Hey guys, I'm looking for a laptop for around $800 (give or take $100).
It's primarily for the whole family to use, for things such as:
- Internet browsing
- Streaming
- Microsoft Office
- Minor CAD/Modelling (mostly file viewing small edits, nothing too heavy like rendering/tessellation)
- Minor gaming (aiming medium to high graphical settings for non-AAA titles, more smaller Indies games, games such as RTS, Moba, platforming)
I've built my own PC, I'm just not sure what to look for when it comes to laptops.
Thanks for your help!
You could try something like this
http://www.cfonline.com.au/index.php?route=product/product&p…
this is probably the cheapest laptop equipped with an actual quad core (most laptops have a dual core, even though they may be i7's) and with a gaming grade GTX 960m. The $1k price is attractive, the only catch is that it's a refurb. It is covered 1 year warranty by ASUS.
Performance wise, it is more than what you asked for, taking on both gaming and CAD with no-compromises level of performance
If refurb is not an option, you can either try:
a Dell Inspiron 7559, sold in Australia for a rip-off price of $1600. It did sell for $1300 during an ebay sale though.
a laptop equipped with the much lower end 940MX, which is still good for some casual gaming and with a i7 Quad core processor to give you good CAD performance. It'll set you back perhaps $1k at the very minimum. An example of this, the MSI CX62 6QD
A cheaper $888 Lenovo 'E' series laptop with a ultra-low-power Core i5 (2 cores only) with very weak AMD GPU, posted by tightarse. It won't play much in the way of games (posting a terrible 11 frames per second on Fallout 4 at 720p) and it will do CAD modeling just fine.
There's another option for people who like to tinker and that is to also get a external GPU. you can google "EXP GDC Beast" which is a cheap chinese adapter that allows you to link a desktop GPU to a laptop using it's mini PCIE 1x slot.