Well I'm probably shooting blanks here but I think that with that sort of processor, the GPU would be bottlenecked. All laptops I've seen with a GTX 860M usually has top of the line i5 mobile processors or even i7's, like the top spec gigabyte laptops and macbook pros.
i'd say you should take a look on the gigabyte laptop website, they sell some really powerful laptops for great prices!
link
I'll keep the bottlenecking in mind. To what extent would I be bottlenecked, do you reckon? I'm not really looking for anything that would smash through games or anything, since for most of the demanding games I'm ever interested in I tend to just get on Xbox (which I know doesn't do them at their best quality, but the demanding games are often the expensive big titles which I get on xbox so my brothers and I can share).
I understand that bottlenecking will mean I don't get the most out of the GPU, but will it restrict me to the point that I can't play newer games on average settings, or not?
I'm not too fussed for playing the likes of Crysis 3 on top graphics.
My current desktop (which is a few years old) can play most games at medium-to-low settings with the following;
- AMD Athlon II X4 605e Processor 2.30 GHz
- 3 GB RAM
- NVIDIA GeForce GT 430
I'm pretty sure he wouldn't get what you suggested Darren considering that's almost twice the price of what he was looking at.
Yeah, thank you loads for searching for a laptop for me Darren, but that's a little bit over the top for price for me.
I only want to spend enough to get a quality laptop capable of Uni work while letting me have my guilty pleasure of being able to still play games.
I would go for a prebuilt by a larger company normally, like Toshiba, but I went shopping today and was disappointed by what I saw, and in the past my family have always had terrible luck with such laptops, particularly HP laptops, which I don't think we've had a single one that hasn't had it's battery and charger input break within a year.
And I think I might steer away from Gigabyte laptops. They look really nice and certainly powerful. But the one you shared was quite a price, and you linked it on Amazon.
I assume that Gigabyte isn't an online supplier, generally speaking. And If possible I'd prefer to buy from the company.
And the nearest shop selling to me is about 3 counties away.
But you do have a point, the pentium will likely bottleneck that GPU. I think you'll have to shoot for a more balanced configuration, Dooble. If there is an option to get a 4-core i5 or similar, with a lower-end GPU then I'd go for that instead.
Unfortunately I can't change the GPU on PCSpecialist for this particular laptop, so unless it's possible to get a better one and install it later (which I'm wary about because I know next to nothing for building/modifying desktops, and less for laptops. Plus I wouldn't really want to pay for the GPU that's in this laptop and then buy a new one on top of that).
Would it be a better match (albeit not necessarily perfect) if I were to replace the CPU with an
Intel Core i5 Dual Core Mobile Processor i5-4210m (2.60GHz) 3MB?
That's an increase of £76, from £603 (3560M 2MB) to £679.
Would that bridge the gap between CPU and GPU by a decent amount, or no?
Remembering that I don't need it as a gaming powerhouse, but as an investment into university for the next 3-4 years, is it worth it to go with this, or look for an entirely different build?
Another question, to perhaps mean I need less help, is there any way in which you can accurately compare CPUs and GPUs with other ones and each other?
I don't really know what traits to look out for in each product to know what is good and what will work with each other.
There any guides for getting to know this? The CPUs and the GPUs are my least-favourite part in buying and upgrading PCs, as I normally have no idea how one CPU compares to another.
And I hadn't even considered that the GPU in this build would be too much for the CPU.
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