$700 - $800 semi gaming laptop

General Questions

1) What is your budget?

$700 - $800

2) What size notebook would you prefer?

would prefer something light to carry around school, but I also prefer a bigger screen than 13-14"

d. Mainstream; 15" - 16" screen

3) Which country will you buying this notebook?

US

4) Are there any brands that you prefer or any you really don't like?

No preference as long as its good and durable.
5) Would you consider laptops that are refurbished/redistributed?

No preference

6) What are the primary tasks will you be performing with this notebook?

Watching movies
Some video editing
light gaming

7) Will you be taking the notebook with you to different places, leaving it on your desk or both?

Both, mostly to college

8) Will you be playing games on your notebook? (If so, please state which games or types of games?)

League of legend, Dota 2, modern warfare

9) How many hours of battery life do you need?

would prefer at least 3 hours or longer if possible

10) Would you prefer to see the notebooks you're considering before purchasing it or buying a notebook on-line without seeing it is OK?

without seeing is ok.

11) What OS do you prefer? Windows, Mac OS, Linux, Chrome OS, etc.

Windows

Screen Specifics

12) What screen resolution(s) would you prefer? (See further below for explanations.)

13) Do you want a glossy/reflective screen or a matte/non-glossy screen? (See further below for explanations.)

I'm not sure whats the difference, but I would prefer a screen that's great to watch movies on.

Build Quality and Design

14) Are the notebook's looks and stylishness important to you?

No.

Notebook Components

15) How much hard drive space do you need?

at least 250 SSD

Timing, Warranty and Longevity

16) When are you buying this laptop?

At the start of May 2021

17) How long do you expect to use this laptop?

3 years at least

18) How long could you afford to do without your laptop if it were to fail?

1 week

19) Would you be willing to pay significantly extra for on-site warranty, or would it be acceptable to you to have to ship the laptop to the vendor for repair with perhaps a week or more outage?

warranty

 

With that price range the best GPU you can get is a 1650/1650Ti which can easily handle DOTA and LOL, Modern Warfare you might have to run it on high to hit 60FPS and i think its playable even on Ultra.

You can also check out this Gateway Laptop with a RTX 2060
https://www.walmart.com/ip/Gateway-...-007-17629fb79864fc&athancid=null&athena=true

You gonna need to buy another 8GB stick so you can have 16GBs of RAM running on dual channel mode and at a M.2 1TB NVME SSD to store your games and other things as 256GBs of storage will easily get filled up.

 

The Gateway laptop looks really good! Do you think I should just get it or should I wait for abit, since it’s almost the back to school sale?

 

It depends on your situation.

It might drop down to $699 again like holiday season. Also the RTX 30 series GPUs are slowly appearing in the market atm but for your needs the RTX 2060 is more than enough.

 

Depends on how high a refresh rate/fps you want in those games. I did get the Gateway for 699 but it's cpu limited with the quad i5 so not the best for cpu heavy games which I don't normally play. And as mentioned you may want another 8gb for dual channel, that'll cost you another $40. I've been fine with the 8gb in all sorts of games for 60fps-120fps, only badly optimized games get much below 60. I could get 15+ fps in some games with the extra 8gb. I doubt it'll ever get to 699 again, even that was just flash sales for a week or two before and after xmas. I have a whole thread on this laptop here:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/threads/gateway-creators-series-15-6-rtx-2060-i5-10300h.834895/

 

The keyboard layout on that Gateway may also be frustrating given it has no dedicated Home, Page Up, or Page Down keys, and the three-column number pad may never seem natural.

Newegg has the MSI - GL65 Leopard 10SDR-492 - 15.6" 144 Hz Gaming Laptop - Newegg.com on sale for $899, and it's $799 after rebate. That's a solid deal for the specs.

Charles

 

I've been extremely surprised by the Legion 5. I have last year's model (4800H, 1660Ti). I use it for teleworking all day; gaming most of the evening. Aside from the more gnarly AAA titles such as Death Stranding, it has proven its value. You can find models on Amazon in your price range.

 

Yeah it is kind of annoying if you use those keys a lot, they have the room for almost full regular keyboard with no room between keys, like my m4600. I don't know why they didn't put that in but the tongfang variants don't seem to do that ever. Also nosecam but it's there.

 

But, there are simple mitigations. I just bought a Logitech G213 since I run my laptop in a closed clamshell configuration.

 

One thing that's great about pc. I rarely use those keys so it's not a big deal. I also never use my kbm for laptop gaming.