12"-15" "Capable" Laptop Recommendations

DebatED Nothing · July 9, 2016

I've become the poor unfortunate soul in my group of friends that is considered "in the know" about laptops and tech and stuff, so a friend has asked me for a laptop recommendation. His budget puts him below the kind of area I've looked in before so I'm kind of stumped at the moment and could do with some pointers as to what to recommend.

His budget is at most up to £700 but would like to spend less if possible. He would like the laptop to be no larger than a 15" screen, doesn't really care about how thin it is or how light it is, but wants it to be able to "run basic games like DOTA 2 for about 4 years while I'm at University". I imagine you can achieve that fairly easily at this budget comfortably, but what's the best deal I could get him for about £600-650?

Thanks in advance for any help you can provide.

don_svetlio · July 9, 2016

Dell Inspiron 7559 is the best he can afford. Anything lower and you'll be in a different, lower class with worse quality.

ARikozuM · July 9, 2016

Lenovo makes very inexpensive AMD laptops with an R5 (iGPU) that works very well at 1360x768 for around 300 USD. Just pop in a CD to SATA caddy and buy a 120GB SSD and for about 400 you can have a very good laptop for MOBA's. I would consider some of the Lenovo Flex series to be worthwhile as well. If he wants to do heavy gaming Dell has the Inspiron with a 960M that Linus did a review of.