Question Need help deciding which laptop to buy

[dumbleburn]

1. What is your budget? 400 ~ 500 USD

2. What is the size of the notebook that you are considering? Any size.

3. What screen resolution do you want? 1366 x 768 or above.

4. Do you need a portable or desktop replacement laptop? Portable.

5. How much battery life do you need? Enough to get me through college classes.

6. Do you want to play games with your laptop? If so then please list the games that you want to with the settings that you want for these games. (Low,Medium or High)? With this budget I'm assuming not many games can run smoothly, but CSGO and Rocket League are probably games that can run easily on almost any laptops this price range.

7. What other tasks do you want to do with your laptop? (Photo/Video editing, Etc.) Engineering softwares like AutoCAD and so on.

8. How much storage (Hard Drive capacity) do you need? 1TB if HDD, 250gb or above if SSD (would rather have SSD).

9. If you are considering specific sites to buy from, please post their links: Not from the US, so this would be irrelevant (maybe Amazon would have the same products?)

10. How long do you want to keep your laptop? 3-4 years.

11. What kind of Optical drive do you need? DVD ROM/Writer,Bluray ROM/Writer,Etc ? None.

12. Please tell us about the brands that you prefer to buy from them and the brands that you don't like and explain the reasons. I've been looking at Dell, Samsung and Lenovo.

13. What country do you live in? Brazil.

14. Please tell us any additional information if needed: I know nothing about laptop GPUs.

 

[siaan312]

For 400-500USD, I would suggest getting a new either AMD 4000/5000, or Intel 11th gen.
Probably of the ryzen 5 or i5 veraities, since they have solid Igpus that you can play games like csgo and rocket league on pretty smoothly.

As for specific laptops to recommend, just search a laptop with these specs:

Ryzen 5 (4000/5000 series! not 3000.) or Intel i5 (11XXX. needs to be 11th because those have the new and improved Igpus.)
Atleast 8 or 16 gigs of ram, though 16 is probably a lot to ask at this price range.
The storage you need.
Any modern screen would be atleast passable, so shouldn't look too much into that.
A minimum of 45~ watt hour battery. Anything lower will not get you through the day on moderate, though If you can charge on campus atleast once a day for a few minutes, or you don't need to use it for more than a few hours a day at a time it should be fine even if it's a little lower. Dimming the screen would also help alot.
Since you are looking for bang for the buck, I would suggest not looking at brands.
You should perfer a faster laptop to a nicely branded laptop. I would imagine what you would find is a Lenovo of some sorts anyways though.

Look for these on any laptop and check if they fit in your budget.

 

[dumbleburn]

Are latops with Ryzen 5 5000 series or 11th gen Intel relatively new? Because I really can't seem to find them. Closest I got was a 10th gen i5 from Samsung. I can only find Ryzens up to 3500U too. Also, between a Ryzen 3500U and an i5-9300HF, which one would be better?

 

[dumbleburn]

Okay, I actually found an 11th gen i5. Right now, I'm in between this two:

1. Asus

• Ryzen 5 3500U
• GTX 1050 4GB
• 8GB RAM
• 4480 mAh battery (3 cells)
• 1 TB HDD
• Full HD screen

2. Dell

• i5-1135G7
• Intel Iris Xe integrated GPU
• 2 x 4GB DDR4
• 42 Wh
• 256 GB SSD
• 1366 x 768 screen

Which one of these would you say it's best? They're aprox the same price.

EDIT: The Asus one doesn't have additional storage room and has an on-board GPU which takes 2 GB of RAM at all times, from what I've gathered.