saturnotaku

Despite all the bad stuff that goes on with Dell, more often than not they will come up clutch for their customers. Enjoy your newly upgraded machine.

I don't get excited about video games any more.

Cramming that much CPU into a form factor smaller than a laptop is going to result in more heat and fan noise, especially for one of those 11th-gen Intel CPUs. If she's not going to be doing anything intensive, a similar machine with a low-power U- or N-series processor would be better.

I take everything here with a healthy dose of skepticism, but I sincerely hope the "rising tide lifts all boats" principle applies.

Can't stand white laptops so no G14 for me. Also said that I want to keep this to under $1000 to minimize the financial loss I would incur by selling the Pro 7i. Finally got around to picking up the A16 Advantage Edition, and Asus has once again failed me. The first one blue screened before it got to the Windows desktop. Exchanged it for the last new-in-box example I could find at a Best Buy that wasn't more than an hour's drive. It got past the opening hurdle, but when connected to an external monitor, the dumb thing idles at 60 degrees. I know that's not dangerous, but my Pro 7i is 20 degrees cooler in the exact same configuration, cooling pad and all while not being absurdly louder. Also, Jarrod got the USB-C configuration wrong in his video. The port that allows for power delivery is connected to the dGPU, not integrated, which more or less defeated the entire reason I wanted this specific model. This whole ordeal must be the laptop gods' way of telling me to hold onto the Pro 7i.

Your exact configuration is now on sale brand new for $2749.

If you want to see someone more succinctly take both LMG and GN to task, this video was rather hard-hitting.

No mini-LED screen, no (apparent) biometric authentication, and nearly as ugly as an Asus Strix. The water cooling is a neat piece of kit, but otherwise, this isn't moving the needle for me at all. The Pro 7i is still going to be a better choice for the money.

To answer your first question, there aren't any scenarios in my work or gaming flow that require switching back and forth between desktop and laptop. However, the monitor where I have my desktop (Gigabyte M28U) has a built-in KVM switch that would facilitate such a need. The Ryzen 7 7735HS is essentially a 6800H with slightly higher turbo boost frequency. Zen 4 with the 7700S dGPU would have been nice, but it's not available in the US. Even if it were it would have been significantly more expensive. There are TUF models with a 7940HS and RTX 4000 GPU, however even on sale they are commanding a 50 percent price premium over what I'm paying for the Advantage Edition. I like DLSS and frame generation but not that much especially since I'm wanting to keep this experiment to $1000 or less. Since the Advantage laptop is from Best Buy, I have TotalTech so a 2-year Geek Squad warranty with accidental damage is included. The 7940HS/RTX 4000 models are from MicroCenter, and the same extended coverage would run me an additional $340. Should I end up keeping the TUF, I'll be taking a reasonable hit on the Legion's resale value (though not as bad if I were to wait until new models come out) so I want to minimize that as much as possible on the other end.

The thing is I do like the Pro 7i, a lot as a matter of fact. The performance is roughly equivalent to that of my desktop, which is really impressive. However, being the desktop replacement that it is, the Legion is quite bulky. The chassis is about at the absolute limit for what I want to carry in a backpack, and when you add the 330W power brick, it's just crossing over the line into being a burden. The TUF is about 1.5 pounds lighter, which is not an insignificant difference, as would be the battery life since I'd likely see at least double what the Legion provides. As I also said, I really dislike that all the video outputs are wired to the dedicated graphics. This means I pretty much can't use it at my office as this creates needless heat and fan noise in a scenario where I'm not going to utilize the machine's full power. Speaking of full power, there are the fans to consider. I totally understand that a powerful machine like the Pro 7i is going to get noisy under load, and that's something I would just have to live with if I were to keep it. However, when the desktop is operating under similar conditions, it is significantly quieter because I spent a lot of time tuning the fan curves to get the acoustics where I wanted. In re-watching Jarrod's review of the A16 Advantage, he got almost 90 fps in Shadow of the Tomb Raider using the laptop's silent mode. That I want to say is close to double what he got with a Pro 7i in its quiet mode. Plus with some tweaking of the CPU and GPU power limits, it may even be possible to game on the TUF with a USB-C charger. I've seen a video of someone do exactly this with the Zephyrus G14 Advantage. I did reserve the A16 before it went off sale today, so I'm thinking I'll try it out for a while and see how it goes. If it doesn't work out, then I'll probably just keep the Legion.

I've been using a Legion Pro 7i with RTX 4080 more or less since the system launched. It's been a constant work/travel and play companion. However, I've been thinking about getting rid of it in favor of a thinner, lighter, less-powerful machine while keeping my current gaming desktop, which is a Ryzen 9 5950X with RTX 4070 GPU. It's not that I'm unsatisfied with the Pro 7i, but I'm thinking it's too much laptop when the desktop performs very similarly while being much quieter. I've also had more than one close call with potentially catastrophic accidental damage to the Lenovo. Such an incident would be covered under warranty, but it would still be a burden. There are also some quality of life issues I don't like about it, including the fact that all the video outputs are wired to the discrete GPU. If I were to sell the Legion, I would go with something like the Asus TUF A16 Advantage Edition that's currently on sale for $800. A Legion Slim 5 is out of the question as for some reason Lenovo has the fan curve programmed to start them when the CPU hits 40C. What temperature does the laptop idle at when connected to an external monitor - 40C, so the fans are turning on and off constantly. Very annoying. The TUF's build quality and screen are like the Slim 5, not outstanding but serviceable, but it's noticeably thinner and lighter than the Pro 7i. Also, the Type-C port that allows for charging also supports video out through the iGPU, so I can use the laptop at work with a single cable. The other option will be for me to sell the desktop and keep the Pro 7i as more or less my sole personal computer. I would be fine with this because it's been performing very well aside from the small QoL problems that I'll just have to deal with over the long term. So far, Reddit is saying I should keep the Legion and sell the desktop, but I'd like to know what you all think about this.

I have lots of great memories of going to CompUSA back in the day. Circuit City was pretty OK, too. The 43-inch HDTV my wife and I got there as a wedding present back around late-2006, early-2007 when HDMI and 1080p were the hot new things is still kicking to this day. It was part of a package that included a free HD-DVD player LMAO. In addition to CompUSA, we also had a similar store called Elek-tek. That was the place where we got our first Windows-based PC. I found this mail-in order catalog of theirs. Elek-tek Catalog V.pdf (wass.net)

You'd probably have better luck buying a no-name Chinese SSD from Wish.com at this point.

GN wouldn't have gotten involved had LMG not fired the first shot. Regardless, the conspiracy angle is stupid anyway because LMG employees themselves have stated on record that they know content was rushed, and Linus admitted to ignoring their concerns.

Our personal feelings on the quality of the content are largely the same. The only LMG property I ever subscribed to was TechQuickie, and that was only for a couple months. I like Mac Address because its tone and feel are, for lack of a better term, more "mature" than LTT. The main channel was something I would only watch if I was utterly bored. However, whatever we think about the overall quality of their work is utterly irrelevant. Your personal opinions on the term "influencer" and how that system operates are irrelevant. Like it or not, whether they have one sub or 15 million, tech YouTubers who want to do content like GN, HUB, or LMG have a responsibility to their audiences. If you're going to take a shot at fellow creators within your space, your own nose better be clean. Again, this isn't just a few transposed numbers on bar charts. We're talking repeated, verifiable errors that have largely gone unnoticed, and when they are called out, the company does little, if anything to correct them. You have your own employees on video, in their own words, saying that they want more time to conduct testing and polish the videos. Upper management responds by ignoring those requests and subsequently doubling down, with no remorse for not spending an extra "$100, $200, $500" of employee salary to do so. The workplace abuse allegations are the cherry on top of this crap sundae. The allegations here aren't inappropriate jokes, or a guy accidentally brushed up against a girl's butt. Someone is saying that they had to engage in self harm just to get a day off, and to me that requires more than the accused paying someone to look into it. I don't deny government in the aggregate is a net negative, but this is one of the few instances where I think they can be effective, and if this situation needs to go to a court of law, so be it.

I say we not pollute this thread with LMG discussion any more. I've said my piece in one dedicated to the matter.

I'll be curious to see if creators start pulling out of Floatplane. Regardless, I have a feeling that with these most recent allegations, we're going to see a settlement with a hush-money payout, an NDA, and the results of the investigation being sealed for all time.

While both sides in the harassment allegations need to be heard, I'd feel more comfortable with an investigation that was being led by whatever the Canadian equivalent of OSHA is. An agency hired by the company itself feels like a fox investigating itself for a break-in at the chicken coop. Unless these workplace allegations are proven false beyond a reasonable doubt, I don't see how LMG recovers, doubly so in light of Linus quadrupling down. They'll no doubt retain a contingent of d**k rider fans, but there's otherwise a very real possibility that they end up like Vice or Buzzfeed. I wanted to address the point in the other thread about handling this privately. Let's not forget that LMG is the one who started this by calling out the other outlets. If the problems with LMG were limited to incorrect data on a few charts here and there, that's one thing. But we're talking about serious, systemic failures in many areas of the operation of a media conglomerate that absolutely should know better. With them attempting to pivot toward data-driven testing, they should have made damn sure their ducks were in a row before going after channels with 1/10 (LTT specifically) or significantly less (all of LMG) of the audience/reach. Maybe Linus should have accepted that $100,000,000 buyout offer.

Currently playing Master Detective Archives: Rain Code. As a Danganronpa super fan who has more than 1000 hours invested in the four mainline games across several platforms, I was pretty excited for this one. However, having just completed chapter 2, I have to say it's not really grabbed me the way its spiritual ancestors have. It's hard to get invested in the characters because most of the ones ones you spend a good amount of time with are annoying as hell. In Danganronpa, Monokuma and the mastermind controlling him are, in my humble, among the most compelling villains in video game history. Rain Code's primary antagonist is a corporation, and you're introduced to new representatives of it in seemingly every chapter, making it hard to focus. The revelation about what you could be up against that comes after completing chapter 2 has me worried as well because it sounds incredibly stupid. I of course will see it through to the end, but I'm very wary at this point.

My monitor saga continues. The USB hub on the Acer mini-LED I bought wasn't working properly as my keyboard would constantly disconnect and reconnect. I'm now trying my luck again with an LG 27GP950, this time brand new since Best Buy discounted it to $600. So far, so good. It's also time for my dad's once-a-decade computer upgrade. He's currently rocking an old Lenovo SFF system with a quad-core Haswell CPU that I got from MicroCenter for like $350 back in the day. As he's a boomer, he's very set in his ways - didn't want a laptop that he could connect to his monitor, no AIO PC, no Mac Mini, etc. I originally found an HP Pavilion on clearance from a local OfficeMax that's going out of business. However, I found a better deal directly from HP on a Victus desktop of all things. It has an i5 13400F and an Arc A380 GPU. He's gotten by the last 9+ years with 128 GB of storage so the 256 GB SSD it has will be more than sufficient. Also went with the stock 8 GB of RAM as I have a 16 GB kit on-hand to upgrade it. For well under $600 all-in, I'm hoping this will be the last PC he ever needs.

An Omen 17 with an i7 13700HX but otherwise identical specs to yours is available brand new from HP for $2400.

P16 Gen 2 is out now, FYI. Lenovo ThinkPad P16 Gen 2 (16″ Intel) | Power-packed mobile workstation | Lenovo US GPUs top out at 115W according to the PSREF. Lenovo is also claiming that the Type-C and Thunderbolt ports support PD3.0. ThinkPad_P16_Gen_2_Spec.pdf (lenovo.com)

The fact that you can still get full performance out of an Apple silicon Mac, for several hours no less, while running off the battery is truly a remarkable feat of engineering. Regarding the MS Office suite, if you use it regularly and for complex tasks, you truly are better off emulating it in a Windows VM. I've used Macs on and off since the late 90s, and those versions of Word, Excel, et al have always been moderately to significantly behind their Windows counterparts. That's never going to change.

I like what Framework is doing but can't justify $2100 to get the 16-inch in the configuration I would want, at least not with a GPU that, at best, offers RTX 3060 levels of performance. At the same time, I begrudge no one who is willing to pay the early adopter tax as strong interest should allow more and/or cheaper options to become available later down the road.

Yes, I believe Sonoma is required for the AGPT to work properly. Someone released a patching utility to allow the GPT's emulation layers to work within the confines of Crossover so you're basically getting the best of both worlds. Apple also recently put out an updated build of the toolkit to address some bugs, which was a surprise considering I wasn't expecting such a thing to happen so soon after the initial release, if ever.