Hello Lemmings,
My 5 year old gaming laptop finally needs to be replaced. I need a new laptop for programming and light gaming. I no longer game on a laptop but a desktop. Though being able to play even outside would be nice so the laptop should be able to play at least Team Fortress 2. I’ll be installing a Linux distro on it. My budget is around 800-1000€. The screen should be 14 or 15 inches. The battery should last at least 6 hours while not doing anything heavy as video editing or gaming.
Make sure you get a laptop with a modern Ryzen processor since the battery life (and performance on battery) is often a lot better than Intel. There are a lot out there that fit the bill like Lenovo’s yoga/ideapad lineup. Just be weary of two things:
- Some 14" laptops may have soldered RAM or SSDs making them impossible to upgrade
- Don’t go off of processor names, they’re often pretty misleading. For example a Ryzen 7 7730U is significantly worse than a Ryzen 7 7840U.
Framework Laptop with AMD/Ryzen. My son uses one with Valorent, Minecraft and other games and they all seem to run smoothly.
Also, very repairable!
Framework laptops are indeed good, but their prices exceed my budget alot.
You’ve mentioned a few times that a new framework is firmly out of budget.
Might still be worth keeping an eye out though. They had a sale going a while ago for some units that were pulled for QA. If minor defects don’t bother you it’s possible to get a framework 13 for <1000€ if you’re patient and a bit lucky.
The Framework 13 laptop is around 1200€ , New ThinkPads are over your budget by a lot, except for the ThinkPad L14 AMD which is just outside your budget, but would probably fit your requirements
I’m in pretty much the same boat. My past 2 laptops have been dell inspirons with a touchscreen. I use the touch screen for game programming to make sure touch events work. The one I got was $500, but probably should have gone a bit higher.
It has a i5 processor 16gb ram, 1 tb ssd. It does indeed run tf2, guild wars 2, and other not graphically intensive games. I’m satisfied and it does work well, but below are some of the negatives of my new laptop vs my old.
It’s missing key backlights, a fingerprint to unlock, and the bodyvis much more plastic and feels not as secure as my wife’s lenovo.
Be sure to check out pics for keyboard arrangement. My new laptop has a numberpad…which is nice, but the arrow keys got shrunk which is not nice for programming.
Be sure to check where the trackpad is. Centralized is better. My new one is more to the left and my wrist hits it when playing tf2 and I do occasionally get some movement from my wrist in game, but not much.
I picked money up from amazon.
Be sure to check where the trackpad is. Centralized is better. My new one is more to the left and my wrist hits it when playing tf2 and I do occasionally get some movement from my wrist in game, but not much.
There should be an option in your OS to disable the trackpad while using the keyboard. My laptop also has a trackpad to the left and I often have my hand over it when playing but never had this issue.
The right choice is a Framework laptop. But if not that one, then a cheaper Framework laptop.
I use an Acer Spin 5, and I really like it, but my next laptop is definitely going to be a Framework. The fact that I can never upgrade my Acer’s CPU is just sad. Even if the screen, keyboard, trackpad, etc, all work great, eventually it’ll just be ewaste.
At least one option I found in that price range on Amazon (US, not sure about EU)
Discrete AMD GPUs in laptops are a very niche market, and there aren’t too many to be found. The RX6550m listed here is not the bottom of AMD’s barrel, but it’s no powerhouse. I’m sure it would run anything that isn’t too demanding, TF2 included.
MSI Bravo 15 Gaming Laptop, 15.6" 144hz FHD, Ryzen 7-7735HS(Up to 4.75GHz), 16GB RAM, Radeon RX6550M with 4G GDDR6, 1TB SSD
Lenovo Thinkpad E or P series. They have decent options with AMD Ryzen chips.
If youre up for it, you could stream off of your home desktop with Sunshine and use the laptop just as a light-weight client. Then the requirements for the laptop are a lot less and could potentially play even better games.
I played dota on my old laptop at a friends house while it actually streamed from my home desktop and it worked fine. I dont remember if you need a domain or static IP or anything like that, which may be a barrier. Or if upload speeds just wont allow it
Just use Tailscale or something to try it out!
Sunshine on the desktop, moonlight on the client side. You can even stream games to your phone or a tablet of you’re feeling frisky.
He could even keep his current laptop with this arrangement. Less e-waste. (unless it’s already dead, but for programming I still use a 12 year old vaio that got a second life when ditching windows)
Laptops that businesses used are pretty good value for the quality. My SO gets Latitude 5590s from eBay that are in near pristine condition and are workhorses for everything he does. They work great with Linux too.
Framework with the 7040 series is fantastic. I can game satisfactory on it at around 60fps low.
I’m impressed of how well the APU runs.
That said, it’s unfortunately out of your budget.
Keep a lookout for factory seconds. They’re super cheap.
