Hi everyone, long-time lurker, first time thread poster. I was wondering if you could help me out in browsing for a good gaming laptop. I've got about a budget of $1000 (Canadian) and I'm completely new to the PC gaming scene. I know buying a desktop gaming rig is often suggested as the better route, but I simply don't have any space to dedicate to a big desktop PC at the moment, so I'm looking at a laptop to dip my toes into the water so to speak.

I've got experience putting things like phones and laptops together, but I've never assembled a PC from scratch, so that's a project that's a little too daunting for me right now. A laptop seems like a much safer purchase, and I'm cool with adding additional RAM and swapping out an HDD for an SSD. But the more I read about it, the more unseen factors start cropping up. Like if I buy an i7 laptop, most of the time they'll only have dual-cores (not sure if that really matters), and most people swear by Intel and crap on AMD, but others say that if you're on a budget, you'll be fine with AMD. Then you've got dGPUs and monitor resolution, touchscreen vs no touchscreen (irrelevant for gaming but it's still an option) so I'm a bit confused right now. High-end, super-crazy, make-your-eyes-bleed graphics aren't what I'm going after here, just something good that can run PC games and do some video editing/rendering for a few years to come.

Does anyone have any suggestions, or recommendations based upon something they've bought in the past? Or perhaps ones I should steer clear of?

"Canadian" So an i3 with intel HD then? jk jk

I would recommend waiting for Pascal/Polaris based mobile GPUs if you can cause those will be much faster with better power efficiency and etc compared to the current generation.

But if you must buy one right now, for $1000 cad, it is quite hard to get one that is gaming. The bottleneck will more often than not be the GPU. So most likely, at 1000 cad, you will get a 950M which isn't very good, specially since those laptops have dual core CPUs. You usually need to spend more like $1300sh+ for an i7 + 960M

Now I did a quick search and Dell of all people has a pretty okay deal on their laptops.

http://www.dell.com/ca/p/inspiron-15-7559-laptop/pd?oc=ni157559_ftsb_h5715e&model_id=inspiron-15-7559-laptop

i5 quad core
Nvidia 960M
8gb ram
1TB hard drive
1080p Res

It is a pretty good deal since its CAD I believe. (At least the country at the bottom says Canada) But I would recommend waiting if u can.

I got myself a MSI laptop last christmas for 900€, with an i5-4210h and a GTX 970m, was not disappointed. MSI would be the go to for high end gaming laptop if you don't want to pay 300 more bucks for an Asus ROG.
For 1k you might want to not care yet about 16gb ram and a SSD and upgrade later, all you need is a screwdriver, it's really easy to change these and shouldn't break the warranty.

Don't 960m, it's a shitty upgrade over 950.

970 is the minimum if you want your laptop to handle games two years from now.

I know but he says $1000 Canadian... Most laptops with a 960M in Canada cost $1300+ so this is an extremely good deal. A 970M will cost him more around $1500-2000+ CAD in most cases... I agree that a 960M sucks but the CAD also sucks so if his budget is $1000... That is the only good deal as far as my quick searching goes. Hence why I recommend him to wait for the eventual 1000M series at least.

I figured this is probably not such a great time to buy something, considering the next round of upgrades comes around the fall, right? Thanks for the recommendations so far! That site is indeed Canadian, so it's definitely an option. I also found this Dell computer on the Microsoft Store's website:

https://www.microsoftstore.com/store/msca/en_CA/pdp/Dell-Inspiron-15-i5559-7081SLV-Signature-Edition-Laptop/productID.333111500

The i7 part is nice, but for the video card (I hope I'm using that term right) it lists this:

AMD Radeon R5 M335 with 4GB graphics memory, Intel HD Graphics 520

Since it's not NVIDIA, I'm assuming it can't handle much beyond low-quality visuals, which is fine considering my budget. And at about $800 I still have some lunch money left over. Is that AMD Radeon R5 a really bad bottleneck?

http://www.notebookcheck.net/AMD-Radeon-R5-M335.144861.0.html

http://www.notebookcheck.net/NVIDIA-GeForce-GTX-960M.138006.0.html

Yea the AMD one is wayyyy worse.

In rainbow 6 for example. 960m gets 54fps on high at 1080p vs 12 fps on AMD. Dont even take a second look at the Amd one dude. You wont be able to play anything.

Oh and the i7 is a dual core vs the one I suggested has an i5 quad core. Why yes, laptops are confusing.

http://ark.intel.com/m/products/88194/Intel-Core-i7-6500U-Processor-4M-Cache-up-to-3_10-GHz#@product/specifications

http://ark.intel.com/m/products/88959/Intel-Core-i5-6300HQ-Processor-6M-Cache-up-to-3_20-GHz#@product/specifications

http://www.extremetech.com/gaming/192064-turn-your-ps4-into-a-laptop-for-1100

This is what I would go with. It should be doable for under $1000 now, and it is the only laptop you will be able to play Gran Turismo, Uncharted, PSVR Titles and many more.

I didn't realize how low CAD is.

He indeed better wait for christmas, 9xxM series will probably get some serious price cut and DDR4 ram on laptops should become more common.

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