does anyone have any tips for a first personal laptop?

[1stepahead]

Hi, I'm very new to the forum, but I came here looking for recommendations for my first computer. I am a young adult looking for a laptop with a budget of just over 1K, I will regularly be doing 3d modeling, slicing, and exporting on it as well as regular browsing, educational purposes, and possibly light to medium online gaming over short periods (usually while stationary). something that also looks presentable and can be put into a backpack, though weight doesn't matter. my three top picks were the Asus Zenbook 14X, the LG Gram 15, and the Dell Inspiron 15—preferably the Asus for its design, small size, and power, but I am quite open to professional/educated opinion.

 

[Tech Junky]

I like Clevo for laptops as you get more for your $$$.

Clevo Barebone Laptop Series - R&J Technology, Clevo Barebone Notebook kits, Laptop and desktop system builder

your Memory hard drives build your laptop based this Clevo Barebone Series select from options provided build

rjtech.com

RJT offers barebones laptops which means there's no OS tax being bundled into the price aka $100 savings and they don't come with drives/RAM as you add your own. They do sell the same models with drives/RAM though but it's cheaper to select your own stuff and put it inside.

RJT offers free shipping / no sales tax which is another big savings that pays for the drive/ram.

If you can up your budget a bit you can get a substantial unit to build off of. Just north of $1K you get into the RTX4060 for the GPU. If you go a bit higher you can opt for higher end options which are still considerably cheaper than off the shelf options like Asus / LG / Dell.

I bought my current one with a 12700H Intel CPU / 3060 GPU for ~$1300 but then swapped out the screen for a 4K120 for $300 and added dual M2 drives for ~$200 and 32GB RAM for $100. If I bought one with the same options it would have easily been 2X more.

 

[1stepahead]

Thanks!

 

[igor_kavinski]

You may wanna wait for these new fangled AI laptops. If you wait a few months, probably by the end of the year you could afford a laptop with at least 45 AI TOPS, which is the minimum requirement for Windows Copilot+ functionality. While the Windows AI features are nothing too fancy, it's the Copilot+ runtime that may turn up some surprises in the form of compelling third party software. I would hate for someone to feel left out of the AI party by a few months.

 

[Tech Junky]

@igor_kavinski

I'm waiting for the AMD 370 HX laptops since they should be the first that have TB ports on them and then I will be Intel free. AMD laptops lack the speedier 40G ports even with the latest CPU for some reason/ most likely the whole Intel licensing thing. Or the OEM is just being cheap. The ASM controller isn't that expensive or difficult to add but they just haven't done it. Then if course there's the whole TB5 coming soon rumination.

 

[lantis3]

https://www.amd.com/en/products/processors/laptop/ryzen/300-series/amd-ryzen-ai-9-hx-370.html

It's USB 4 not thunderbolt 4

Thunderbolt 4 vs USB4: What's the difference?

The key differences between Thunderbolt 4 and USB4, explained

www.tomsguide.com

 

[Oyeve]

My last 2 laptop purchases are Asus TUF 17.3 inchers. Got both for under 1000 bucks. One had an GTX 1660 TI 6gb GPU and the last one had a RTX 3050 6gb GPU. Added my 1 4tb NVME and they can with 16gb ram. Solid laptops. My only issue with them is the built-in speakers. Garbage. But for the price, these are great laptops. The 15.6 inch ones are cheaper but I like big screens.

 

[lakedude]

This is well under budget.