Looking for new laptop for the future

[Kitje]

So I've been looking into a new machine for a while now. Not because I wish to decommission my (I guess custom) HP and Dell workstations. But things can change, so I'm now looking into a new machine and albeit I have tech experience; I'm pretty picky. I should mention my needs for a system is a good SRGB/DCI-P3 panel, upgradeable RAM and storage, it's a must.

I haven't done these ever, I'd appreciate any suggestion or help! Thanks!

 

General Questions

1) What is your budget? £800 to £1100

2) What size notebook would you prefer?

a. Ultraportable; 10" - 12" screen
c. Thin and Light; 13" - 14" screen
d. Mainstream; 15" - 16" screen
e. Desktop Replacement; 17"+ screen

 

3) In which country will you buying this notebook? Great Britain

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

a. Like: Acer, MSI, Medion, Dell, HP
b. Dislike: Asus to an extent after negative experience with keyboard quality and support from Asus.

 

5) Would you consider laptops that are refurbished/redistributed? If it's a model suggested and can't be bought new, I can consider refurbs/redistributed laptops.

6) What are the primary tasks you will be performing with this notebook? Video editing 10-bit  Cinema4K footage, photo editing and gaming

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

8 ) Will you be playing games on your notebook? (If so, please state which games or types of games?) I currently play Borderlands: GOTY Enhanced and been trying out Hitman 2.

9) How many hours of battery life do you need? 6 hours away from the mains.

10) Would you prefer to see the notebook you're considering before purchasing it or buying a notebook on-line without seeing it is OK? Buying it online without seeing is OK. I tend to find reviews, especially detailed ones from Notebookcheck.

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

12) What ports do you require on your laptop? (ex. MiniDisplayPort or HDMI? Displayport or USB-C w/ DP?) My current machines have DisplayPort. But USB-C Thunderbolt 3 or 4 would be nice. I use Ethernet as well.

Screen Specifics

13) What screen resolution(s) would you prefer? See further below for explanations. 1920x1080

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

Build Quality and Design

15) Are the notebook's looks and stylishness important to you? Build quality should be good, also meaning the keyboard shouldn't fall apart in 6 months.

Notebook Components

16) How much storage space do you need? 256GB, but more the merrier.

Timing, Warranty and Longevity

17) When do you consider purchasing this laptop? It's not urgent so not anytime soon.

18) How long do you expect to use this laptop? 4 Years.

19) How long could you afford to do without your laptop if it were to fail? Long enough since I'll still be keeping my Zbook 15 G2 and M4800.

20) 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? Not necessary.

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[KING19]

You can check out mid-range gaming laptops within your budget like the Lenovo Legion series, HP Omen, Dell G Series and others since you're going to be doing heavy 3D tasks. Since battery life will be factor a laptop with an AMD CPU would be a better choice than Intel laptops but Intel's CPU's perform better in productivity tasks especially 12th Gen ones and they often have a thunderbolt port. Its a lot of choices within your budget.

[Kitje]

On 9/19/2022 at 9:49 PM, KING19 said:

You can check out mid-range gaming laptops within your budget like the Lenovo Legion series, HP Omen, Dell G Series and others since you're going to be doing heavy 3D tasks. Since battery life will be factor a laptop with an AMD CPU would be a better choice than Intel laptops but Intel's CPU's perform better in productivity tasks especially 12th Gen ones and they often have a thunderbolt port. Its a lot of choices within your budget.

So I've been looking since this post. I had a look at Legion but discovered some didn't have a good panel or build quality was questionable. I didn't mention that low noise emission was also a requirement. I did find a laptop, that was a potential candidate and it's an Acer ConceptD 14in but reading some reviews yields conflicting opinions with theirs. Some say the keyboard isn't great and it's a loud unit yet other reviews say otherwise.

 

It's become quite a challenge now... Yikes. I may have to wait until there's either a decent deal or hold on until there's something ideal on sale.

[KING19]

On 9/28/2022 at 8:37 AM, Vaardu said:

So I've been looking since this post. I had a look at Legion but discovered some didn't have a good panel or build quality was questionable. I didn't mention that low noise emission was also a requirement. I did find a laptop, that was a potential candidate and it's an Acer ConceptD 14in but reading some reviews yields conflicting opinions with theirs. Some say the keyboard isn't great and it's a loud unit yet other reviews say otherwise.

 

It's become quite a challenge now... Yikes. I may have to wait until there's either a decent deal or hold on until there's something ideal on sale.

 

The Legions have good build quality especially the 2022 models. The Pro and the Legion 7s uses QHD+ screens with 500 nits of brightness. The Legion 5 can be configured with a QHD screen and decent 1080p Panels as long you avoid the cheapest panel especially in retail stores. You could try to look for non-gaming laptops like the HP ENVY, Lenovo Thinkpad, and maybe the DELL XPS with a dedicated GPU but you might have to increase your budget somewhat.

[saturnotaku]

18 hours ago, KING19 said:

 

The Legions have good build quality especially the 2022 models. The Pro and the Legion 7s uses QHD+ screens with 500 nits of brightness.

 

I would advise some caution, though, as I've always believed Lenovo's 500-nit brightness claim on these models to be somewhat misleading. Yes, it is able to achieve that level at 100%. However, below that point, brightness falls off a cliff. Even at 80%, I believe it's well under 300 nits. Far from unusable, mind you, but most other laptops have a much more linear fall off as you go down the scale.

[KING19]

On 10/6/2022 at 11:14 AM, saturnotaku said:

 

I would advise some caution, though, as I've always believed Lenovo's 500-nit brightness claim on these models to be somewhat misleading. Yes, it is able to achieve that level at 100%. However, below that point, brightness falls off a cliff. Even at 80%, I believe it's well under 300 nits. Far from unusable, mind you, but most other laptops have a much more linear fall off as you go down the scale.

 

Yea that true but it isnt a major problem if you're indoors anyways and/or not in a room filled with sunlight.

 

Even at 40-50% brightness with my 2020 Legion 5 300nit screen  when i am running on battery its very usable.  You can always keep it at 100% if you dont mind losing battery life or if you keep it plugged in with conservation mode on

[saturnotaku]

15 hours ago, KING19 said:

 

Yea that true but it isnt a major problem if you're indoors anyways and/or not in a room filled with sunlight.

 

Even at 40-50% brightness with my 2020 Legion 5 300nit screen  when i am running on battery its very usable.  You can always keep it at 100% if you dont mind losing battery life or if you keep it plugged in with conservation mode on

 

The 300-nit panel on the standard Legion 5 doesn't suffer from the brightness fall-off nearly as much as the 500-nit one on the Pro and 7.

[KING19]

On 10/13/2022 at 10:43 AM, saturnotaku said:

 

The 300-nit panel on the standard Legion 5 doesn't suffer from the brightness fall-off nearly as much as the 500-nit one on the Pro and 7.

 

It does according to Jarrod and it drops below 50nits at 50% brightness

 

2020: (300nits 144Hz)

 

2021 (300 nits 165Hz):

 

Its actually worse on the 2021 model with the 165Hz screen. I dont know what Jarrod uses to measure it but it seems only Lenovo laptops suffers from this. Like i said even at 40-50% brightness its very usable despite the lower brightness.

[Kitje]

In regards to the brightness, my M4800 has a panel rated for 300nits. As of now there's still nothing ideal, since either model has a downside on one specific part over the other (which is pathetic, come on now don't integrate the entire palmrest). I don't think the Legion is gonna be the laptop for me, as I just watched a video of someone actively using a soldering iron to uninstall the keyboard... This is severely reducing my options further.

[ryan]

On 10/17/2022 at 1:53 PM, KING19 said:

 

It does according to Jarrod and it drops below 50nits at 50% brightness

 

2020: (300nits 144Hz)

 

2021 (300 nits 165Hz):

 

Its actually worse on the 2021 model with the 165Hz screen. I dont know what Jarrod uses to measure it but it seems only Lenovo laptops suffers from this. Like i said even at 40-50% brightness its very usable despite the lower brightness.

 

 

If you had not posted that I would have called BS. but I guess you learn something new everyday. 50 nits is mighty low though I don't see how or why anyone would go below 90 percent brightness

[Kitje]

Looked into the Legion 5 Pro 16in, but discovered the fan noise emission is too high for me.

Looked into the Dell G15, the reviews weren't positive on Dell's site and build quality doesn't seem great. The Dell G16 looks enticing but Dell isn't selling it in the UK. Ugh.

 

I looked into the ThinkPad T15g second hand but for some reason the price is overinflated for such a model that doesn't have anything other than gaming orientated specifications, even a last gen RTX... This is silly, it shouldn't be this difficult to filter out the good systems that don't outright deny you on repairability and the artificial price hike.

 

Considering what I'm doing now with Unreal Engine 5 the system I'm currently on is definitely showing its age.

[Kitje]

So I've been looking on eBay for second hand units and stumbled on a RTX 3000 Dell Precision 7540. It's tempting but unsure if anyone has compared it to an RTX 2070/3060/3050. It's almost perfect except I'm unsure of anyone's experience with them.

[Reciever]

3 hours ago, Vaardu said:

So I've been looking on eBay for second hand units and stumbled on a RTX 3000 Dell Precision 7540. It's tempting but unsure if anyone has compared it to an RTX 2070/3060/3050. It's almost perfect except I'm unsure of anyone's experience with them.

@Aaron44126 might have had some exposure to one 

[Kitje]

On 11/23/2022 at 7:30 PM, Reciever said:

@Aaron44126 might have had some exposure to one 

I ended up going with an i7 9750H RTX 3000 Precision 7540, and it seems that I'll be working on yet another laptop. It's in better condition than I thought it'd be but now it means there are three items needing to be replaced. It'll be LCD, SSD and a new battery over time. Since it has USB-C Thunderbolt 3, and while it has something akin to an RTX 3060, docking with an eGPU won't be so difficult.

 

Although I wouldn't recommend doing what I do, it's a learning experience either way. Not perfect, but at least it has some benefits I wanted. Feels just as solid as my current two machines.

[kojack]

If gaming weren't a factor, I would suggest even using iris Xe.  I use it on my dell inspiron and edit 4k video, photo, do graphic creation etc all on it. I may be a little slower than having dedicated graphics, and for me now, time is money, but while on location, with the way I have everything setup now it works for me and I get the results I need. I did upgrade my ram and SSD to much better specs, but the system itself was 949 cdn.  With Xe graphics, you have to make sure you optimize your software to run on it. Once done, it's smooth sailing. 

[Etern4l]

On 11/23/2022 at 4:13 PM, Vaardu said:

So I've been looking on eBay for second hand units and stumbled on a RTX 3000 Dell Precision 7540. It's tempting but unsure if anyone has compared it to an RTX 2070/3060/3050. It's almost perfect except I'm unsure of anyone's experience with them.

 

Precisions are reliably said to be solid machines, but obviously RTX 3000 is an entry level GPU that would probably disappoint in gaming.

[Kitje]

2 hours ago, Etern4l said:

 

Precisions are reliably said to be solid machines, but obviously RTX 3000 is an entry level GPU that would probably disappoint in gaming.

It's been fine so far despite the whining Sunon fans it has. I haven't got replacement fans yet to address it (hoping it does with Delta, like the M4800). It's using a 2060 Laptop chip on DGFF. I don't really game much at all. The benefits here is a keyboard that isn't mounted to the palmrest, expandable RAM beyond 64gb. I won't get rid of my M4800 anytime soon either since that has benefited MXM, still serviceable and just works.

[Etern4l]

1 hour ago, Vaardu said:

It's been fine so far despite the whining Sunon fans it has. I haven't got replacement fans yet to address it (hoping it does with Delta, like the M4800). It's using a 2060 Laptop chip on DGFF. I don't really game much at all. The benefits here is a keyboard that isn't mounted to the palmrest, expandable RAM beyond 64gb. I won't get rid of my M4800 anytime soon either since that has benefited MXM, still serviceable and just works.

 

Yeah, the Turing RTX 3000 (confusingly, Nvidia will have soon released like 4 different chips under the same name) is actually about 20% behind 2060, but still if you got the whole laptop for about a grand, that sounds like a decent deal. 

 

https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/quadro-rtx-3000-mobile.c3428

 

 

[Aaron44126]

Funny thing is, Precision 7540 is a 15" laptop and those have a GPU power limit of around 80W in that generation?  You could get a RTX 4000 or RTX 5000 for it, but it would have the same 80W power limit; so unless you need the extra vRAM from those GPUs, you probably wouldn't be seeing that much of a performance uplift from the RTX 3000.

 

19 minutes ago, Etern4l said:

Yeah, the Turing RTX 3000 (confusingly, Nvidia will have soon released like 4 different chips under the same name) is actually about 20% behind 2060

 

GeForce RTX 2060 (mobile version) and Quadro RTX 3000 (mobile version) both have a TU106 GPU chip with the same specs (CUDA core count, vRAM, etc.).  If there is any reported performance difference, it would basically come down to the power limit set by the OEM.  (Rated clock speeds don't matter much anymore; in the Precision 7000 line at least, these GPUs will just operate at boost speeds up to the power limit as long as the cooling system working properly.)

[Etern4l]

7 minutes ago, Aaron44126 said:

GeForce RTX 2060 (mobile version) and Quadro RTX 3000 (mobile version)

 

Fail. I looked at the perf comparison chart, but the 2060 there was the desktop variant....

[Aaron44126]

2 minutes ago, Etern4l said:

Fail. I looked at the perf comparison chart, but the 2060 there was the desktop variant....

 

Thank you NVIDIA for having product names that make so much sense and tell you exactly what a product is!