New laptop and stuff - Advice please? :)

[neobrain]

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I decided to finally get myself a new laptop, given that my current one is becoming a tad out of date meanwhile.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:

• 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

[admin89]

Dell Inspiron and HP Pavilion are both of their low end series which are known for heating issue .
i5 4200U GPU : Intel HD 4400 is not a good choice . At least , choose sth like Intel HD 4600 (i3 4000M for example )
http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductLis...isNodeId=1

[Link_to_the_past]

Dell Inspiron and HP Pavilion are both of their low end series which are known for heating issue .
i5 4200U GPU : Intel HD 4400 is not a good choice . At least , choose sth like Intel HD 4600 (i3 4000M for example )
http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductLis...isNodeId=1

It wouldn't cover his battery expectations. Taking all your expectations into account i think your choice is pretty good. The only thing i would search for is if there is a laptop without an os preinstalled with those specs for cheaper price.

[Shonumi]

The 4200U under most conditions (i.e. anything but Dolphin) runs very well actually. We got my sister a new laptop with one and it does everything she needs (web browsing + Photoshop/Illustrator) just fine. I wouldn't imagine g++ to be an issue since I've developed on weaker systems with no speed issues like when compiling and doing something else.

I have not done any Dolphin testing, but if you can wait about 24 hours, I can test a couple of games. Just specify one or two you're interested in and what Dolphin revision.

[neobrain]

Dell Inspiron and HP Pavilion are both of their low end series which are known for heating issue .
i5 4200U GPU : Intel HD 4400 is not a good choice . At least , choose sth like Intel HD 4600 (i3 4000M for example )
http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductLis...isNodeId=1

Thanks for bringing up the heat issue, I'll do some research on that. Indeed, my current Inspiron has such issues too, however it's fine if I'm cleaning the fan twice a year.

Can you elaborate on why the 4400 is not a good choice? Is it, like, completely incapable of running anything?

Dell Inspiron and HP Pavilion are both of their low end series which are known for heating issue .
i5 4200U GPU : Intel HD 4400 is not a good choice . At least , choose sth like Intel HD 4600 (i3 4000M for example )
http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductLis...isNodeId=1

It wouldn't cover his battery expectations. Taking all your expectations into account i think your choice is pretty good. The only thing i would search for is if there is a laptop without an os preinstalled with those specs for cheaper price.

Thanks for the feedback Unfortunately I so far had no luck finding laptops without an OS preinstalled. Maybe if I keep looking some more..

The 4200U under most conditions (i.e. anything but Dolphin) runs very well actually. We got my sister a new laptop with one and it does everything she needs (web browsing + Photoshop/Illustrator) just fine. I wouldn't imagine g++ to be an issue since I've developed on weaker systems with no speed issues like when compiling and doing something else.

I have not done any Dolphin testing, but if you can wait about 24 hours, I can test a couple of games. Just specify one or two you're interested in and what Dolphin revision.

If your sister's laptop does have an Intel GPU, I would be very much interested in some quick Dolphin testing. Test any game you like (say, for instance Super Mario Galaxy 1 or 2 if you have those). I'm mostly curious if it runs fine with the recent merger of tev_fixes_new (which would be 4.0-1192) without any glitches. There's no hurry so far, particularly since the offer I'm looking at won't ship until the end of March anyway.

Also, the g++ compiling thing is very likely just due to my RAM .. 4 GB minus the 1 GB that firefox, and then I also don't have any dedicated video memory.. hence I quickly run out of RAM when the linker kicks in

[admin89]

Intel HD 4400 is not much better than Intel HD 4000 , I say those two are similar in term of performance . I'm sure Intel HD 4000 will struggle in SMG even if you use 1xIR . My GT 540M barely cut it with 1xIR , Intel HD 4600 performance is quite close to my GPU

It wouldn't cover his battery expectations

It ? Those Lenovo laptops I linked in my last post have 5 hours battery life which is almost twice as much as his old laptop
If he use a specific software to limit i3 4000M 2400MHz to 900MHz or less . i3 power consumption will be similar to an ULV CPU power consumption , that should increase battery life (more than 6 hours)

[neobrain]

Intel HD 4400 is not much better than Intel HD 4000 , I say those two are similar in term of performance . I'm sure Intel HD 4000 will struggle in SMG even if you use 1xIR

What kind of slow are you talking about when you say "struggle"? I mean, did you catch the point where I said I don't want to play games with Dolphin, but rather just have it running at all and good enough for things not to be a slide-show? However, what would indeed be important is being able to use Blender fluently.

It wouldn't cover his battery expectations

It ? Those Lenovo laptops I linked in my last post have 5 hours battery life which is almost twice as much as his old laptop
If he use a specific software to limit i3 4000M 2400MHz to 900MHz or less . i3 power consumption will be similar to an ULV CPU power consumption , that should increase battery life (more than 6 hours)

I don't think such "specific software" is available for Linux, and I'm really not the type of guy who is into spending a day scripting things like this.
Either way, do I understand it correctly that the i3-4000M is actually a little bit faster than the i5-4200U, but less energy-efficient?

[Shonumi]

@neobrain - My sister's laptop indeed uses an Intel HD 4400. I'll try out SMG and a few others for variety on whatever the latest build is tomorrow. I'll see if I can get Blender tested too (though it's not like I'm familiar with a lot of work in Blender). Unfortunately, not everyone believes in Linux in my house, so she's running Windows 8.1, but hopefully the results will help you.

[AnyOldName3]

Just FYI - I've been able to use blender in basic scenes (although one of them had hair) on an old dell celeron laptop with Intel GMA graphics. You could tell 3D view wasn't going at 60FPS, but it was completely useable seeing as you don't need the same responses as in a real time game. The only actual restriction is going to be how the CPU fairs when you're actually rendering things, but that's all CPU-side, not GPU-side until you get an nVidia chip which is faster than the CPU in Cycles.

[Link_to_the_past]

Intel HD 4400 is not much better than Intel HD 4000 , I say those two are similar in term of performance . I'm sure Intel HD 4000 will struggle in SMG even if you use 1xIR . My GT 540M barely cut it with 1xIR , Intel HD 4600 performance is quite close to my GPU

It wouldn't cover his battery expectations

It ? Those Lenovo laptops I linked in my last post have 5 hours battery life which is almost twice as much as his old laptop
If he use a specific software to limit i3 4000M 2400MHz to 900MHz or less . i3 power consumption will be similar to an ULV CPU power consumption , that should increase battery life (more than 6 hours)

Well according to tdp the 4200u is a 15 w cpu and 4000m is a 37 w cpu, therefore everything else being equal (battery), it should last a lot more by default. Buying something better only to handicap it doesn't seem like a very good solution imo, but it will give him a bit more freedom to manage his performance needs.