How to pick the right laptop for you
Finding the right laptop for you can be a right pain, so I want to run through some tips on how to narrow your search down, what your priorities should be depending on your use case and some options for what’s good right now. I’ll leave some links to some of my favourites right now in the description if you want to check them out, those will be Amazon affiliate links that’ll take you to your local Amazon store where you can see pricing when and where you watch this. And of course, if you haven’t already, consider subscribing for more videos every Monday, Wednesday and Friday!
I thought I’d break this down to three main use cases. Gaming, creative work, and basic word processing, web browsing, school work. Check the timestamps to jump to the area that fits you the best. Lets start with gaming.
Under the gaming category, I can think of a number of different options depending on what you are after. The obvious one is, ‘budget’. This is a tough one to find good recommendations for, as the lower your budget is, the more tradeoffs you have to make. Being able to get a £1000 / $1000 gaming laptop is normally a good place to be, but £800 / $800 is more difficult. And £500 /$500, well you are definitely compromising on a lot there. In general, getting a GTX 1660 Super or TI is about enough graphics horsepower to play almost any game, even if it’s at low settings. You’ll want at least 8GB of RAM, ideally upgradable, and if you can find one with at least and i5 CPU, or even an i9 or Ryzen, all the better. You’ll also want an SSD boot drive, and if you can swing a 1TB HDD as well, or at least 512GB of SSD space, you should be alright.
If you want a more well rounded system, those normally cost somewhere between £1000 and £1500 – this HP OMEN 15 Ryzen laptop for example, or the Acer Triton 300 are excellent options that offer RTX 2060 or 2070 – even 2070 Super – graphics to power through games, high refresh rate displays, 16GB of RAM, decent amounts of SSD storage, and high end Ryzen or Intel CPUs for good gaming and productivity performance – even streaming on the side if you want to. Plus, build quality is normally a step above the more ‘budget’ tier machines.
I’ve mentioned Ryzen CPUs in laptops a few times now – for good reason. Right now, AMD’s Ryzen CPUs are generally offering more performance for less power consumption, meaning better battery life and more performance and versatility. You can more easily stream or edit videos thanks to the extra power, or just get a few more FPS in games. Laptops with Ryzen 4000 CPUs, or soon to be Ryzen 5000, are still relatively limited in numbers right now, although plenty more are on the way. So, especially if you want a machine to do both gaming and creative work, keep an eye out for a Ryzen 4000 or 5000 H or HS series CPU.
There are of course the T H I C C options, the ones that need to be terminally connected to multiple power bricks like a form of life support – personally I’m not sure why they exist, who the target market is, but there are a few options to choose from. These are often much more expensive, in the multiple thousands, but offer close to, or actual desktop hardware while still including a battery, keyboard and screen. If you are after this class of laptop, I think you know what you are looking for here.
Then there is the exact opposite, the ultra thin and light machines like this Razer Blade Stealth. Since they dropped a GTX 1650 Max Q in here, it’s spawned kind of a new category of machines that have a little bit of gaming power on the go, but when paired with external GPU enclosures like the Core X offer decent, if not mind blowing, performance at home. These can be great, but often are expensive especially when you factor in buying a GPU to sit in the enclosure. You can go down the route of getting a more normal laptop from the likes of Lenovo or Dell, that have a Thunderbolt 3 port, and still use one of these external enclosures, but they often aren’t spec’d with fast displays or enough storage.
I think that’s a good amount covered for gaming – what about productivity and creative workloads? Well, I think there’s two main sub-categories here. There is CPU heavy workloads like video editing, 3D modelling, the likes, and more artist-focused workloads like drawing, illustration. For the former, options like Razer’s Blade Studio – if insanely expensive – or the more reasonable Acer ConceptD line like the ConceptD 5 Pro I reviewed a while ago are great options. They normally come with a decent amount of hardware horsepower while also sporting stunning and colour accurate displays. Your primary objective here is either to find a laptop with enough horsepower to meet your needs, or a display that is accurate and crisp enough to get your work done with.
If you are more an artists than an editor, 2 in 1 machines like this Lenovo Yoga 14 are excellent. Anything that comes with a stylus and pressure sensitive touch gets top marks, which this has. Great battery life is likely also top priority, and the display under the touch digitiser should be bright and vibrant – and accurate. Specs like CPU, RAM, Graphics and Storage aren’t normally as big a deal here especially since many apps now default to use ‘Cloud’ storage instead.
Finally, the more ‘basic’ type machines. Great for school, college or uni work, or just as the home PC for doing those tasks you’d rather do with a real keyboard and the desktop versions of websites. Here there are a couple of options. Generally you are looking for value options here, but be careful on build quality. Finding one with little keyboard flex, solid construction and especially a good hinge is key to making it last. Again, finding one with a Ryzen CPU, including the U series chips, is a bonus, and 8GB of RAM and 256GB or more of SSD space should keep it snappy.
You can go for a Chromebook – these are basically overgrown android tablets. They don’t run programs on them directly – except for Android apps, they are basically a web browser and Android device and not much else. Normal Windows programs don’t work on them, but for a basic and often cheap web browser and word processor they are fine.
