some questions before buying a new laptop

[GrimBear]

Hi all, I'm looking for a powerful gaming laptop to replace my 5 year old Lenovo y510p
I'm here to discuss on what kind of ram and what cpu I need and I'll make another post after this to compare the laptops I'm considering and/or get some recommendations on laptops.

 

my laptop's Specs
cpu: i7 4700MQ 2.4GHz
gpu: x2 geforce GT 755m (tho I never used sli because the game I play doesnt support it (Black Desert Online))
Ram: 16gb ddr3 2400mhz
I use an opolar fan to cool the laptop

 

• Here is a breakdown of my laptop and my activities, skip if you are not interested

with this laptop I haven't had many problems on running games (I always had to go for low graphics on newer games)
the only "unplayable" game I tried was Space Hulk: Deathwing.
and the most recent game that I'm playing is Black Desert Online on low settings and I wanna be able to play on remastered or ultra (ultra is claimed to be unplayable becasue of how high specs it requires)
I like to play multiple games at once (BDO has afk playing on the background) and some word or excel files (to make spreadsheets) as well.
I like watching youtube or a movie on gom on a second monitor while playing games. (some movies start to have low fps while I'm playing)
I do ocasional video editing maybe once a month or so.
due to the Black Desert Online having afk gameplay, I usually never turn off the laptop and keep it running at night as well (been doing this for longer than a year now and havent seen any problems caused by it)

 

I also watched many videos on YouTube and narroved down most of the questions I had.
I'm convinced 16gb ram is enough, but not sure what mhz I need.

Also I want a minimum 3ghz cpu but not sure if I require hyper threading (aka i7 vs i9)

 

I'd like to start streaming as well.
I dont know if I need ram or cpu power for streaming, should I go for 32gb ram?

 

sometimes I notice the excel slowing down/lagging when the BDO is running or windowed so I need to put BDO on background to be able to use excel. (is this casued by not enough cpu power or ram?)

 

Tldr: is 16gb ram enough for streaming while playing AAA games?
Do games benefit from hyper threading?

 

[TensorVortex]

16gb is enough for streaming and gaming. If you try to save a buck, 16 is fine, but since you are buying another laptop, it might be safe to have upgradability.

 

For laptop I would suggest look out and don't buy anything that's using optimus, which significantly limit the gpu.

 

For  streaming, current recommended way of transcoding is to use the new nvidia NVENC in the 20 series cards. I don't know if laptop 1660 have the newest transcoder, the desktop 1650 doesn't have the new Turing NVENC.

 

For CPU i think a 4 or 6 core should be fine for gaming, it's just the frequency of mobile parts could be very low, look out for that.

 

For GPU a 1660ti or 2060 nobile is a huge upgrade over your current laptop.

 

For the slowing down, since your BDO is running in window mode, it is still consuming CPU and GPU power. Your excel will run slow due to this.

Also you can use software to monitor your temperature to see if you are overheating or not.

 

some AAA nowadays optimize to up  to 8-12 cores, which would have some benefit when u have hyper threading, but i think having a higher freq is still more significant than having 2 more cores.

 

 

[GrimBear]

34 minutes ago, TensorVortex said:

16gb is enough for streaming and gaming. If you try to save a buck, 16 is fine, but since you are buying another laptop, it might be safe to have upgradability.

 

For laptop I would suggest look out and don't buy anything that's using optimus, which significantly limit the gpu.

 

For  streaming, current recommended way of transcoding is to use the new nvidia NVENC in the 20 series cards. I don't know if laptop 1660 have the newest transcoder, the desktop 1650 doesn't have the new Turing NVENC.

 

For CPU i think a 4 or 6 core should be fine for gaming, it's just the frequency of mobile parts could be very low, look out for that.

 

For GPU a 1660ti or 2060 nobile is a huge upgrade over your current laptop.

 

For the slowing down, since your BDO is running in window mode, it is still consuming CPU and GPU power. Your excel will run slow due to this.

Also you can use software to monitor your temperature to see if you are overheating or not.

 

some AAA nowadays optimize to up  to 8-12 cores, which would have some benefit when u have hyper threading, but i think having a higher freq is still more significant than having 2 more cores.

 

 

Thanks for the reply, maybe I didn't clearly state it but I'm not planning on using my laptop after buying a new laptop.

I'll probably but Alienware area 51m with rtx 2080 and i7 9700k

 With the fan my laptop doesn't go over 80C degrees

When bdo is fullscreens or minimized, Excel runs slow but when I put bdo on background(tray) the GPU usage drops down to 20% from 99%  

Does Excel use GPU?