Looking for a decent gaming laptop for £800

[joshparrish95]

As the title says, I'm looking for a decentish laptop for gaming, I travel a lot and I had to get rid of my rig (cries) I miss playing games and my budget is around £800 (£850 max) so I was wondering if you guys could help me find the best laptop for the price.

Any help would be appreciated!

Josh

 

[JackNaylorPE]

Have one custom built to your specifications

http://www.pcspecialist.co.uk/laptops/clevo-laptops/40/

Never heard of Clevo you say ? Well just about any "recognized brand" you could name doesn't actually make a laptop

The vast majority of laptops on the market (94% in 2011) are manufactured by a small handful of Taiwan-based Original Design Manufacturers (ODM), although their production bases are located mostly in mainland China. Major relationships include:

Quanta sells to (among others) HP, Lenovo, Apple, Acer, Toshiba, Dell, Sony, Fujitsu and NEC
Compal sells to (among others) Acer, Dell, Toshiba, Lenovo and HP/Compaq
Wistron (former manufacturing & design division of Acer) sells to Dell, Acer, Lenovo and HP
Inventec sells to Toshiba, HP, Dell and Lenovo
Pegatron sells to Asus, Toshiba, Apple, Dell and Acer
Foxconn sells to Asus, Dell, HP and Apple
Flextronics (former Arima Computer Corporation notebook division) sells to HP
Clevo sells to boutique distributors like FalconNorthwest, VoodooPC, WidowPC and under their retail arm Sager and, back in the day, Alienware (before dell purchase)

Buying direct from Clevo distributor will save you 25-30% off buying the same thing from the boutique sellers.... there's a significant change in performance £50 either side if ya budget

£750 is 960M territory
£900 is 970M territory

 

[joshparrish95]

Have one custom built to your specifications

http://www.pcspecialist.co.uk/laptops/clevo-laptops/40/

Never heard of Clevo you say ? Well just about any "recognized brand" you could name doesn't actually make a laptop

The vast majority of laptops on the market (94% in 2011) are manufactured by a small handful of Taiwan-based Original Design Manufacturers (ODM), although their production bases are located mostly in mainland China. Major relationships include:

Quanta sells to (among others) HP, Lenovo, Apple, Acer, Toshiba, Dell, Sony, Fujitsu and NEC
Compal sells to (among others) Acer, Dell, Toshiba, Lenovo and HP/Compaq
Wistron (former manufacturing & design division of Acer) sells to Dell, Acer, Lenovo and HP
Inventec sells to Toshiba, HP, Dell and Lenovo
Pegatron sells to Asus, Toshiba, Apple, Dell and Acer
Foxconn sells to Asus, Dell, HP and Apple
Flextronics (former Arima Computer Corporation notebook division) sells to HP
Clevo sells to boutique distributors like FalconNorthwest, VoodooPC, WidowPC and under their retail arm Sager and, back in the day, Alienware (before dell purchase)

Buying direct from Clevo distributor will save you 25-30% off buying the same thing from the boutique sellers.... there's a significant change in performance £50 either side if ya budget

£750 is 960M territory
£900 is 970M territory

I see, it's worth looking into, however, do you have any opinions on prebuilt branded such as MSi or ASUS ROG? I've even seen a Lenovo with quite a high spec

update: I configured a Laptop through the site you showed me, the only thing that throws me off is the build time + delivery time, I need a laptop quite soon and I don't fancy paying to speed up the build, so far I've looked at this MSI GP72 2QE Leopard Pro is there any other laptops that you would recommend at a similar price that will offer better performance or the same? I quite like the design but I'm open to opinions, a bit of help would probably be the games I play: Borderlands 1, 2 and PS, League of Legends, War Thunder, Civ V, SWTOR and a few others but that's generally it

 

[JackNaylorPE]

MSI makes theirs, Asus does not. So MSI is like Clevo in the respect that there's no middle man which I like. I am also a bit concerned about yet another Pagatron / Asus link..... Asus created the AsRock brand so it could compete in the low budget market, then Asrock was spun off, is now owned by Pegatron and we have AsRock;s parent company supplying Asus w/ Asus branded laptops and Pegatron supplying warranty replacements for Asus premium high end workstations boards.

Well that's just one site, being US based, I m not up on who the major Clevo / Sager suppliers are over there. If you order a stock configuration it will obviously come faster than a customized one.... usually takes a week for me (shipped 3,000 miles).

The 950M om that GP72 tho is a significant step down even from the 960M. Among all available single GPU, SLI and CF configurations, the 3 GPUs mentioned rank as follows:

http://www.notebookcheck.net/Mobile-Graphics-Cards-Benchmark-List.844.0.html
970m - 19th place
960m - 57th place
950m - 70th place

Id try real hard ti find one w/ the 9760 that you could squeeze into your budget. The MSI models I saw w/ 970M started at £1150 ...the Clevos at £900