It feels a little selfish that my first thread here is asking for help, but I have seen a number of threads about building PCs on here and while there are often some conflicting opinions I trust the shared knowledge of VGC to help steer me in the right direction. To get to my point, I have been looking into buying a custom laptop for a few months now, and after some research and comparison my preference is for this laptop from PCSpecialist:
http://www.pcspecialist.co.uk/notebooks/optimusVII-15/
First of all if anyone here (presumably from the UK) has used this website before I would like to know your opinion of their service, they seem trustworthy and for what you get seem to be lower prices than other sites.
My other questions are regarding the setup I am looking at, which is this:
| Intel® Core™ i5 Quad Core Processor 6300HQ (2.3GHz, 3.2GHz Turbo) |
| 8GB KINGSTON SODIMM DDR3 1600MHz (1 x 8GB) |
| NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 960M - 2.0GB DDR5 Video RAM - DirectX® 12 |
| 1TB SERIAL ATA II 2.5" HARD DRIVE WITH 8MB CACHE (5,400rpm) |
| 128GB M.2 2280, SATA 6Gb/s (510MB/R, 310MB/W) |
| GIGABIT LAN & WIRELESS INTEL® N-7265 M.2 (300Mbps, 802.11BGN) + BLUETOOTH |
I am looking into gaming more on my laptop than I do now, but I don't need bleeding edge. I will be happy if I can play 2015/16 games on low-medium settings (though more is a bonus) without melting my laptop or having to flutter my eyelids to pretend I can't see the poor framerate.
First of all what is the relative level of the i5-6300HQ compared to other current processors, ie is it base level i5 or mid-range (pretty sure as it's a mobile version in a sub £800 laptop it won't be top-end). For example my current laptop has the 3210M, which I think may be the lowest of 3rd gen i5s. Also regarding turbo clock speed, is that something the processor has built in to do automatically when it needs to or do I need software or special drivers to run at turbo speed.
Second is there a significant advantage of Hyper-X Impact RAM over standard? It only changes the price by £8 so if it is more reliable I will probably get that.
Third the GeForce 960M I understand seems to be good value for money, my main future game purchase I would like to run is Mirror's Edge Catalyst, which doesn't have specs yet but if anyone has any guesses as to how well it will run I would like to hear.
And lastly I am a little confused as to the different options PCSpecialist gives for HDD/SSD drives... What I would like is about 1TB of space, but I would like to run the OS from Solid State, and I am not sure what the differences are if I go for:
A- the setup as above, with a basic 1TB HDD in the "main" drive slot and a 128GB SSD in the mSATA drive
B- the main drive being a 120GB SSD and a 1TB HDD in the 2nd drive slot
C- a 1TB hybrid drive in the main drive slot.
(It also confuses me that certain SSD models can be put in the main/2nd drive but not in the mSATA and vice-versa)
