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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?

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.