[SOLVED] Laptop for general use and gaming

[clouded2]

I have a friend who is trying to decide between the following 3 laptops:

Dell Inspiron 14 7490
Dell Latitude 7400
Lenovo x1 carbon (+ ext. GPU?)

The 3 things that matter to him are:
-- being light and therefore portable
-- reasonable build quality
-- being able to play non-AAA games at low settings for the next 5 years

He won't be playing games while travelling so an external GPU is an option, if those are reasonably priced(?) From a little Googling it seems like the x1 carbon with an external GPU might be the best of all worlds, but I know very little about laptops... we'd be grateful for any advice.

thanks in advance,
M

 

[cdrkf]

I have a friend who is trying to decide between the following 3 laptops:

Dell Inspiron 14 7490
Dell Latitude 7400
Lenovo x1 carbon (+ ext. GPU?)

The 3 things that matter to him are:
-- being light and therefore portable
-- reasonable build quality
-- being able to play non-AAA games at low settings for the next 5 years

He won't be playing games while travelling so an external GPU is an option, if those are reasonably priced(?) From a little Googling it seems like the x1 carbon with an external GPU might be the best of all worlds, but I know very little about laptops... we'd be grateful for any advice.

thanks in advance,
M

I don't know as I'd recommend going for the external gpu. A decent enclosure costs over £200 and that is before you pay for the gpu to go in it so it's not a very cost effective solution.

I would suggest looking for a laptop that includes at least a basic discrete gpu, doesn't need to be very powerful if only looking to play light games. Something with a Geforce MX 150 or MX 250 would probably fit- Razer do a range of thin and light laptop that include those for example.

 

[hang-the-9]

I'd remove the Dell's from the list, last 3-4 generations of them have had constant issues with batteries or motherboards or ports breaking. I have seen a bunch of new 7480 and 7490 laptops with bad batteries right from the box, and early failures within months of use. And the 7470 is about a 100% battery failure rate.

X1 are pretty good if he likes that.