Buy laptop or wait

[Bertik23]

I know, I know. If you need the computer buy it. But.. do I need it?

I'm going to uni in september, my current laptop won't do. It strugless when installing larger packages from AUR (it freezes and nothing, but a restart helps). So a need another one. I've been looking at some used Thinkpads, but the local market with used electronics is really bad. So I'll have to get a new one. One of my relatives got a new laptop and I got their old one. And I was thinking of buying a new battery for it. And wait for Ryzen 7000 to arrive later this year.

The laptop I got is a 2015 Lenovo G50-45 with AMD QC-4000 CPU and two GPUs? AMD Radeon HD 8550M / R3 M230 and AMD Radeon HD 8280 / R3 Series, 8GB of RAM and a 1TB HDD. My budget to buy a new one would be about 24 000 CZK (~1000 €). I'm not sure, it has the performance I'll need. The RAM and GPU should be fine, but it strugeled a lot when running Windows and streaming movies. And I'm going to study Informatics, so I'll need it to compile C programs. And I'll also use it for other stuff.

[Cyber Raven]

I'm not sure about how that laptop will do with your workload, but if you're wanting to try it, make sure you upgrade the Hard Drive to an SSD as well. I was able to get my Lenovo b50-10, which before was experiencing similar problems to yours, running smoothly, at least well enough to get decent performance programming with the pygame library for python, just by doing that (and going to 8GB RAM, but you already have that). 

 

Comparing CPUs between the two, mine is significantly faster clockspeed, but it would do no harm to try, and the upgrades would make it a much more pleasant experience for any parent/sibling that you could pass it on to, even if it's not fast enough for your needs.

[killswitch6000]

On 6/30/2022 at 6:10 PM, Bertik23 said:

I'm going to study Informatics, so I'll need it to compile C programs

I think u will need to look at a 12th gen intel laptop, one with an i7 or i5 CPU and the GPU should be an after thought (rtx 3050 mostly) if ur getting a new laptop. Between 12th and 13th gen laptop CPU's i dont think that there is gonna be a really big single core performance difference which is what u should be looking at for compiling code and the max that AMD is gonna do is match the single core of 12th gen with their 7000 series. So, idt its gonna make a difference if u wait or not. 

[Bertik23]

I did a benchmark with compiling a rust project of mine and the results are these:

My desktop with a i3 9100F, running Windows and a Youtube video in the background - 3 minutes 2 seconds.

The laptop running Arch, Awesome WM and Firefox with one new tab open - 7 minutes 5 seconds.

 

Also, while trying to setup the benchmark I encountered a few issues, the laptop is usable, but the experience is not great.

[powertoys]

If your budget is low, have you considered swapping the boot drive for a SSD? That HDD is by far the biggest bottleneck on your laptop.