Need advice for laptop for 17yo

[jerry19380]

My son is 17 and needs a new laptop. I'd like to get one which will not only serve his gaming needs but also last through the next 5 years (college). Any advice towards specific laptops that have sufficient CPU and graphics and decent construction would be much appreciated.

Answers to questions in the guidelines post:

As far as budget, closer to $1000 is better, but I can exceed that if there's good bang/buck.

I don't have clear requirements for size/screen res.

For battery life, I figure he'll mostly be using it plugged in, but perhaps on the go for class to take notes when he gets to college.

For gaming, mostly he play Fort nite currently, which probably has lowish requirements, but he may end up wanting to play games with higher CPU/graphics needs. I think he just started Don't Starve Together.

For other uses I expect mostly apps that don't have high CPU requirements - Office suite tools or equivalents.

I'd like the laptop to last for 5 years at a minimum.

I'm in the US.

Thanks,
Jerry

 

[jerry19380]

Maybe my question was too broad. After having done a little research, I'm looking at the Dell G15 or G16, with 16GB RAM and a 512GB drive. They can be had for about $900 to $1200 at the Dell Outlet store. Add a 4 year warranty for another $100 or so.

What are the opinions on these for the requirements in my first post? The graphics chips for these are the RTX 3060 with 6GB or the RTX 3050 or 3050 Ti with 4GB. I don't have a good basis for comparison on these so thoughts on this are helpful.

Thanks again.

 

[Kaamos_Llama]

Most of us here use desktops, laptops arent really the best for gaming in a bang for buck sense so for me personally I dont keep up with them at all.

The nomenclature for laptop chips is also different to desktop parts so for example an RTX 3060 laptop is a completely different chip and performance than the desktop version. When you also factor in build quality for different manufacturers on top of basic headline specs I'm reluctant to recommend anything I dont know much about.

PC Gamer has a sister site over at Toms Hardware you would most likely get more replies over there

 

[jerry19380]

Thanks for the tip, I'll head over to Tom's.

 

[Jackho_ho_ho]

You can read here https://www.pcgamer.com/best-gaming-laptop/

It might be useful to know more information.