Well, my laptop/primary computer died due to a dead battery and I am looking for a new one. Right now I am looking at getting a lenovo y580 with the 500GB 7200 rpm hard drive and the 1080p screen. The other option I am looking at is the lenevo t430 with a dedicated gpu, the screen upgrade and a wireless upgrade. I am open to other suggestions that are not hp or sony laptops, have a decent keyboard and a screen at least a resolution of 1600x900 that is not a 17'. I would like to play some more recent games and clockwork empires but all I want setting wise on the games is 720p, graphic settings to low and 30 fps. Any ideas.
One thing to keep in mind is to get an LED backlit screen. Not only for the power savings, but laptops are much more likely than a desktop/tower PC to ever fall, and LEDs are all but impervious to damage from this, while florescent tubes that are the backlights of every other type of LCD display can and do break. Also, I thought I had misspelled florescent, so I looked it up. It contains mercury. That alone is good reason to avoid them. If you do not always need massive amounts of space, I suggest getting a laptop with a small SSD. Why? Because it is not fragile. (Same exact reason I suggested the LED backlit LCD display.) An added benefit is that it will be several times as fast or more. But I know the SSD is a luxury item. So your call. If IBM has a reasonable policy and will let you swap out the hard drive, you can buy an SSD and just plug it right in. For gaming, it is a whole different thing. You can probably leave all graphical settings on medium/normal and just disable Antialiasing to more than quadruple the framerate with ease. The only case where this will be evident are those pitiful games where they are trying to pull a fast one for the GPU makers by having shitty textures like chain-link fences and such that this would help with. Otherwise, *I* cannot tell a difference. The big problem with running at a non-native resolution is that most games try to fit to your screen. I honestly do not know if the game engine decides to do this, or if the GPU and/or drivers for the GPU does this. The problem is the same either way. You run at a different resolution, and the GPU/game engine has to do extra work to stretch it/shrink it to fit. And it will always look far worse like this. You would be better off with lower framerate and even skipped frames than stretching/shrinking. I will look up the Lenova line and others and reply back with what I think is best. But the obvious question is how much are you willing to spend? (I know that you, like almost if not every other Human on Earth wants to spend as little as possible, but I am asking what your limit is and how big of a difference would an option have to be to make you change your limit?)
Note that the Lenova 580Y has a 660M GPU and it is *NOTHING* like the 660 non-mobile GPU. I can illustrate: The short version is that the 660M uses a third the power. But for that it does 641 GFLOPs verses the 660 non-mobile doing 2108 GFLOPs. So sadly it looks like they should have named it anything else rather than lead many to likely believe it is comparable. Interesting to note that my Radeon 5850 does 2088 GFLOPs. I bought it almost three years ago. But you already said you are not interested in playing high detail settings in the games you play. Cool. Moving on. (More posts will follow.) *Edit* Here is the Wikipedia link to the articles I used to get these images. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Nvidia_graphics_processing_units https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_AMD_graphics_processing_units And here is one you probably have zero interest in. Where I looked up florescent to verify the spelling, and discovered they are made with Mercury. (You would think I should damned well know that.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluorescent_lamp
Also note that if you think of downgrading, the G780 has a 630M GPU, and thus does just under half the GFLOPs. Sadly, I examined the options on Newegg, and I think your selection of a 580Y is the best currently available for the price. Too many systems use that joke of a GPU that Intel calls the HD 2k/3k. It has it's purposes, but gaming is not one of them.
One, I knew that the 660m is nothing like the desktop version. Two, I have a soft limit of around $1000 $1200. My main issue with the G780 is that I don't want a laptop that big to be honest. The big thing on the lenovo brand is that they make two main lines of laptops the thinkpad line and the ideapad line. The thinkpad line was originally made by IBM and is a high class business laptop. They are made for ease of service, portability and surviablity over raw power. The ideapad line is lenovo's consumer line. Build quality is to be expected from a consumer line but I've hear things like boatware tend to be less and keyboard quality tends to be better. Here is a graphic with a bit of hyperbole and slightly hard to read that explains it better
