New gaming/school work laptop

[GPUEnthusiast]

Helping my friend pick a new gaming/school work laptop and figured I'd ask the gents here in the laptop section.

Budget: ~900 dollars. Less is great, shouldn't be more than 925.

Form Factor: 17.3 or 15.1 inches

Resolution: 1600x900 or 1920x1080, if it's 1366x768 I'll really have to look at it close to decide

Purpose: Gaming and School Work (friend is in college so it must be quiet in lecture halls, therefor slim form factor is out)
Games he plays: League of Legends, Skyrim, Left 4 Dead 2, Dead Island Riptide, Call of Duty (older ones like MW2 and Black Ops), Heroes of the Storm.

Battery Life: When not gaming, the best battery life would be awesome, no specific, but at least above two and a half or three hours, anything higher would be awesome.

Extra software: None really, Microsoft Office is always cool, but most laptops in this price bracket come with it, or can be added in for a small fee.

Storage: SSD for boot would be awesome but not required, 1TB or 750GB would be the best for storage.

Retailers: Anywhere, Amazon, Newegg, in the US so retailers are plentiful.

Optical drive: Not required but would be nice

Brand preference: I am partial to HP and Dell, owning both an HP Folio 13-1020us, and a Gen 1 Dell XPS 13 Linux Dev Edition. He has no brand preference, but he is sufficiently hard to impress coming from a Toshiba Satellite S75-A7221, which had an i7-4710, 16GB of RAM, 1600x900 display and awesome speakers. The hardest part is he got that laptop for an abnormally low price on Black Friday a couple years ago, ~600 dollars.

Other info: Cannot be refurbished, even if he would tolerate it, I refuse to have refurbished computers. I would take a new 17 inch HP with HD 4600 and an i7 over a refurbished GT80 Titan for the same price.

Must include OS. (Windows 7 is great, but his Satellite has 8, so either 7, 8, or 8.1 would work

Needs to have something better than the Intel HD 4600 graphics from his Satellite. Whether this is going to be Iris Pro, or a GTX 850M is fine, as long as the budget is right. I know HD 4600 can actually do some good stuff on desktop, especially if you have adequate cooling and overclock it, but that's not a mobile chip. His HD 4600 can barely run BF3 and Skyrim, but can sort of run L4D2 and of course it can run League.

Other features: Backlit keyboard, lighter weight, but not thin (see note above about being quiet), decent speakers, screen brightness keys, etc. These are all extras that as a student he would appreciate. Another thing that would be nice is durability, I will persuade him to buy a soft CaseLogic carrying bag, but this thing can't burst into flames if he has to throw it in his backpack with a textbook once or twice.

 

[RedJaron]

Your biggest challenge on this will be weight. Remember, it's not just the laptop's weight. A lot of gaming specific laptops have massive power bricks too. And that doesn't count any spare batteries you may want to haul with you. I had an 8lbs 15.4" laptop in college and I definitely would not go any bigger. I probably walked a minimum of two miles / day on campus, sometimes three, and hauling a heavy bag around takes its toll on you.

If it was me, I wouldn't want a gaming-specific laptop due to their size and poorer battery life. You probably want a good balanced laptop that has gaming potential and is more portable. I can't give you specific model numbers, I'd just say go to Dell or Lenovo and look at their models and see if you can customize one of them with a modest dGPU.

 

[GPUEnthusiast]

Yeah, that's what I'm thinking. Purpose built gaming isn't in his price range either, but yeah, a nice multi purpose laptop with dedicated GPU is really what he's looking for. He doesn't play anything that demanding, but HD 4600 simply doesn't cut it.

Anything by HP or Dell would be great. I found it really cool how much Dell has turned around recently with Michael Dell taking control of the company again by buying back a bunch of stock.

I'll wait for somebody to list some specific models for me to look into. I would love anything from MSI, but it's just too gamer oriented for him, with the red backlit keys and such. Same with Asus RoG, not even in our price range anyway.

What I guess I want people to take from this, is a laptop with better graphics than the HD 4600 on the i7-4710HQ. CPU power can be less, it can be an i5 for all I care, the i7 is overkill for most stuff, even the mobile chips unless you are running tons of stuff like photoshop and professional programs. This laptop will be used for school work, web browsing, typing papers, entertainment like YouTube and Netflix, and gaming. Out of all of these things, the most of the budget will be taken up by gaming, because I can get a decent school work notebook for like 500 bucks with an AMD A6 and 8GB of RAM, but can't game worth crap.

 

[velo3100]

What about barebone laptops? They have a generic look and aren't too gamer oriented and have good maintainability.

 

[GPUEnthusiast]

We ended up deciding on the HP Envy 17. The new ones that say "Hewlett Packard" on the bottom bezel with the black brushed aluminum. The problem seemed to be that it was really hard to find any notebooks with dedicated GPUs for under 900-950. The ones that did were older MSI ones with like 500GB hard drive and a lower end Haswell i5, that or refurbished laptops which I can't stand because if something breaks in like three months down the line, you're SOL.

The HP Envy 17 with the i7-5500U, and Geforce 940M GPU with 2GB of GDDR5. It has a touch 1920x1080p display with 2x2 802.11 b/g/n/ac and bluetooth, 8GB of DDR3, Windows 8.1, 1TB hard drive, nice backlit keyboard and a very sexy black brushed aluminum outside. All in all, it's about 970 bucks. To get this version though, you have to order it from them because I can't find it in stores. It takes them about two weeks to set it up (it will ship on the 23rd, and we ordered it yesterday), and takes 3-5 days to ship.

 

[RedJaron]

Sounds about right. Getting a decent dGPU under $1000 in a laptop is hard because they're usually not offered in the lower spec models. You have to get the better CPU ( $100 - $200 extra, ) and higher resolution monitor ( another $100 ) before the OEM will let you opt for one. The 15" I got in college was about $2400 ( ten years ago ). Second gen Pentium M, 1680 x 1050, 2GB RAM, Radeon mobile 9600, ahh, it was a workhorse. I found that it's best to shop online to look at models and options, but then call in and buy it over the phone. The price on a website is hard-coded with price, but a human wants to make a sale for the commission. I knew I was going to get the dGPU, but by acting like I was waffling over the price, the sales guy knocked $100 off.