Most bang-for-your-buck-laptop on the current market?

[gigabyter]

Which laptop currently on the market should be considered most bang for your buck in terms of general versatility no matter if you're a gamer or a graphic designer or whatever you need a new laptop for?

It doesn't matter if it's a $700 laptop with an i5 and an RTX 3050 or a $1700 laptop with an i9 and an RTX 4070, as long as you get the very most you can for the amount of money you spend.

[Levent]

There is not a single device that will suit everything. For me M1 MBA/MBP offers tremendous value.

[8tg]

Just now, Levent said:

There is not a single device that will suit everything

This

and then additionally the best value laptop isn’t always the most capable for modern tasks, it’s just the most capable in general relative to the money spent

 

A thinkpad P50 is a skylake Xeon and Maxwell Quadro, supporting multiple nvme ssds, a 1080p or 4k display, a built in color calibrator and up to 64gb of ecc ddr4. And they’re dirt cheap because they’re mobile workstations. It’s about the best performance and capability you can get for like $300-500 depending on spec.

But it’s still a skylake Xeon and at best a GPU equivalent to a GTX 970m, it’s not going to be up to AAA games or super fast in professional workloads compared to modern options. It’s just very economical if you only have a little bit of money.

[filpo]

4 minutes ago, gigabyter said:

Which laptop currently on the market should be considered most bang for your buck in terms of general versatility no matter if you're a gamer or a graphic designer or whatever you need a new laptop for?

we can supply different budgets

$1000 - MSI Bravo 15 C7VFKP Gaming Laptop AMD Ryzen 9 7940HS 4.00 GHz 15.6" Windows 11 Home 64-bit - Newegg.com

$1500 - Acer Nitro 16 Gaming Laptop, 16" WQXGA IPS 165Hz Display, AMD 8-Core Ryzen 7 7735HS (Beat i9-11980HK), GeForce RTX 4070 140W, 32GB DDR5, 2TB PCIe 4.0, VR Ready, 4-Zone RGB Keyboard, WiFi6, Win 11 Pro - Newegg.com

$2000 - HP OMEN 16 Gaming Laptop 16.1" 165 Hz FHD IPS Display (8-Core AMD Ryzen 9 7940HS 4.0GHz, 64GB DDR5 , 2TB PCIe SSD, GeForce RTX 4070 8GB, (4-Zone) RGB KYB, Wifi, Bluetooth, Win 11 Home) - Newegg.com

MSI Katana 15 Gaming Laptop, 15.6" 144Hz IPS Display, Intel Core i7-12650H(10 core), NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070, 64GB DDR5 RAM, 4TB SSD, Wi-Fi 6, Bluetooth, 4-Zone RGB Backlight Keyboard, Windows 11 Home - Newegg.com

[BlueChinchillaEatingDorito]

If you're doing graphic design, you'll also need to factor in the display quality. Gaming laptops have pretty horrid colours in the chase of higher fresh rates. Whereas MacBooks and workstation laptops like the HP ZBook Studio have some of the most accurate laptop displays on the market. 

[DrMacintosh]

A MacBook will give you the best battery life, screens, and speakers. But the moment you need to run Windows or want to play Windows only video games, they start to fall apart.

[Mud23609]

The best value laptop will be a rolling target based on what sales you can find, your budget, and your personal use case. I'm typing this on an HP Envy 16. Not because I am a huge HP fan, but because Best Buy had them on sale with an i9 13900h and a 4060 for $1049 plus tax the day I walked in the door looking for a laptop because my last one suddenly died. A couple of 32-gig sticks of ram from Crucial later and I now have a pretty beefy laptop at around 1300 bucks all in.

 

Another way to look at things is the average cost of owning laptops for ten years. If that is the way you want to look at it something like the framework laptops look good. 

 

What is a great value for one person might also be nearly worthless to someone else. I'll use my use case as an example. I need a laptop that can work efficiently in Davinci Resolve and the Adobe Suite. So while I like the Framework 13 it would be a terrible choice for me. On the other hand, if I was just using a laptop for light web browsing something like my Envy, even on sale would be a terrible value.

 

That being said, I am looking hard at the Framework 16. After the first production batch is in the hands of users if things are looking good I will very likely order one. Sure there are plenty of laptops available that perform just as well at lower price points, but none of them are as upgradeable or repairable and I find that valuable.

[RabbidEwok]

17 hours ago, DrMacintosh said:

A MacBook will give you the best battery life, screens, and speakers. But the moment you need to run Windows or want to play Windows only video games, they start to fall apart.

You can run windows through parallels on a Mac. 

[filpo]

32 minutes ago, RabbidEwok said:

You can run windows through parallels on a Mac. 

not that great though. And games won't be great either

[RabbidEwok]

47 minutes ago, filpo said:

not that great though. And games won't be great either

It’s quite literally the best windows for ARM experience available. When out through a translation layer and a VM it’s still faster than the best Qualcomm chip by a mile 

[filpo]

Just now, RabbidEwok said:

the best windows for ARM experience

Apple is like the only people who use ARM in their laptops apart from Microsoft (but theirs is going horribly)

 

It'll run better on a native windows. Maybe not more power efficient but definitely better

[RabbidEwok]

1 minute ago, filpo said:

Apple is like the only people who use ARM in their laptops apart from Microsoft (but theirs is going horribly)

 

It'll run better on a native windows. Maybe not more power efficient but definitely better

Depends on the hardware. Would like to see an M3 vs a similar wattage CPU 

[filpo]

3 minutes ago, RabbidEwok said:

Depends on the hardware. Would like to see an M3 vs a similar wattage CPU 

m3 vs the 7730u they get very nearly the same cinebench r23 score in multi core (10365 vs 10770)

In passmark MC they're 8 points from each other (negligible)

the m3 does have a noticeably better igpu but it's restricted by it's own company on it's capability to play games

[RabbidEwok]

31 minutes ago, filpo said:

m3 vs the 7730u they get very nearly the same cinebench r23 score in multi core (10365 vs 10770)

In passmark MC they're 8 points from each other (negligible)

the m3 does have a noticeably better igpu but it's restricted by it's own company on it's capability to play games

It also has 16 threads and 8 full cores vs the the M3s 4+4 big little design. The 7730U gets clowned on in ST

[filpo]

3 minutes ago, RabbidEwok said:

The 7730U gets clowned on in ST

most apps are optimized to work with multiple cores

 

Also games are some of the only apps which can focus on single cores and are single threaded and since the m3 can't game very well because of it's optimization, there's not much to it if it's better at ST

[RabbidEwok]

4 hours ago, filpo said:

most apps are optimized to work with multiple cores

 

Also games are some of the only apps which can focus on single cores and are single threaded and since the m3 can't game very well because of it's optimization, there's not much to it if it's better at ST

No they’re not? The majority of applications are lightly threaded. 

[filpo]

Just now, RabbidEwok said:

No they’re not?

modern cpus have more cores, so modern apps are more optimized for those cores. And I'm not talking about apple

 

3 minutes ago, RabbidEwok said:

The majority of applications are lightly threaded. 

for windows or apple? and by lightly threaded do you mean single threaded?

[RabbidEwok]

27 minutes ago, filpo said:

modern cpus have more cores, so modern apps are more optimized for those cores. And I'm not talking about apple

That’s… not how it works. 

27 minutes ago, filpo said:

 

for windows or apple? and by lightly threaded do you mean single threaded?

Literally everything. You don’t need to light up a CPU on all cores to launch a browser. Some applications used multiple cores, most don’t and a single powerful core for the task is better than multiple weaker ones.