i wanted to make a back to school laptop guide but if i say the hp nv14 is sweet
it'll go from sweet to sold out in about
30 minutes so instead you guys are getting something even better a start to
finish laptop buyers guide so you can make your own decision
also it will include some honorable mentions like the aforementioned nv14 it
really is pretty sweet so if you want one move fast
and move fast to check out our sponsor MSI's clutch gm41 lightweight wireless
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hours of battery life check it out at the link down below right out of the
gate the dell xps 15 is the benchmark for Windows laptops it excels in
performance build quality and battery life the only small problem is that it
costs over 2 000 us dollars now i think
dell might have financing options available if you need them but before
you lock into an agreement like that i should tell you that it is possible to
find something with more power a longer lasting battery or something much
lighter for less than half the price the first and most important thing you
need to decide is how much performance you actually need as well as your budget
because these two factors will determine what type of laptop you're looking at be
honest with yourself if you don't really need a top of the line rtx 3080 GPU
sacrificing some FPS could either save you a ton of money or get you a better
built machine that's more comfortable to daily drive
with that said if performance is your top priority you're probably going to
want a gaming laptop generally speaking they have the best cooling they feature
the fastest processors and they're cheaper than equally powerful laptops
that are marketed at professional creators
if you primarily want a laptop for school or work that has enough grunt to
game on your brakes you'll be perfectly fine with either a gtx 1650 or an rtx
3050. here are a couple of budget friendly options any of these should
serve you very well so i would personally go with whatever's on sale
and then return it and try again if i end up hating it if you're looking for
something powerful enough to really crank the details in aaa games at 1080p
or if you want to drive a high refresh rate panel for smoother animations the
rtx 3060 mobile delivers nearly a 40 bump in FPS over the 3050 ti and comes
highly recommended especially in ASUS zephyrus g14 and we've also seen some
really nice fire sales on last gen 2000 series rtx models
above that however things start to get a little complicated
a lot complicated in many cases the model of GPU that you
choose and that you pay for can have less of an impact on real world
performance than the cooling and the power delivery of the overall laptop
there's honestly way too much to cover here so instead we made a playlist that
you can watch called buying a gaming laptop in 2021 is way more complicated
than it should be also get subscribed because i'm sure that the shenanigans
are far from over moving on then if gaming for you means
playing text twist in your browser or the occasional round of rocket league
great news integrated or igpus have
gotten shockingly good so you want to avoid a laptop that has low end
dedicated graphics like these ones in my opinion they just aren't enough of an
upgrade over modern integrated gpus to be worth the extra power draw and heat
output your emulated playstation 2 classics are gonna run fine without them
as for cpus AMD keeps things pretty simple the bigger the number the more
faster it goes and i can easily recommend both the ryzen 4000 and 5000
series processors on mobile they have exceptional efficiency which means great
performance in compact or lower priced machines that typically end up with
smaller batteries i would hesitate however to go for ryzen
3000 the name seems to suggest that these are based on AMD's zen 2 cores but
they are actually based on an older design that is significantly slower and
less power efficient as for Intel
oh if it's got five numbers followed by an
h like this that means it's a faster model with more cores and if it ends in
hk like this one it's a super fast boy
and is generally capable of overclocking if instead it's got four numbers
followed by g4 or g7 like this
that means it'll have at most four cores and is intended to be snappy and power
efficient rather than capable of handling heavy workloads now for most
people only 4 CPU cores isn't going to be a problem but if you plan on running fluid
simulations or editing 4k video an h series processor or ideally an 8 core
from AMD would be the better choice something to note though is that for
Intel their latest 11th gen processors were a significant upgrade they finally
switched from 14 nanometer to 10 nanometer so if the latest and greatest
isn't within your budget you can't assume that last year's model will be
same same but slightly worse the good
news however is that in the few years prior to that Intel was basically
rehashing the same designs so you'd be hard-pressed to tell the difference
between an 8th gen processor and a 10th gen one i'd only go 7th gen and older
though if the price was very compelling on a used device
fortunately RAM is simple get 16 gigs if
you can Windows and chrome are going to make quick work of 8 gigs and if 8 gigs
of RAM is all that meets your budget make sure you choose a machine that can be upgraded down the line with slots
that look like these ones even if you're not tech savvy ifixit has excellent
teardowns that can both help you choose an appropriate model and perform the
surgery framework by the way gets an honorable mention here for their outstanding
attention to the upgradability of their machines they even go as far as making
the integrated ports swappable storage is a similar story to RAM you're
probably going to want at least 500 gigs for your SSD but if a 256gb one is all
that you can fit in your budget just make sure that the laptop you're considering can be upgraded down the
road something you might have realized by now though is that since Intel didn't do a
whole lot to improve their laptops between 8th and 10th generations it is
entirely possible that someone might think that their old laptop is slow but
it actually just needs a little bit more storage or RAM
neither of them is super expensive these days so trucking 16 gigs of RAM into a
three-year-old laptop maybe with a battery refresh that can usually be
found with a quick part number search on ebay could give it a whole new lease on
life while you're in there by the way make sure to blow out the cooling system
because overheating is the biggest cause
of premature laptop failure now to address the elephant in the room
AMD and Intel aren't the only options for cpus anymore bringing us to the
apple m1 the macbook air and pro m1s are
in almost every way the best thin and lights on the market they're extremely
snappy feel great to use have excellent screens and the battery life is
unmatched by anything that shows this logo on boot up
but they aren't perfect the m1 chip has only been out for a year so there are
some growing pains for instance our mac guy jonathan has to use teams in a
chrome window since there's no native app yet and there's no way to install
full x86 Windows as for us the inability to run
professional programs like solidworks and altium not to mention games makes
the m1 mac a complete no-go so beautiful
machine much better keyboard than the old ones just make sure that everything you're
going to need will run on it and chromebooks are a similar story if
you're on a budget or you already have access to a powerful desktop 95 of the
time a chromebook is going to do everything you need it to do but if a
chromebook is your only computer your professor or your boss could easily
provide you with some mandatory piece of software that you either can't run or
are going to have to install in a hacky time-consuming way and at that point
you'll probably wish that you'd saved up another 100 bucks and got a Windows
device or spent the same amount and gotten a
used thinkpad like this one having the fastest laptop around though
means nothing if the screen sucks how do you appreciate all the new t-shirt
designs on ltteststore.com but seriously
the screen is the thing you'll interact with most on your laptop so it really
makes sense to skimp on it there are three main panel types the tn
ips type and OLED and only one that you
should choose tn looks terrible by today's standards and should basically
be avoided at all times OLED panels look amazing with crisp blacks and vibrant
colors and incredible saturation but they're normally not super bright which
kind of matters if you're taking this thing into bright areas like
outside they struggle with reflections and they're terrible for battery life
which leaves us with ips and ips type
panels since lg trademarked ips so other
brands have to use different names for the same tech once you know the panel
type is okay the color space is the next key thing this describes how many
different colors your monitor can produce it can get a bit confusing since there
are a bunch of different standards but unless you know you need something else
aim for near 100 coverage of srgb pretty
basic the vast majority of applications web pages and games are tuned for srgb
so unless you're doing professional color work going beyond that to adobe
RGB or a dc ip3 is not a requirement
more expensive machines may come factory calibrated to account for the slight
differences from one panel to the next but there are quick and dirty ways to
calibrate it yourself using test patterns that are good enough if you're
not doing color critical work something you cannot change after the
fact is your panel's brightness it's tough to recommend a single brightness
number since 250 nits might be fine on a matte display while 400 nits might not
feel like enough on a glossy one but what i can say is that if you're going
to be in a bright environment more is generally better finally if you
plan on gaming throw out most of what i just said
because the single most important thing for you is the refresh rate of your
panel a high refresh rate display paired with a good CPU and GPU will allow you
to see much smoother animations on the screen and make your gaming experience
feel more responsive and immersive we proved outright that going from 60hz to
144hz results in a real world competitive advantage and while 240
hertz and above definitely starts to succumb to the law of dimensioning
returns it's safe to say that more is
more better at least for competitive gamers if sightseeing games are more
your thing though looking at you with your three players a 1440p 120 or 144
hertz ips type is the perfect sweet spot
chef's kiss speaking of which you might have noticed
that i've hardly touched on resolution that's because despite it being one of
the big highlights on a typical manufacturer's web page for the most
part it doesn't really matter unless the laptop is extremely cheap or small
it will have at least 1080p resolution and since laptops are pretty small in
general 1080p is enough for the image to look pretty darn good in our opinion
pushing to a 4k display is basically just a waste of battery life unless the
1080p option is a really bad panel a far
more important aspect of the display is the ratio of horizontal to vertical
pixels for professionals in particular a 16 by 10 or 3x2 display gives you more
vertical space to work with for scrolling long documents or editing
complex video timelines some laptops with great screens are the surface
laptop hpn v14 dell xps ASUS zephyrus
m16 and g15 and the lenovo legion pro
they're good oh and yeah we like touch screens you
might not so hey it's up to you unless you buy a mac then it's up to
apple a really important part of a laptop that you can't evaluate from the spec sheet
alone is the keyboard and trackpad given these are the bits that you'll
physically be touching every time you use it you'll want them to be really
good the easiest way to figure out if a keyboard and trackpad are good is to
watch some reviews find a host who has some overlapping experience with yours
see if you like the same kind of things then find out their most recent opinion
on whatever machine you're considering we've got heaps of unboxings over on
ShortCircuit like this one right here and i think this one too so if you're
lucky we've already taken a look at what you want and if you're not so lucky well
i guess it's time to head over to a local big box store like best buy or
somewhere and just try some out first thing to do is make sure hands
physically fit if they're falling off the edge kind of like this you need a
bigger laptop the typefast consistency is the key the
more confidence your fingers have the better
so kind of just press around the keyboard if the whole thing flexes a bit
that can be fine but uneven squishiness can throw off your typing feel around
the j and k keys specifically this tends to be a soft spot on some laptops if the
deck flex is good then you can evaluate the keys themselves press around the
corners to check the stability if the corner
kind of dips below the chassis before it actuates
don't buy it finally give the keys a press to see how
consistent the force required to push them is if some of them take more effort
than others keep looking unless you're a hunt and peck typist for you you
probably wouldn't notice the difference but if you want to improve your typing
in the future maybe you know invest in something that's good our keyboard
standouts are the ASUS zephyrus lineup basically any alienware laptop but
especially this one with the cherry switches any
surface device dell's xps 15 and pretty much anything from hp's envy or spectre
lineups while you're tooling around with the keyboard it's a good time to
evaluate the palm rejection of the trackpad if the mouse accidentally
clicks or moves around while you're typing real bad if none of those things
happened try to use the keyboard and then slowly move to touching the
trackpad what you're looking for is to see if the trackpad doesn't immediately
start working oems will do this to make sure that your palms don't actually
trigger it but if it's too aggressive it can make the trackpad feel unresponsive
after that check if the trackpad uses Windows precision drivers if it doesn't
just don't get the laptop in 2021 no one
needs snapdick's drunken drivers from there i personally don't like trackpads
with high latency but depending on what panel you have and your personal
sensitivity to it you might not notice the difference so it kind of just comes
down to trying as many as possible in person and hopefully you can figure out
what you like our standout trackpad champs are of course the macbooks xps 15
once again and the zephyrus g15 and m16
the last big ones that we haven't mentioned are weight and battery weight
is pretty simple since it's just a function of performance and how much you
want to spend this one's real light made of magnesium
not cheap but the battery's a lot more complex i
wish i could just say something like get an 85 watt hour battery and you'll be
good but like these two both have 55 watt hour
batteries this one's four hours this one
doesn't really work like that because depending on the CPU GPU display and
even the tuning of all those things the battery life is just
willy-nilly and will vary wildly your only real choice is to find a reviewer
who has tested the config you like or something close to it in an industry
standard test like the pcmark battery life test anything over about six and a
half hours will be serviceable with anything over 11 being pretty darn solid
for all-day use big thanks to drop for sponsoring this video with drop you can
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description if you still want to know more check out our playlist buying game
laptops and 2021 is way more complicated than it should be it's
it's so stupid all the things that you need to know to make an informed
decision to buy like a gaming laptop
ridiculous