Hi, All!
I'm planning to buy a gaming laptop soon. My budget is $2k (before tax). The titles I play are as follows:
DOTA 2
Witcher 3
Guild Wars 2
Cities: Skylines
Overwatch
Rust
Civ 6
...and a LOT of old RTSs. I also do mild content creation.
The following things are important for me to have:
-some sort of i7. I'm not against a dual-core i7-7500U if everything else is amazing
-16gb of RAM
-some sort of pcie SSD
-at least 256gb storage (I really don't need more than 512 tops, though)
-dedicated graphics (ideally at least a 970M, and pascal GPUs would be nice)
-premium, aluminum construction (ideally a unibody)******** very important to me
-either a 13.9'', 14'', 15'', or 15.6'' display
-enough I/O for mouse, wireless headset, and one or two other peripherals.
-ethernet would be nice, but not absolutely necessary
-thin, portable form factor
-keyboard with good tactile feedback and decent key travel.
The following things are less important to me:
-graphics settings (I'm happy to crank down to high graphics settings instead of ultra for thermal reasons, but would generally prefer to stay away from min graphical settings)
-resolution (1080p, 1440p, and 3200x1800 are all fine by me, but 4k seems overkill on such a small screen)
-touchscreen (neat, but not super useful to me)
-trackpad (nice to have a good one, but i'll be using a mouse 70%+ of the time)
Thoughts?