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Is this a "gaming" laptop? Should I even bother playing games?

R

Remobz

Platinum Member
I have not been playing games for years now. This Christmas I got a new laptop as a Christmas gift. Not sure if I can call it a gaming laptop but I am wondering if I should even bother paying money to buy games? Games like real time strategy games or FPS or war thunder type games for example.

Here are my laptop specs.....

15.6" HD Widescreen CineCrystal™ LED-backlit Display: (1366 x 768) resolution; 16:9 aspect ratio
4th Generation Intel® Core™ i5-4210U Processor 1.7GHz with Turbo Boost Technology up to 2.7GHz
Windows 8.1
NVIDIA® GeForce® 840M with 2 GB of dedicated DDR3 VRAM
8GB DDR3L Memory
500GB 5400RPM SATA Hard Drive
Digital Media Card Reader - Secure Digital™ (SD)
802.11a/b/g/n Wireless LAN featuring MIMO technology (Dual-Band 2.4GHz and 5GHz)

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00...productDetails


For additional note, I have a 23 inch Asus IPS monitor doing nothing since I spend all my time on my laptop (love the portability).

https://www.asus.com/Monitors/PA238Q/


Obviously, hooking up the laptop to a 23 inch monitor will defeat the purpose of portability in the first place.

hmmmmmmmmmmm.................................
 
I wouldn't try firing up any of your average AAA games at ultra settings, but you can certainly play most of them on low-medium settings. And it should handle your average indie game without much trouble.
 
That will depend on the games.

Don't bother launching Assassin's Creed Unity on it, it won't run. But anything released up until a year ago or so should run without much issue, but after that, I wouldn't bet on it.

Always check the minimum requirements of the games you buy.

At any rate, that is definitely NOT a gaming laptop, and I wouldn't advise even entertaining the idea of running AAA games on it. It's not only bad practice, but also bad manners :quite:
 
It's not a "gaming laptop" but it's a laptop where you can game 🙂 (not the same thing). Basically, like others said, you can play most games there as long as you don't go crazy. The older the game is, the more graphic options you can enable (and viceversa).

One thing I would do if I were you, replace the HD for a SSD, not only it'll be MUCH faster to load anything, but the battery charge will last a tad longer.
 
The cpu and ram are actually fairly capable of running fairly recent midrange games...

the GPU is holding the laptop back...

As far as I can tell the numbering convention that NVidia uses is that the first number is a the series and the second number is the level of relative performance of that gpu in the series.


Here is a good comparative site that reviews mobile GPUs and ranks them by benchmarks and actual fps in games.

http://www.notebookcheck.net/NVIDIA-GeForce-840M.105681.0.html

The 840 is decent for playing midlevel (in terms of hardware demand) games that are older than 6 months or so on the resolution of your screen at medium to low setings... don't expect to hook it up to a 720p or 1080p HD television without a performance hit.

Looking at the resolution 1920 x 1080 of your external monitor you'll need to adjust the settings much lower or stick to games that are a year to a couple of years old.


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Yeah, that GPU isn't suited for modern gaming. 384 processing cores, 64bit, DDR3.

Fortunately, you only need to push a 1366 x 768 resolution, but even still.
 
xantub said:
It's not a "gaming laptop" but it's a laptop where you can game 🙂 (not the same thing). Basically, like others said, you can play most games there as long as you don't go crazy. The older the game is, the more graphic options you can enable (and viceversa).

One thing I would do if I were you, replace the HD for a SSD, not only it'll be MUCH faster to load anything, but the battery charge will last a tad longer.
Click to expand...

Actually, I have an unused Samsung 840pro SSD 128GB bought exactly 2 years ago. The problem is that I have ZERO laptops (2 total) and one desktop (one small mirco case dell with no room for a second HDD or SSD) that have no space for a second drive. The 128 GB SSD is too small in storage size to be a single drive. I would have to build a totally new desktop system in order to take advantage of the SSD.

So basically, I can only look and hold the SSD in my hands and wonder when will the day finally come to use it? lol!!
 
The 840M isn't that bad. You'll be able to play something like Skyrim at max level at your res, especially with AA off.

A super-high-end game will require turning down details, but usually still look good even at "medium".

Bear in mind you'll often get a big performance boost when plugged into AC power. Portability when you need it, speed when you can plug in.
 
maybe it depends on the game you're going to play on that laptop 🙂 i hope i can have same specs haha
 
Remobz said:
Actually, I have an unused Samsung 840pro SSD 128GB bought exactly 2 years ago. The problem is that I have ZERO laptops (2 total) and one desktop (one small mirco case dell with no room for a second HDD or SSD) that have no space for a second drive. The 128 GB SSD is too small in storage size to be a single drive. I would have to build a totally new desktop system in order to take advantage of the SSD.

So basically, I can only look and hold the SSD in my hands and wonder when will the day finally come to use it? lol!!
Click to expand...
The laptop I'm currently using I replaced the stock HD with a 128GB SSD. In my case my main computer is the desktop, and I use my laptop when I travel, so 128GB is perfectly fine to be a single drive. Obviously depends on what you install, if you want to install a 50GB game then you're in trouble.
 
Last edited:
xantub said:
The laptop I'm currently using I replaced the stock HD with a 128GB SSD. In my case my main computer is the desktop, and I use my laptop when I travel, so 128GB is perfectly fine to be a single drive. Obviously depends on what you install, if you want to install a 50GB game then you're in trouble.
Click to expand...

I need the storage space and 500 GB is my minimum at least.

Someone mentioned maybe I should make the Samsung pro into an external drive. I am not sure about that.
 
OP I have a similar machine to your, just a quad core cpu and a slower GT740M.
You can definitely play games at 1366*768, as an example I'm running Dragon Age Inquisition now at mid-high details with playable frames and your card is certainly much faster than mine.
Hence don't worry and try even some recent games but don't expect to have every detail at max expecially on the external screen if it's fullHD. Any older game should run fine instead.
 
Remobz said:
Actually, I have an unused Samsung 840pro SSD 128GB bought exactly 2 years ago. The problem is that I have ZERO laptops (2 total) and one desktop (one small mirco case dell with no room for a second HDD or SSD) that have no space for a second drive. The 128 GB SSD is too small in storage size to be a single drive. I would have to build a totally new desktop system in order to take advantage of the SSD.

So basically, I can only look and hold the SSD in my hands and wonder when will the day finally come to use it? lol!!
Click to expand...


Never looked into it fully but I remember seriously considering getting an adapter that let you take out your optical drive and add another HDD bay. Check it out you can always get a USB external DVD drive.
 
Puppies04 said:
Never looked into it fully but I remember seriously considering getting an adapter that let you take out your optical drive and add another HDD bay. Check it out you can always get a USB external DVD drive.
Click to expand...

I did that in my old Dell XPS M1530. I had to do it since I only had a single 2.5" slot, and I put a SSD in there. I ended up moving my HDD to the drive caddy, which was fine since the caddy was a bit slower (IDE not SATA).
 
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