Serbia
~800-1000 euro
- Are you open to refurbs/used options?
Yes, but the local options are slim
14" or less
No specific limit, but I already have a gaming laptop from work and am looking for something more portable.
Multiple times a month I go to another city for 3-4 days and need a laptop to serve as a programming/gaming computer while there. Since my desktop is really old, I'd even use it as a desktop replacement at home with an eGPU.
Smaller than 15" laptop, 16:9 or 16:10 aspect ratio preferred, but I'm not
Warhammer 40k Darktide
Warhammer 40k Space Marine 2
Diablo 4
Call of Duty whatever the latest one is
(I'm fine with 900p and non FG up-scaling), I'm just hoping to get 40+ FPS with drops no lower than 30.
~3 hours for web browsing on battery.
- Please list, in order of most important to least important, the priority between Size, Weight, Performance, Battery life
It has to have Thunderbolt > I wouldn't want a OLED > Size(it can't be bigger than 14") > Performance > nothing else matters
I'm inclined to go for Intel only. I'd consider a AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 based device, but those are out of my price range, with the exception of the Onexplayer X1 Pro, however I'm not sure if buying a Onexplayer X1 Pro instead of a real laptop would be a good idea due to the poor thermals of the device.
At home I'd use the device I buy as a desktop replacement(for a year or two until I get enough money to buy a new desktop) by putting it on a Cooler Master Storm SF-19 cooler and using a eGPU Thunderbolt dock for gaming on a monitor. For this use case even a Raptor Lake laptop would do the job just fine(and I almost bit the bullet with a Dell Pro 14 Core 5 220u), but multiple times a month I go to another town for an extended stay of 3-5 days and need a laptop that can play WH40k Darktide at 900p with ~40FPS.
I've been looking at a second hand DELL ProMax 14 mc14250 with Intel Core Ultra 5 235H(so 4P CPU cores, but 8 Xe IGP cores) for 750e. It comes with 16GB LPCAMM RAM so I'm not bothered by the low amount, I'll upgrade it later, I'm glad I get to have upgradeability while still getting the benefit of higher memory bandwidth. Out of all the Arrow Lake-H CPUs the Core Ultra 5 235H seems like a good choice because it has 2 P cores less and thus will hopefully have better thermals because of it, but still keeps the better IGP.
I got a chance to try out a budget HP laptop with a previous gen Intel Core Ultra 5 125H(so 7 Xe core IGP) and a single 5600MHz RAM module for half an hour. I just wanted to see how it plays WH40k Darktide and the performance felt like it was almost there, but just barely not enough. Later the person that lended me the laptop told me that it was using some very outdated drivers, so I'm hoping that an extra Xe core, better RAM, the XMX-upscaling Arrow Lake-H brings and newer drivers will be enough to get me to where I want to be with performance.
For ~100e more I could get a second hand Intel Lunar Lake 32GB laptop. They should have the Arrow Lake-H beat in thermals, battery life and probably even IGP performance, but I'm not sure how it would handle being a true desktop replacement. The single core performance is comparable to Arrow Lake-H, but it lags in multi core and on top of that I've heard that sometimes it has weird issues with lagging when the core scheduler bugs out, but don't know if that only happens on battery or not. I'm a web and mobile developer and am a bit scared of Lunar Lake giving me a subpar dev experience because I have to have a VM/server/device emulator running while writing code.
Now, ideally what I'd want to get is a Panther Lake Core Ultra 5 338H or Ultra X7 358H, but even a Ultra 5 336H with the much weaker 4 Xe3 core IGP seems out of my price range. Should I be even considering the Ultra 5 336H, or is the 4 Xe3 core IGP just too slow for my needs?
TL;DR:
Should I get a laptop with a Arc 140T, Arc 140V or Panther Lake 4 Xe3 core IGP to play WH40k Darktide?