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Friday Fun Thread for October 20, 2023

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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 can't help too much, because I've always gone desktop, even when I didn't necessarily have tons of space. I feel like the difference between a laptop on a desk and a desktop on a desk is usually very minimal. The Tower for a desktop computer can also go under the desk, and the wires just poke up to operate the screen. The screen can be placed farther back from the keyboard so you can have a healthier eye distance for a screen. A Tower also has far more flexibility on the type of plugs available. Usually as much as your hardware can handle you can manage to get plugs on the outside of the tower connecting it all together.

Here are my current desktop specs:

CPU Brand: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-10700K CPU @ 3.80GHz

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070

RAM: 64GB

SSD sizes: 2000G,1000G

I think that would break your budget, but I'm able to play modern tripple A games at mid or high graphics settings, so its also overkill from your perspective.