Question Help buying a gaming laptop

[pugoverlord]

Hello and thank you in advance for the help. I will keep this direct.
I teach English online so my desired laptop does not need much for that task but I would like to play Fallout New Vegas too.
I usually have 150 mods max when I play. quality of life and outfit mods, nothing huge.

What is your budget?
€500 / $540 max

What is the size of the notebook that you are considering?
14"

What screen resolution do you want?
Not sure, nothing fancy. I play with medium graphics settings.

Do you need a portable or desktop replacement laptop?
Portable.

How much battery life do you need?
Not important, the laptop will remain stationary.

Do you want to play games with your laptop? If so then please list the games that you want to with the settings that you want for these games. (Low, Medium or High)?
I only want to play Fallout New Vegas, medium graphics at least, about 150 small mods, outfits, stand alone guns, etc.

New Vegas Requirements;
Windows 7/Vista/XP
Dual Core 2 GHz or equivalent processor
2 GB Ram
10 GB free HDD Space
NVIDIA GeForce 6 series or ATI 1300XT series video card, or equivalent

What other tasks do you want to do with your laptop? (Photo/Video editing, Etc.)
Microsoft Word, Skype or Photoshop for making homework papers for my English class.

How much storage (Hard Drive capacity) do you need?
In this aspect I am ignorant, I have a 1tb external drive. I do not need to store any English class/work task longer than 1 week so...maybe the skype, photoshop and Fallout game and mods would take up the most room.

If you are considering specific sites to buy from, please post their links.
I live in Finland so the sites here are...
www.gigantti.fi verkkokauppa.com power.fi

How long do you want to keep your laptop?
5 years at least.

Please tell us about the brands that you prefer to buy from them and the brands that you don't like and explain the reasons.
What country do you live in?
I do not know enough to have a preference, I am not used to apple and have always had a PC. I live in Finland.

I am not knowledgeable about graphics cards either, since NV is about 11 years old. Do current average laptops have good graphics by default? will a good graphics card even fit in a laptop?

 

[Brian Boru]

I live in Finland.

Welcome to the forum

Our Finnish consul should be along shortly
@Kaamos_Llama

 

[pugoverlord]

kiitos. it is 2am here now English is my first language.

 

[Kaamos_Llama]

kiitos. it is 2am here now English is my first language.

Tervetuloa!

I wonder if @mainer could advise on how much mods affect performance in Fallout NV? Particularly would they affect RAM usage enough that 16GB might be preferable to 8?

I'm not hugely knowledgeable about laptops, as I mainly follow desktop. Obviously a lot of the knowledge is somewhat transferable. What I dont know is anything about build quality, keyboard quality, and the like, so I'd advise you to look up customer reviews for anything I suggest based off specs to make sure all is satisfactory to to your needs. It generally seems to follow at your budget either they save money on the power of the components and produce something fairly solid that is pretty slow. Or they produce something with OK components that is not built particularly strongly.

As you say you are going to keep it in place and not carry it around too much, and you also want to game a little, I'd sway towards the performance side.

This one's on sale, seems like about the strongest graphical performance you can get for €500 right now.

https://www.verkkokauppa.com/fi/pro...q1004no-14-kannettava-Win-11-Valkoinen-480S3E

Providing we dont get advice that 16GB is necessary to game, I think that's about as good as you'll get at the price.

 

[Lutfij]

Welcome to the forums, newcomer!

Preparing for a Finnish takeover...why am I thinking this is a Rally Finland event on the WRC calendar? That aside, I was going through options from the first hyperlinked site you'd parsed. Sadly I don't see anything worthwhile picking up with that budget. Yes FO:New Vegas has a dirt cheap sort of requirements for hardware but in 2023, I'd advise on looking into something more beefy both GPU and ram wise, which is half somewhat true with the option listed by my colleague above. You might never know, you could venture into more territories with games if you're given the opportunity to do so.

If you had a higher budget to flex with, the APU route suggested by @Kaamos_Llama albeit with a higher pedigree CPU/iGPU( = APU) would be something I'd look into at the very least. If at all possible, maybe a laptop that has a discrete GPU and the same amount of ram.

If you can't go higher than what you've stated, then Kaamos's suggestion is spot on!