Laptop For College

[RoundTabler]

Hey all,

I have been looking around for a good college laptop for a while, and I'm having trouble coming up with the right combo of battery life and gaming performance. I'm looking for a laptop with 5+ hours of battery life, 15" screen, <5ish lbs, decent gaming performance (older, casual games), and <$1200. Anyone have any suggestions on what might make a good laptop? Are there any laptops coming out soonish that I should wait for?

 

Thanks!

[Castdeath97]

The only laptops I was able to find were the alienware 15 and the ROG GL551, which sadly can only get around 4 and half hours of use. If you really need the battery life wait till quad core broadwell processors get to newer laptops.

[JefferyD90]

So right now I am really eyeballing this notebook myself. It looks kinda slick and has tons of functionability. I has plenty of horsepower to drive college use, but I don't know about how great it will serve gaming purposes. Battery life will be off the hook, and I think your overall experience will be fairly amazing. Plus with the extra money you could save you could probably get a nice gaming desktop set up, or buy tons of accessories (like a nice travel bag, additional charger so you're not forgetting one at home or at your dorm, really nice speakers to listen to in your room, so on)

http://store.hp.com/us/en/pdp/Laptops/hp-envy-x2---15-c001dx

[RoundTabler]

What do you guys think of the Lenovo Thinkpad 550 or E550? They look like pretty much what I want. On a side note, the touchscreen option on the 550 is $460 more - what do you actually use a touchscreen for on a laptop?

[kingkickolas]

Hey all,

I have been looking around for a good college laptop for a while, and I'm having trouble coming up with the right combo of battery life and gaming performance. I'm looking for a laptop with 5+ hours of battery life, 15" screen, <5ish lbs, decent gaming performance (older, casual games), and <$1200. Anyone have any suggestions on what might make a good laptop? Are there any laptops coming out soonish that I should wait for?

 

Thanks!

 

Have you looked at any Clevo-based laptops? (XoticPC is a re-seller has a good collection of the Clevo barebones chassis, built by Sager.)

Eurocom is another Clevo re-seller, and the Shark 4 seems to have what you're looking for. You might not get exactly the battery you want with moderate usage, but you get a lot of functionality at the price.

For under $1000 you get:

• 4720HQ,
• AH-IPS 15.6" 1080p screen,
• 960M GPU,
• tons of drive options, even an M.2 slot that supports M.2.

The build quality is also better than most laptops these days, and Eurocom's laptops stay pretty cool.

You might also find what you want on XoticPC, if you want.

[PaulKolby]

Hey all,

I have been looking around for a good college laptop for a while, and I'm having trouble coming up with the right combo of battery life and gaming performance. I'm looking for a laptop with 5+ hours of battery life, 15" screen, <5ish lbs, decent gaming performance (older, casual games), and <$1200. Anyone have any suggestions on what might make a good laptop? Are there any laptops coming out soonish that I should wait for?

 

Thanks!

http://www.amazon.com/MSI-GE62-APACHE-002-15-6-Inch-Gaming/dp/B00RVUMRKS/ref=sr_1_1?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1433607804&sr=1-1&keywords=965m

 

This is perfect

[RoundTabler]

Thanks for the suggestions! I'm leaning towards a Lenovo W550 Mobile Workstation, with an i7 5500U, Nvidia Quadro 620M, a 3k screen, and 10+ hours of battery life. The build quality and keyboard are supposed to be amazing. And all that for $1200-1300. The only thing is that Lenovo swaps the function and ctrl keys, which really bugs me. You're supposed to be able to change that in the bios though.