Need techy advise

Planning to buy a gaming laptop under $500 price which i can play aion on an average playing speed. Found this one https://www.amazon.com/HP-Notebook-...0f-20&linkId=331a8304e10430f36b4a7a0b3ee78353 and i think this is good, but i don't know about you guys. I really don't know much about these things so I wanna hear your comments, or if you know something better to suggest, let me know. Thanks

 

Generally I would recommend staying away from integrated graphics cards. This 1 in particular is really terrible:
http://www.notebookcheck.net/Intel-HD-Graphics-520.149940.0.html
Scroll down and you will see FPS examples for different games. The right side column ranks graphics cards by performance so when you look for laptops you can refer to it and see FPS examples for each.

You can also refer to this table (desktop cards I know, but mobile ones follow similar numbering and performance)
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gpu-hierarchy,4388.html
It shows side by side comparison of equivalents between Nvidia, AMD and Intel graphics. Yours would fit below GTX 260 which is an 8 generations old Nvidia card.

I would also suggest whenever possible to not have your OS on a HDD as it gets really slow over time and fragments. If you can't afford to have a small SSD as OS drive, at least go for one of the hybrid drives (SSHD). These show one logical drive, but in reality there is like 8-16gb of fast storage space where the system automatically moves most used files (so overall your OS runs faster and feels smoother).

Edit: looked into it some more, there really are not that many alternatives in that price range and yours actually isn't that bad compared to the others they offer. The CPU is definitely good and the integrated card actually outperforms some of the dedicated. Seems like on laptops specifically, this integrated model is quite competitive. Amazon does have a return policy so it might be worth a try to test it out.

 

It's not really good sir, since it's using processor gpu and 1080p resolution with it really sux especially in gaming, it's really slow you can't even get 20fps on all low settings on gamezaion, plus a 5400 rpm hard drive is really bad. It loads so slow. You better get an SSD becoz aion loads resources everytime you move or teleport to other map and it needs fast storage to load quickly. I'd suggest just buy a pc with 500$ build on pc you can really have decent specs. Real gaming laptops are really pricey especially brandnew so i wouldn't suggest it with a 500$ budget, but if you really want laptop just buy a used one, much cheaper and you get save extra bucks.

 

I had a laptop that I paid around $1,000 and it worked pretty well on games. You might just have to put everything on low and not get any HD effects.

 

Thanks for all the info smartik. The laptop though is to be given to me by my sister as a gift so i only gave her the specs i need cause i don't want to demand a bit expensive one. So i also searched myself a gaming laptop with the price range she can afford and guess what, she had already bought one with the specifics i had given (at least i3 processor, 8gb ram and 500 GB HDD), not the one above in the link.

Thanks for your advise however, i really don't need a pc where i can totally play aion cause our internet connection at home is so slow because 3 houses in 1 compound share the same internet. I only need to play aion at home in a laptop doing all the daily basic stuffs and other things which don't involve pvp, i'd prefer going to computer shops for pvp.

 

I can see that, but there are alot of good deals of 2nd hand gaming laptop out there with high end specs. Better check for it rather than buying a b.new low specs one. Just my advise .

 

For $500 or less you might want to go for a used one.

If you can add $150 you might be able to get an open box/refurbished one from newegg:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...2-_-VisNav-_-15.6-Inch&LeftPriceRange=500 700

If going for refurbished, make sure it's manufacturer's refurbished and not seller.
Also, SSD is a must, at least a small one for OS. The difference it makes is huge.

 

Yea SSD or at least SSHD definitely help with faster startup. My old laptop spends over 3 minutes booting up even on clean install now (took 5 minutes before reinstall) just because the hardware aged. Overall though faster disk does not contribute to FPS in any way, only map loading times. If he is on a budget, depends what he wants to prioritize. As for me, I just can't deal with a slow OS and long boot-up.

Edit: by the way, can you fix the stupid smiley conversion inside URLs whenever a post is edited or quoted?

 

i went directly from hdd to ssd.. never used SSHD, are they good?

yea, if can't go for a high capacity ssd because of the budget then at least do a small 64GB or 128GB one to have the OS there..

go complain to xenforo about that

 

nope, they are not that good.

 

They take a while before they get better. It is like having 1 logical drive (C: drive), but part of it consists of 8-16gb of flash memory (sort of like tiny SSD). The OS determines which files are used most frequently and puts them there for faster caching (this is the part that takes a while). Overall it is still not as good as a dedicated SSD, but performance wise it is at least halfway between SSD and HDD speeds.