Buying a new laptop

[edyzmedieval]

Well, the time has come for a new one, I guess. I made a thread about 5 years ago buying a new laptop, went out and bought one. Time to replace the existing one.

Current specs:

ASUS N55SF
Intel Core 2 Duo i5 2.3 GHZ
8 GB RAM DDR3
750GB HDD
nVIDIA GeForce GT555m
Bang & Olufsen Sound System (sounds excellent)

I'm looking to stick with ASUS, throughout these almost 5 years it worked almost perfectly, I did get a couple of BSODs because of drivers mainly, nVidia being the main culprit. Plus I love the keyboard and I think I will keep it in the family.

That being said, time for a new one! What I'm looking for are similar specs for 2016 aka 16GB of RAM and a good video card. I do play videogames, but the games I'm interested in right now - Battlefield 4 and Attila TW. So nothing too daunting on the system to be fair.

Can anyone recommend a good ASUS? My main concern - how good are the Republic of Gamers laptops?

Open to other recommendations though, not necessarily ASUS.

[wooly_mammoth]

I've been using a RoG laptop (G55 model) since 2012, and since I play only old games for the most part (think 90s and early 00s) I intend to keep it around at least until 2020, when MS plans to remove support for Windows 7.

As with all laptops, the problem here is cooling. Even though they may be advertised as "gaming laptops", anything close to actually being demanding or utilizing their hardware to full capacity will get their temperatures somewhere around and over the 90 degrees mark even with a good cooling pad beneath (the RoGs in particular don't seem to mind the cooling pad too much anyway). This means that playing anything comparable with their hardware should either be avoided or attempted outside of very warm seasons (forget about playing pretty much anything during a romanian summer).

As for problems, I've ran into a single freak BSOD so far and some rogue headphone jack issue that came and went on its own.

[edyzmedieval]

Hah, loved the point of Romanian summers. You're quite right on those - either you freeze with an air conditioner or your laptop melts. One or the other.

So technically the ROG is sound. This is one of the main selling points of it that I'm really liking - good components put together and a solid build.

[Xiahou]

This probably isn't what you're looking for spec-wise, but less than a year ago, I bought a laptop on Ebay using this guide. I got a fully functional HP Elitebook 8460p for less than $150. I upgraded it to 8GB of RAM and an SSD and replaced the battery for just about another $100. So for right around $250, I got a very rugged business-class laptop that has some respectable stats (i7 SandyBridge, 8GB RAM, Intel HD3000 graphics). I installed Linux Mint on it instead of Windows, because I'm kind of over Windows, but it has a BIOS that will activate OEM Windows7 installs if you wanted to go that route too. I run a number of low to mid-spec games on it without issue aside from the general office/productivity software.

For me, the big thing (aside from price, obviously) is the build quality and components that go into high-end business laptops vs the cheap plastic construction of many consumer level ones.The keyboard, touchpad, the aluminum/magnesium case - all top notch.

So anyway, it sounds like this might not be what you're after- but I thought I'd share my experience just in case it's useful to you or any others that read this....

[edyzmedieval]

150 $ for a business-spec laptop?

That is one serious bargain score right there. Quite impressive. I would never expect a business-spec laptop, second hand ok but still, to go for such a low price.

Thank you for the tip, Xiahou.

[Xiahou]

Glad you found it useful.

The prices on these types of laptops are really a phenomenal value, IMO. I'm guessing that most of them are laptops were leased to corporations, and then are being auctioned off cheaply once the leases are up and the businesses refresh their laptops. Sure, a Skylake i7 has better performance than a Sandybridge i7- but not as much as you might think. And certainly not enough to justify the price of a brand new laptop (for me at least).

Here's a fun video that shows what I mean by "build quality" with HP Elitebooks.