent gaming performance for a low price. You can add a 32GB mSSD cache drive for a 50$ (still lower price than the Y500)

The post two highlighted deals – Y580 with 32GB mSSD for 950$, Y500 with 16GB mSSD for 880$ and an HP dv6t-7000 for 750$ appeared first on Gaming Laptops Junky.

You won’t find almost no specific models in this list – for specific models and recommendations, there are the price-range recommendations (sub 500$, 600$, 800$, 1000$, high end) and also the gaming laptops deals list.

Again, this is only a reference list to get the big picture of what gaming performance level you can get for your money with two main features – 1080p screen and Windows OS included in price. Note that other features are not mentioned here (backlit keyboard, blu-ray player, thermals and noise and so on) and you also won’t find specific recommendations – for that we have the links above.

I’ve added a relative gaming performance measures, based on average potential in several games like BF3 and Skyrim. This is not accurate as some games like specific GPU more (Nvidia vs AMD) or for some the power doesn’t really matter that much from some point and on (Minecraft). For specific game, you’ll have just have to ask (!).

I’ve chosen the 100% performance point to be around 900$-1000$ since you can get a full features laptop for this price, plus the gaming performance is adequate and will suffice to run most games, even heavy ones, on high to highest settings on 1080p resolution – games like BF3, Skyrim, BL2, Portal 2, FarCry 3 and more.

The post GPU for a budget: what can I get for my money? appeared first on Gaming Laptops Junky.

Now, the comparison to the 7690M is also a reference comparison to cards of the same level, like the GT 555M, GT 635M and GT 640M.

OK, some raw data (thanks TechReport):

You can see that the number of ALUs is lower (80%), but actually, the 7690M belongs to the VLIW5 architecture and the 8790M belongs to the new GCN (Graphics Core Next) architecture so we can really say something really accurate from these numbers, expect the fact that the 7690M is a 7670M which a GDDR5 memory (and sometimes higher core clocks).

AMD also had produced some VLIW4 GPUs because they thought there won’t be a serious performance hit – read here for thorough information on both the VLIW4/5 and GCN and in simple words – the 7690M 480 ALUs vs 8790M 384 ALUs shouldn’t scare you since you don’t really lose anything in practice (but this statement is not “scientific”).

Moreover, you can see that the 8790M core and memory clocks are much higher and the die size is much smaller. The TechReport power consumption tests show that the 8790M doesn’t consume more power (well, 2W more in load) and this is thanks to the technological advancements.

Now, for some real results:

I didn’t add the settings and drivers info, but you can read it on TechReport’s article. Generally, they used updated drivers and used reasonable settings for comparison:

It is quite obvious that the 8790M is far superior here. 50% advantage is easily expected across the board and there isn’t any real competition. TechReport article show another finding – the occurrence of frames which it takes a long time to render is much much lower, meaning you’ll have far less stuttering and lags and so on.

Conclusion – there is a reason to wait.

The post First Radeon 8790M benchmarks: 8790M vs 7690M appeared first on Gaming Laptops Junky.

While there are a quite a few good deals here and then, there are some deals that surpass most of the others and this is one of them, since you get a lot of power for you money and there isn’t a lot of though needed – if you have around 800$ to spend and you want these features and a windows os included in the price (even if not), this is an excellent choice for you.

Here are the details

The post A great deal to consider – the HP dv6t-7000 for 750$ appeared first on Gaming Laptops Junky.

I’d really like to know if there are some requests for things like specific laptops reviews, some laptops comparison (like the Lenovo Y580 vs the MSI GE60 or something), GPUs comparisons, specific games requirements and so on.

Thanks!

The post Readers requests? appeared first on Gaming Laptops Junky.

The review unit is for the HP g6t-2200 specific model with Intel B980 and Radeon 7670M. Now the HP g6t-2200 available comes with the Intel I3-3110M + Radeon 7670M combination, no choice there. This is actually a good combination for a sub-500$ gaming laptop as you get the HD4000 integrated GPU (with lower clocks) that will handle simple tasks of video playback. The Radeon 7670M, on its end, will give you the gaming power you need for moderate gaming.

According to the review, the temperatures of the g6t-2200 are actually very good, maxing 30C under full load – these are excellent readings and are much better than other laptops, like the Acer V3-551G with AMD A10 and Radeon 7670M too (review) or the Lenovo Z585 with A10-4600M and Radeon 7670M too (review).

Moreover, the 768p display, however still only not high quality, do have very good sRGB color coverage and high contrast making it even more interesting as even higher priced laptops with 768p (that sometimes even sold as a “premium” laptops) are of a lesser quality.

That’s all. I really think that currently, the HP g6t-2200 is a very good option and probably my favorite under 500$. For more options, please check the sub 500$ gaming laptops recommendations. Note that I still listed the HP dv6z-7200 which is still a very good option and probably more feature-rich, only the total price is above 500$ including tax and shipping.

The post HP g6t-2200 review by notebookcheck: an excellent sub-500$ gaming laptop appeared first on Gaming Laptops Junky.