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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   2230 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for October 20, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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About three weeks ago my laptop got stolen so I need to buy a new computer. I was thinking of building a desktop, but I'm about to move into a small apartment with my girlfriend and I don't think we'll have the floor space to spare, so it'll have to be a laptop.

What I need it for, in descending order of importance/time spent:

  1. Music production: I'll be using Propellerhead Reason and the shareware version of Reaper a lot. Obviously this means that a good integrated sound card is a must. With my old laptop, Reason would sometimes stop playing the track, I presume because my laptop couldn't keep up with the number of concurrent MIDI tracks. I presume this is caused by insufficient RAM, so it'd be nice if that was less of an issue with my new laptop.
  2. Photo editing/graphic design: Using Photoshop.
  3. Video editing: Using Premiere Pro. I'll be making short music videos which will require a great deal of colour correction. 1080p is fine, I don't need a 4k monitor, and I expect most of my editing will be 24fps.
  4. Gaming: Admittedly I've kind of gone off gaming a bit and don't spend nearly as much of my free time playing video games as I used to, but it'd be nice to have the option should the mood strike. I don't know if it makes a difference but I'm exclusively a single-player gamer. I own several games that I bought on a whim and only realised after the fact that my old laptop wasn't powerful enough to run them (e.g. Mirror's Edge Catalyst, Wolfenstein: The New Order, Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor, Metro), so it'd be a plus if the laptop I get for the three tasks above is also powerful enough to run at least some of the aforementioned games. I rarely buy games on release, so a laptop which could reliably play games from 5-6 years ago at 60fps 1600x900 would be fine for me.

Budget, let's say somewhere between €1000-1500.

I was thinking of building a desktop, but I'm about to move into a small apartment with my girlfriend and I don't think we'll have the floor space to spare, so it'll have to be a laptop.

There's a third option: miniature desktops.

Interesting, are these any good for gaming?

I put together a mini-ITX based computer for my parents many years ago that was decent for its time, barely (IIRC it was mostly for MythTV but I had a few contemporary 3D games set up too) ... but I don't think I'd go with such a small form factor again, even for something sitting in a living room where aesthetics is a concern. Having a giant computer case in (realistically: next to) your entertainment center can hurt the ambiance, but at least a big case has room for lots of bigger slower quieter fans. With a small case you have to choose between CPU/GPU options with low cooling requirements (annoyingly underpowered) or small fans with high cooling capacity (annoyingly whiny sounding). That tiny computer eventually went to my daughter but soon got junked and replaced because trying to upgrade the GPU a little further led to overheating problems.

The 7735U's integrated GPU apparently is approximately equivalent to a 130-$ GTX 1630—extremely weak (between "entry—suitable for 900p gaming" and "modest—modern games at medium settings" on the Logical Increments scale), but not totally worthless. The CPU has 8 cores and 16 threads.

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