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Good budget workhorse laptop?

DeathofsageDeathofsage Member UncommonPosts: 1,102
in Hardware

Hoping for some advice here.

I'm trying to buy a workhorse laptop for <$400 and have been scouring the net for options.

The only major brands I'm steering clear of is Toshiba and VAIO (I've had $800-1000 laptops of those brands and been disgustingly disappointed).

I'm not against refurbished, I'm against refurbished without reasonable warranty and I'm against refurbished where the discount is marginal. I'm not hurt by the idea of a few scratches on my new toy but it always bothers me when I can't see an image of what I'm buying since refurb can be some pretty disgusting wear.

Primarily I do web coding and basic graphic design. I'm also a blender (3D modeling) hobbyist but accept that while I might be able to do some modeling, nice renders are probably not to be done on budget laptops.

I'm more comfortable in Windows 7 but have no problem with 8.

The best laptop I can find for the money is the Thinkpad 545g. Amazon has pretty stellar reviews for it, considering it's a budget laptop. Newegg reviews are not as kind but not bad. (Amazon is cheaper). The common opinion from the more negative reviews is that while Thinkpads are famous for good hardware, this one maybe not so much. That, and people are bothered by a lack of HDD activity indicator light.

Anything less than 4gb is probably a waste, and while laptops aren't great for future-proofing, upgradable to at least 8gb is desirable.

Spec'ing properly is a gateway drug.
12 Million People have been meter spammed in heroics.

Comments

  • OrgoneOrgone Member Posts: 90

    A couple of months ago, I bought an Asus X552C for my son.

    I5

    Geforce 710M

    750gb hd

    6gb ram

    dvd rewriter

    etc etc

    Windows 8 (ages to update to 8.1)

     

    He plays wildstar and elder scrolls online and some zombie nonsense on it.

    Four Hundred POUNDS , not dollars

     

    Ridiculously better performance than it appears

    Hope that helps in some way

  • Spankster77Spankster77 Member UncommonPosts: 487

    You really don't need anything fancy for web development and graphic design.  You can probably get away with an i3 with around 4 GBs of ram and still be ok for most tasks.  As far as blending goes you are probably not going to be able to do much with a < $400 machine as at that point the graphics card comes into play. 

     

    My girl got an i3 HP with 6 GB ram from Best Buy last black Friday for $350.  I would just say look for sales and check out places like Costco and Sams Club, you would be surprised what you can find at those places. 

  • DeathofsageDeathofsage Member UncommonPosts: 1,102

    The X552CL (I couldn't find X552C anywhere) is about twice the budget I have, but it does look like a really strong computer.

    I hadn't checked costco or sam's club before. Thanks for the tip.

    Spec'ing properly is a gateway drug.
    12 Million People have been meter spammed in heroics.

  • Siris23Siris23 Member UncommonPosts: 388

    £400 is ~700USD

     

    staying with your 400USD budget the thinkpad was the best that I found as well.

  • lugallugal Member UncommonPosts: 671
    OP, did you check Dell Outlet? That is Dell's site for selling used/refurbs equuipment. You might get lucky there.

    Roses are red
    Violets are blue
    The reviewer has a mishapen head
    Which means his opinion is skewed
    ...Aldous.MF'n.Huxley

  • QuizzicalQuizzical Member LegendaryPosts: 25,483

    Go a little over your stated budget and get this:

    http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834313719

    It's only $40 over budget, but will roughly double both your CPU and GPU performance as compared to what you were looking at.  To be fair, the doubled CPU performance is just four cores versus two, but the doubled GPU performance is real.

  • CleffyCleffy Member RarePosts: 6,413

    I found this:
    http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA29P1R65610

    $8 cheaper and comes with some accessories.

    I could not do better than Quizzical on this. Its tough because it has to run Blender.
    For Blender, I would look for lots of cores and has either a GCN based GPU or NVidia GPU. Preferably a NVidia GPU. That price range though restricted it to purely the AMD APUs.
     

  • RidelynnRidelynn Member EpicPosts: 7,383

    If lack of a HDD indicator is the worst thing they can pin on a laptop, that isn't bad.

  • iamgrootiamgroot Member Posts: 3
    Does anybody know if alienware laptops are still any good?  I bought one way back and it was a beast.

    yo

  • CleffyCleffy Member RarePosts: 6,413
    Alienware Laptops are Dell Laptops with a different paint job. However, Dell Laptops have always been adaquette.
  • QuizzicalQuizzical Member LegendaryPosts: 25,483
    Originally posted by iamgroot
    Does anybody know if alienware laptops are still any good?  I bought one way back and it was a beast.

    Most of the hardware in an Alienware laptop will be nice, albeit rather overpriced.  But the memory options are often wrong, and the storage options are absolutely ridiculous.  For example, if you want an SSD as your boot drive like any respectable system would have, to get that in a 17" laptop from Alienware, you absolutely have to get either a Radeon R9 290X or a GeForce GTX 880M as the video card.  That means you're paying over $2300, while other vendors will sell you a respectable 17" gaming laptop with an SSD boot drive for half that price.

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