Hey guys,
I decided to finally get myself a new laptop, given that my current one is becoming a tad out of date meanwhile. For reference, my current laptop is a Dell Inspiron M5010, with horrible hardware such as an Athlon II P320 @ 2,1GHz and a Radeon 4250 (4 GB of system RAM, and no dedicated VRAM of course). So.. that's what I've got used to work with for the past few years, hence my demands aren't particularly high, yet probably somewhat special.
The current candidate I'm looking to buy is the Dell Inspiron 15-3537 at a price of 508€, or the Inspiron 17-3737 for 528 € (it's got a -50€ discount on the base price of 578€). The latter has basically the same hardware, but a 17'' display with a resolution of 1600x900 instead of 1366x768. CPU is a Core-i5-4200U, it has 6 GB RAM, no dedicated GPU.
There is a number of criteria I came up with:
Soo basically, I was wondering the following:
That's basically it. Deciding on what laptop to buy is something I don't do every day, and I'm fairly sure I suck at it
Hence, I appreciate all sorts comments
I decided to finally get myself a new laptop, given that my current one is becoming a tad out of date meanwhile. For reference, my current laptop is a Dell Inspiron M5010, with horrible hardware such as an Athlon II P320 @ 2,1GHz and a Radeon 4250 (4 GB of system RAM, and no dedicated VRAM of course). So.. that's what I've got used to work with for the past few years, hence my demands aren't particularly high, yet probably somewhat special.
The current candidate I'm looking to buy is the Dell Inspiron 15-3537 at a price of 508€, or the Inspiron 17-3737 for 528 € (it's got a -50€ discount on the base price of 578€). The latter has basically the same hardware, but a 17'' display with a resolution of 1600x900 instead of 1366x768. CPU is a Core-i5-4200U, it has 6 GB RAM, no dedicated GPU.
There is a number of criteria I came up with:
- CPU needs to be good (not great though). I figured a Core-i5-4200U is nice. I basically just want to be able to run Dolphin at acceptable speeds (I don't care for being able to play games, but I don't want Dolphin development to look like a slideshow as it is with my current setup) and be able to run an IDE, a browser, a console, an e-mail client, gcc compiling Dolphin and stuff like that at the same time without everything choking.
- RAM should be >= 6 GB, I guess. I don't really know how much of an impact this has, but if the GPU doesn't have any dedicated RAM I think 6 GB (or even 8 GB) should be preferred over 4 GB. Feel free to correct me if I'm mistaken.
- GPU: Most importantly, I don't want any Optimus system. Those run like crap under Linux due to lacking driver support, and the open-source solutions are too much of a hassle to use conveniently. Instead, I guess an Intel GPU wouldn't be too bad (afaik the i5-4200U usually comes along with the Intel HD 4400 GPU). All I need the GPU for is for HD video playback, running Dolphin (without actually playing games, I just need the thing to render stuff correctly, and maybe not bottleneck everything to a slideshow) and every now and then use Blender for not-too-complex scenes. I'm not sure if an AMD GPU would fulfill these requirements any better than an Intel GPU, plus the latter one probably gets me a few additional minutes/hours of battery power.
- Display: Anything between 15'' and 17''. I actually like 15'' a bit better because they aren't as huge, but apparently it's really hard to find such with a resolution higher than those pesky 1366x768. 1600x900 would already good enough for me, while 1920x1080 would be great. Don't really care if it's glaring or not.
- Battery: My current laptop's battery never lasted longer than 3 hours, and I'd really prefer to have something which lasts at least twice as long. Hence also why I guess an Intel GPU would be preferrable over AMD GPUs.
- Drives: Give me a HDD with at least 500 GB disk space and I'm happy. No need for optical drives, really... bonus points for an additional SSD with >= 30 GB though.
- Weight: I was actually hoping for something really light, but apparently 2 kg is sort of the bare minimum. My current laptop weighs around 2,5 kg, so whatever. Either way, bonus points if it doesn't have an optical drive for lower weight, but those notebooks seem to be hard to come across...
- OS: Couldn't care less, if there's anything preinstalled I'll wipe it anyway and install my own stuff.
- Price: Something around 600€. I've found a "good enough" one for 530€ (incl. shipping), but if you happen to find something which match all of my expectations perfectly or even better, I would consider paying even 700€.
- Case quality: The Inspirons have some excellent manifacturing for the price range afaik. Would be sad to settle for a less well-designed one.
Soo basically, I was wondering the following:
- Do you have any other suggestions apart from the Dell models I found so far? I've also looked at the HP Pavilion 15 models, and they seem to be roughly just as good. I do know that the cases of Inspirons are fairly excellent for the price range though, so I felt like going with the familiar one
- Do you think that lowering a specific criterion of the ones listed above would improve my experience a lot? For example, I was pondering if it makes a lot of a difference if I go for an i5-4200U or just with i5-3337U, or even an i3.
- Is the Inspiron 17-3737 worth the 528 €, or would I find better stuff?
- .. additionally, just comment on anything stupid that I might have said in this post ... I'd rather clear up any misconceptions now instead of noticing when it's too late.
That's basically it. Deciding on what laptop to buy is something I don't do every day, and I'm fairly sure I suck at it
Hence, I appreciate all sorts comments
