techknow beat
by Bilal Iqbal
We interrupt our usual transmission to bring you this guide on budget gaming laptops. Say the shiny new Xboxes and the PS4s do not tempt a veteran PC gamer such as you; which then is the laptop you should go for?
Chances are you already have your eyes set on that QR10,000 gaming monster sitting at Jarir or Virgin, but your finances just don’t allow you to splurge to that extent. If you are willing to make some compromises — yes, PC gaming is all about compromises — you could walk away with a perfectly decent gaming rig for less than half that price.
At the entry level, those QR1,000, QR1,500 and QR2,000 laptops are all well and good, but they run on Intel’s built-in graphics solutions. These cards have come a long way recently and may even be good enough to play some games at lower settings (think Dota 2 and World of Warcraft).
If one or two games are all you plan on playing on your new PC, check online for their performance on the machine you are planning to get. Getting the exact model of the Intel graphics solution may be harder than you would expect, but you should be able to find at least one salesperson with enough knowledge to get you the info. Google the specs of your machine for the game you intend to play. See if you can live with the compromises. Buy the laptop. End of story.
Hardcore gamers: Let’s be honest here, you will get nothing capable of proper gaming in the price range of a brand new current-generation console. You will have to move to higher price brackets. In Qatar, QR2,500 is the sweet spot where you start seeing dedicated graphics cards in machines.
At the lower end, closer to QR2,000, you will see some laptops with Nvidia GeForce 820m. By all accounts, 820m is only marginally faster than an Intel HD 4600 (a built-in card by Intel), and will not offer you much of an improvement in terms of gaming. Making a decision, treat 820m as a built-in card. Qatar being a small market, you will find that the laptop with the 820m will likely also come with superior specs (focus on RAM and the processor here, not the card). Also, you probably are not a gamer.
Gamers need to go higher. At around and above the QR2,500 mark, you will find some laptops with the ATI Radeon M265 cards in them. At even higher prices, around the QR3,000 mark, you will encounter the Nvidia 840m graphics card. These two cards tend to perform similarly, with the Nvidia having a slight edge in performance.
Given the fact that the machines with the Nvidia card in Qatar also tend to have better RAMs, the latter seems to be a better option to get. But if you are already straining your budget, you should get decent performance out of the machines with the ATI Radeon M265 in them as well. Acers seem to be the predominant laptops in this category, and while the brand does have a reputation for making flimsy machines, their latest offerings do seem to be as sturdy to the touch as the rest.
The machines with Nvidia 840m make an entry around the QR3,000 mark, with offerings from virtually all brands in Qatar: Acer, HP, Dell and Lenovo. This category was pretty cut and dry up until a few days ago (Lenovo Flex 2 ranging between QR3,000 and QR3,600 was the machine you needed to get), but an on-going discount by Jarir Bookstore until January 3 has thrown in the fray a number of machines that deserve your consideration.
Jarir does not offer the Flex 2. But it does have an HP Pavilion that gives you a Core i7, 840m 2gb, 8gb RAM and 1tb (1,000gb) of hard disk for QR2,700. Jarir is also throwing in a one-year subscription to Microsoft Office 365 for free (a QR300 value). The machine is not FHD, but really, you cannot do much better in this price in Qatar. The 840m itself is more suited to 720p gaming, so you will not be able to play many games at the higher FHD resolution on max settings anyway.
Another compelling option is the Lenovo Z5070, which offers the exact same specifications as the HP, but more memory on the graphics card (4GB instead of 2GB) for QR200 more. At 720p resolutions, the difference in 2GB video RAM vs 4GB video RAM should not be much (if at all), but you may still want to shell out the extra dough for peace of mind.
We also have an HP Envy (with metal body and better looks) at Jarir for QR2,800. This machine lets up on the processor, going down from Core i7 to Core i5, but offers 12GB of RAM and a FHD screen in turn. You will still need to play most games at 720p resolution, but the more RAM will be useful for heavy multitasking. The FHD screen will also be better for watching movies. Keep in mind though that the Core i7 processor on the Pavilion and Lenovo is up to 15-18% faster than the Core i5 — this is something that you will not notice in daily use, but in CPU-intensive tasks such as video encoding and playing CPU-intensive games such as Civilization.
If you can extend your budget higher, I would urge you to extend it to QR4,050. That price will net you a Lenovo Y50 at Jarir Bookstore (down from QR4,500), with a Quadcore Core i7 processor (the Core i7s on the HP and Z5070 are dual-core) and Nvidia GTX 860m 4GB. You also get 8GB of RAM and 1tb hard drive space. No other manufacturer in Qatar is offering you an Nvidia GTX 860m in this price range; in fact, you have to move up to around QR6,000 to get this graphics card and will have to double your investment before you can move to a better graphics card. If PC gaming is your thing, and QR4,050 is doable, this is the machine you need to get. You will be able to play most PC games at high settings at FHD. There will always be that odd game that will overextend the reach of your machine, but such occurrences should be rare and far in between.
Other vendors such as LuLu and Carrefour have the QHD version of the Y50 on sale for QR4,500, which itself is not a bad price. The QHD screen quality is better than the FHD version, but you do not get enough benefits to shell out the extra QR450. The Jarir Bookstore sale will last until January 3, 2015, and until then this is the variant you need to get. Once its price goes back up to QR4,500, the QHD version will be the better machine to buy, even if you will find yourself playing most games at FHD resolution and not QHD.
The author may be contacted on techknowbeat@outlook.com or followed on Twitter at @tknobeat