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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   2385 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for October 20, 2023

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About three weeks ago my laptop got stolen so I need to buy a new computer. I was thinking of building a desktop, but I'm about to move into a small apartment with my girlfriend and I don't think we'll have the floor space to spare, so it'll have to be a laptop.

What I need it for, in descending order of importance/time spent:

  1. Music production: I'll be using Propellerhead Reason and the shareware version of Reaper a lot. Obviously this means that a good integrated sound card is a must. With my old laptop, Reason would sometimes stop playing the track, I presume because my laptop couldn't keep up with the number of concurrent MIDI tracks. I presume this is caused by insufficient RAM, so it'd be nice if that was less of an issue with my new laptop.
  2. Photo editing/graphic design: Using Photoshop.
  3. Video editing: Using Premiere Pro. I'll be making short music videos which will require a great deal of colour correction. 1080p is fine, I don't need a 4k monitor, and I expect most of my editing will be 24fps.
  4. Gaming: Admittedly I've kind of gone off gaming a bit and don't spend nearly as much of my free time playing video games as I used to, but it'd be nice to have the option should the mood strike. I don't know if it makes a difference but I'm exclusively a single-player gamer. I own several games that I bought on a whim and only realised after the fact that my old laptop wasn't powerful enough to run them (e.g. Mirror's Edge Catalyst, Wolfenstein: The New Order, Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor, Metro), so it'd be a plus if the laptop I get for the three tasks above is also powerful enough to run at least some of the aforementioned games. I rarely buy games on release, so a laptop which could reliably play games from 5-6 years ago at 60fps 1600x900 would be fine for me.

Budget, let's say somewhere between €1000-1500.

May the PCMR gods forgive me, but you sound like you'd be best served with a Mac (🤢)

That's what's hip for music production, but in terms of actual differences, you need to consider your work flow or software compatibility, and I can't specifically comment on that.

An M1 MacBook is perfectly sufficient, though you can get an M2 or higher if you really feel like it.

In terms of games, it's still a mixed bag, but since it's not a real priority you can probably get away with using a compatibility layer or dual booting.

If not, your needs aren't particularly demanding, and most laptops of any description in your price range should more than suffice.

If you don't mind a somewhat unrelated question:

I have a 2015 MacBook Pro. Is it possible to manually control the battery charge, so it doesn't charge all the way when plugged in all the time, or is that functionality only available on newer models?

I usually recommend a desktop, but it all depends on your living arrangements. If you can dedicate a desk to your PC, then there's no point in buying a laptop. If your desk space is also your dinner table or your GF's desk, then you need a laptop.

I have a mini-ITX desktop in a CoolerMaster NR200 case, the goldilocks small case. Easy to assemble, easy to disassemble, still small enough. There are newer versions like NR200P and NR200P Max, which make it better for gaming, but even the old version is good enough. I played with the newegg builder, and $1200 will get you a pretty good PC.

Congrats on moving in with your girlfriend!

Don't have much thoughts on the laptop, but shadow of mordor is a fun game.

Depending on how much you want The Best Performance possible, you may be able to go significantly under your budget target. This isn't a great machine performance-wise, but it'll hit most of your targets (albeit a little slow for video editing).

For your requirements list and current equipment costs, buying new I would recommend starting by looking for 16-32GB RAM and an nvidia 1650 or better. The ideal storage situation would be 512GB+ nvme boot drive and a 2TB SATA SSD storage drive for video editing, but that can be hard to find in compact or ultracompact laptops; if you have to compromise, 1TB or greater NVME boot drives are table stakes at the price range you're looking at. Video editing takes an obscene amount of storage, and games have started to get pretty bloated, and having to fuck around with a USB drive is bad enough before dealing with UK prices.

For used or refurbished machines, you can probably get away with 8GB RAM if the computer is otherwise a steal, but RAM's cheap and it's better to have more. That's doubly true for ultracompact and compact laptops, where getting access to memory to upgrade it may be difficult or near-impossible. The gaming list you have can go back a few generations if you're buying used, but I wouldn't go lower on this chart than an nVidia 1650 or so; the games only 'need' an nVidia 970 or so to run with decent settings, but any GPU that old will be inviting reliability problems down the road. For CPU, you'll probably want to stick to an Intel i5-84xx or higher on this chart. The Ryzen numbers are... complicated in a way that just adding price doesn't necessarily get you much performance, but that chart's not the worst way to look at them so long as you don't pay a bunch of extra money for a tiny boost.

If you want a mobile machine, I'd caution to watch out for any laptops with very exposed hinges -- see this for an example of a reasonable deal except the first time you drop it on a corner one of the hinges will bust. Similarly, watch out for compact or ultracompacts with very few USB connections (or where the only connections are USB-C); at best this will require you to get a dock, and often it's a sign the machine is meant as a very light use device and will burn the hell out of you.

Unless you absolutely need video editing or gaming on the go, I wouldn't exclude small (~cfe Lian Li Air at 384 x 288 x 400 mm) compact desktop PCs or a laptop with an eGPU. These are a little more annoying to assemble, but they vastly improve usability and can be meaningfully upgraded at very little floor space cost (though some fan noise), and they're much less likely to be damaged or stolen than something you can take around the world with you. In most cases, they'll cost so much less you can get a gaming desktop and a lightweight mid-performance laptop, though in turn expect to spend some time fucking with cable management. While most gaming laptops will have okay integrated sound, there's very few that are anything outstanding, while desktop machines will have a lot more options there.

((Contra ToaKraka, I don't recommend NUCs or NUC-likes. There are some with the performance you need, if not necessarily the price range, but getting the performance and significant storage for fast video editing will bust your budget, and they're prone to fan failures. They have great uses cases, but this isn't one of them unless you're willing to jettison gaming and accept a USB storage drive.))

The only meaningfully upgradable laptop is the Framework, and it will bust your budget in the performance range you're aiming for, and has very long wait times. For other laptops, you basically will only be able to upgrade RAM a little (usually no more than 2x) and you can replace or add one disk drive, and some won't let you do that (either soldered to the motherboard, or with a sealed frame).

Thank you for such a detailed response, this is a big help.

I can't help too much, because I've always gone desktop, even when I didn't necessarily have tons of space. I feel like the difference between a laptop on a desk and a desktop on a desk is usually very minimal. The Tower for a desktop computer can also go under the desk, and the wires just poke up to operate the screen. The screen can be placed farther back from the keyboard so you can have a healthier eye distance for a screen. A Tower also has far more flexibility on the type of plugs available. Usually as much as your hardware can handle you can manage to get plugs on the outside of the tower connecting it all together.

Here are my current desktop specs:

CPU Brand: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-10700K CPU @ 3.80GHz

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070

RAM: 64GB

SSD sizes: 2000G,1000G

I think that would break your budget, but I'm able to play modern tripple A games at mid or high graphics settings, so its also overkill from your perspective.

I was thinking of building a desktop, but I'm about to move into a small apartment with my girlfriend and I don't think we'll have the floor space to spare, so it'll have to be a laptop.

There's a third option: miniature desktops.

Interesting, are these any good for gaming?

I put together a mini-ITX based computer for my parents many years ago that was decent for its time, barely (IIRC it was mostly for MythTV but I had a few contemporary 3D games set up too) ... but I don't think I'd go with such a small form factor again, even for something sitting in a living room where aesthetics is a concern. Having a giant computer case in (realistically: next to) your entertainment center can hurt the ambiance, but at least a big case has room for lots of bigger slower quieter fans. With a small case you have to choose between CPU/GPU options with low cooling requirements (annoyingly underpowered) or small fans with high cooling capacity (annoyingly whiny sounding). That tiny computer eventually went to my daughter but soon got junked and replaced because trying to upgrade the GPU a little further led to overheating problems.

The 7735U's integrated GPU apparently is approximately equivalent to a 130-$ GTX 1630—extremely weak (between "entry—suitable for 900p gaming" and "modest—modern games at medium settings" on the Logical Increments scale), but not totally worthless. The CPU has 8 cores and 16 threads.

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