laptop for college

Dell XPS 13 9380 13.3"

Intel Core i5-8265U Processor 1.6GHz; 8GB LPDDR3-2133 Onboard RAM; 256GB Solid State Drive; Intel UHD Graphics 620

Only worry is the Intel 620, also the $100 student discount helps.

 

intel HD is already mighty sufficient for adobe stuff including After Effects. Unless you want to do After Effects in real-time and full-resolution.

but at that price, doesn't its better to look for something else that have NVIDIA GPU? although i think it will be pretty hard get a laptop as nice as that dell XPS...

 

She's looking at a Lenova, I don't know which one yet but I'm gonna check them out. The school just lent her a lightscribe pen/notebook for the semester which I still don't know what it is but sounds cool, she just lined me about it all excited.

She LOVED her first day! SO FREAKING PROUD!!!

Also edited my previous post because the microcenter link wasn't working for me. It's definitely not decided on the XPS, but it's definitely not out of the question yet either.

Still got looking to do and some decisions to make, letting her focus on school for a few days though.

 

Oh, what are some decent laptops with good GPUs in them? Are there any with decent battery life?

 

Dell Inspiron 14 5482 Intel Core i7-8565U Processor 1.8GHz; NVIDIA GeForce MX130 2GB GDDR5; 16GB DDR4-2666 RAM; 512GB Solid State Drive

 

Not sure this is what you had in mind, but configurable HP Ryzen 7 processor and Nvidia GeForce GTX 1660Ti with Max-Q design graphics available in Sept. Price starts at $799.
https://hexus.net/tech/news/laptop/133886-hp-announces-first-amd-powered-pavilion-gaming-laptop/
https://www8.hp.com/us/en/gaming/laptops/pavilion-15.html

 

Let her see if she likes pen. The old one she had was probably too slow. I have an elite book and use the stylus regularly. I cannot imagine that she won't do so in graphics design. Also while a waccom tablet is cool they add more junk to carry. A single device that rotates 360 seems optimal to me unless you want to spend all the money for a surface book

 

Holy mother of gods is that a beautiful looking machine! Very grateful, will wait for the new fall line up.

Any other cool ones coming soon?

BTW- Is the GTX 1660Ti at all similar to the desktop one or is it just marketing?

 

Its max q. So it will run quieter, cooler, and slower than desktop part.

At least the previous max q moniker was like that

BTW how about razer laptops?

They re usually overpriced, but they look like a Normal laptop.

https://www.theverge.com/platform/a...led-4k-pro-laptop-gaming-specs-price-features

Or gigabyte Aero series https://www.gigabyte.com/Laptop/AERO-15-OLED--Intel-9th-Gen#kf that's usually cheaper

 

ROFL! Just checked out Razer's site and saw this:



I think she found her laptop, she's totally in love. ROFL!

 

$500 for pink?! You can probably buy a matte plastic overlay/screen protector for a glossy screen. 32 GB RAM strikes me as overkill and only worth it if nothing else is sacrificed. I gamedev and edit movies on an 8GB PC without ever coming close to saturating physical RAM, although the more RAM, the faster editing can be. I'd be interested to see what actual RAM usage by real people is actually like. Articles like this strike me as baloney. How is having ten tabs open good creative workflow when editing a video? If you are distracted by the content of 10 tabs, you aren't really concentrating on what you're making...

What are the main workloads you'll be doing? I'd look for a compromise that favours the particulars of that work. For anything study related, any i5 laptop with 8 GBs RAM and an SSD will be fine. Heck, my Surface Pro is fine for any amount of document creation for college work. Going towards particular workloads like art, see whether PhotoShop prefers RAM or CPU. Likewise with video, how much is caching going to really help versus having a faster CPU and lower res previews? By and large you are editing in a window so a small 720p preview video will be perfectly acceptable quality for making edits before building the final cut, so needing 32+ GBs to be able to cache 4K previews makes no sense unless you have a second dedicated monitor and going fine resolution floating placements and stuff.

 

On a sidenote, my wife was looking at a truly terriffiyingly cheap one at Best Buy earlier, so i found this on Amazon.

I know it sort of sucks, but the back comes off and it has room for 2 ram sticks and only has one 4gb in it. I could either just get another or mebbe go nuts. Also it has a free internal connection for an SATA HDD so I could toss a 1TB 7200rpm one in there and with the SSD should work out nice.

It's just for web cruising/watching viddies, not a workhorse. Also it's for around the house and not meant to go back and forth to work, thus the size.

Thoughts?

 

OMMFG! I am so proud and frankly amazed, did you see that monster Maddy found?!?



How can that be $890?!?

 

Weird it looks like the 13 inch Intel based Inspiron 7000 series laptops have pen support, but the Ryzen based ones don't.

Regards,
SB

 

For a 13.3" laptop it's relatively chunky/heavy - that's why the price is friendlier.

 

Thanks. Next dumb question, how come I can't find any information about this laptop in this configuration anywhere on the web except Amazon's site? Is my google-fu weak today or am I losing my touch?

 

That is certainly curious as all the other configurations are far more basic, as you'd expect for the price. eg. 8GBs RAM instead of 32. There's only one Inspiron listed at AMD as having a Ryzen processor whcih is reviewed here as 3/5 Stars

Even at Dell, the only >12GB systems are i7's and they haven't 32 GBs. I'm starting to think it's a wrongful listing. If you click the Dell seller name on that Amazon listing, you get a Dell branded shop front and this laptop is not listed - not even close. They have no Ryzen 7 model and their most expensive model is 8+3 GBs.

 

It's an unpossible laptop.

Ok, so hypothetically if I bought it with the 4-year total coverage guarantee would I get to bitch if it didn't live up to the stats? Where would that put me do you think?

Normally I wouldn't consider it, but Amazon is sort of sickly amazing with customer service. I'm honestly curious as to what they'd do.

 

You can buy it and if it's not exactly as described in the spec, return it for free. Wouldn't even need the guarantee as it's part of Amazon's selling guarantees. I also presume there's a basic 'not falsely represented' law in US commerce so you can't advertise a dog, deliver a cat, and refuse to pay a refund. In this case you are quite clearly buying a 32 GB RAM, Ryzen 7 laptop. If what's delivered isn't that, it isn't what you bought so you'd be entitled to a full are refund. And a grovelling apology!