Quick laptop check - is this any good?

[VanceIX]

starcraft said:

VanceIX said:

 

Hmm. This is actually a pretty good deal that's a lot cheaper than those and should be more than satisfactory

 

Metabox Alpha W650SJ ($1,374.00 AUD) Standard Metabox Design 15.6" FHD 1920 x 1080 Matte Super Slim IPS LED Nvidia GeForce GTX 850M with 2GB GDDR3 VRAM Intel Core i7-4710MQ Processor (6M Cache up to 3.50 GHz) 8GB DDR3 1600MHZ (No mSATA Installed) 1TB 7200RPM HDD Intel 7260 AC Dual Band Wireless DVD +- R/RW DL Windows 8.1 64BIT 2 Year Platinum Metabox Onsite Pickup Standard Insured Delivery 4-7 Days

No SSD, but those are technically uneccessary overall (even though boot time is much, much faster with SSDs). The graphics is perfectly fine (the 850 should eat up any modern game you throw at it on at least high). You only need 8gb of memory, no need to pay for more. Blu-ray readers are also essentially worthless, unless you have a large collection of movies, and even then you should stick to a traditional blu-ray player.

You think? I tend to get tunnel vision, most of the benchmarks I have read put the 860M about 30% more powerful than the 850M...but then its hard to envision how that plays out in the real world.

I will take your advice on the RAM...I really have no clue...as long as it runs Civ 6 without enormous between turn wait times :P

I have no interest in blu-ray though, agreed.

Finally, SSD...you really dont think its worth bothering?

The 860 is more powerful, but in the end it'll probably be out of your pricepoint. Either way there's always something more powerful, so you'll eventually have to settle for something. The 850 will easily max out Civ 6 and most other modern games, and it should be able to play games on at least medium for another three years or so. 

Yeah, at this point pretty much no game uses 8gb of RAM. Heck, most don't even use 4. 

SSDs are nice, I have one in my desktop, but they aren't necessary. I personally don't have one in my laptop because laptop SSDs tend to be obscenely expensive overall. The boot time will be slower, but Windows 8 isn't that resource-intensive so it won't be that bad at all, maybe three or four minutes to boot up completely. As long as you simply put it into sleep mode instead of turning it off, you probably won't even notice that you don't have an SSD.