I can't seem to find a laptop that combine good battery life, good graphics and a decent price...

[Raven A]

Back in 2010, I bought my first decent computer (I was 14 at the time), a laptop called Acer Aspire TimelineX 5820TG. It had an AMD Radeon 6550M and one of the newest i5's. I was able to play Skyrim on high with mods, and Crysis 3 on low settings. When switched to the on board Intel HD graphics, the laptop would last about 6-7 hours on a battery charge.

It was only about two years ago that the games got too intensive to play on low settings on this laptop (so last year I built a GTX 970 desktop pc). The amazing thing about this laptop, is that back then it cost me €650.

Now I'm going to university, and I need a new laptop. I've been browsing all over the internet for a laptop that I could buy that combines good graphics to be able to play modern games such as Battlefield 4 on max, a good batterylife of at least 6 hours (doesn't need to be powerful when on battery, it would just be for lectures), and a decent price tag of about €1100 (£950-1000) max.

I just can't seem to find anything. All that I've found are MSI/Lenovo laptops that sport a GTX 960M and even a 4 core i7 for around €900, however the battery life on those are 4 hours maximum, when not playing games. Even when I bump up the budget a bit, the battery life on semi-gaming laptops seem to be terrible.

The best thing I've found is an Alienware 13" laptop with a 960M and an i5 (€1270), which reportedly sports a 10 hour batterylife, but it's slightly out of my budget and (except that batterylife) hardware-wise not that impressive in that pricerange.

Now I'll be honest, I'm not that familiar with laptop GPU's, so I might be missing laptops thinking they have low-end hardware even though they're actually decent.


[TL;DR]
I would greatly appreciate it if this community could help me find a good laptop that has a good GPU (to play modern games on high), has a good batterylife (6h+) and a good pricetag (of up to around €1100).

Thanks!

 

[InvalidError]

You will have to compromise. Price, battery life and performance are the three main pillars of mobile balance. If you want more of one, you have to compromise on at least one of the other two. If you want more battery life without paying more, you have to give up some performance.

Your best bet for decent laptop gaming performance on a budget without compromising battery life would be to wait for Zen mobile APUs but those are still somewhere in the neighborhood of six months away.

 

[Raven A]

Yes I realise that. That's why I included the story about my previous laptop; to prove that 6 years ago it was possible to buy a laptop that fulfilled all 3 demands, for just €650. So I figured somewhere on the market there must still be something like that if I bump the budget up to around €1100

 

[InvalidError]

The PC and laptop is becoming increasingly bipolar: either cheap and under-powered or very expensive. Good options in-between are becoming increasingly uncommon. Cheap laptops have high volume sales which makes low-end laptops profitables, high-end laptops have wide margins which offset the costs of low volume manufacturing while the middleground is an ocean of compromises where neither volume nor wide margins are necessarily present.