Gadgetory

hey guys Boston we take a look at a lot of budget gaming laptops on the channel but today I have something a little bit different in mind so this is a 2014 Alienware 13 and back when it came out it cost well over $1000 today though I was able to pick it up on eBay for only 500 and ignoring a little bit of cosmetic damage what you're getting here is the surprisingly decent gaming laptop on the other hand we have this the Acer Aspire 5 now I am a huge fan of this laptop I've already done a whole video on it and the gist of it is for $600 you're getting a quad-core processor nvidia graphics 8 gigs of ram as well as a full SSD but does it make sense to save your hundred dollars and get a used option one look at the Alienware and you'll be able to tell this used to be $1,000 plus laptop now it does have some minor scuffs and scrapes on the outside but importantly on the inside it's going to be clean and it's got all the good stuff including a 13.3 inch 1080p panel that looks surprisingly decent impressively this actually even has a windows precision touchpad something that a lot of even modern computers are barely starting to adopt now for the most part it's solid I don't think it's all that thick or heavy however you are going to be making a couple of compromises when you buy a used system it's only like the Acer well you're not going to have to deal with it the idea of having a brand new laptop is definitely a big advantage but there also are some disadvantages to having something a little bit on the cheaper end so even though Acer was able to cram a ton of high-end specs into this guy it's sort of at the cost of some build quality and some design things so for example it's very plasticky there's some like screenflex and on the right side instead of having USB 3.0 ports you have a pair of USB 2.0 ports and sure there's still going to be USB C and USB 3 on the other side but there's just little kind of cost-cutting measures here and there that do start to add up but the important thing to keep in mind is this is a brand new laptop that comes with a full warranty if it comes broken you can return it whereas with something like the Alienware you're going to kind of be on your own if something goes wrong on the Acer we're also getting a 1080p panel this time at 15.6 inches however it is a lower NT and display and honestly it's actually my biggest issue with the laptop I can live with pretty much all the rest of the stuff like slightly flimsy build quality but the screen is barely acceptable it would really be nice if they had an upgrade and actually makes the Alienware display looks pretty nice Pearson now the keyboard is going to be fine you get a full number row as well as a number pad as well as you're going to be getting backlighting and it technically does have a windows precision trackpad but the touchpad itself isn't so great what you're really buying this laptop for are the really impressive specs at the $600 price point with the Alienware now are you going to be getting three USB 3.0 ports as well as Ethernet there's also going to be HDMI mini DisplayPort as well as the Alienware graphics amplifier ports now this is something that's actually even found on current Alienware laptops and you can think of it as an old-school version of Thunderbolt 3 so back before is it easy to be able to put an external GPU and connect it to a laptop instead Illinois made their own graphics amplifier which you actually can still find on eBay for around a hundred bucks or so you know I don't know if I would necessarily want to do it with this particular Alienware 13 but if you ever want to upgrade with some graphics options even an older laptop like this does have the ability to do so now we need time you buy something used the price is going to be a huge factor so four or five hundred dollars we were able to pick up not only the Alienware 13 but it also came with some key upgrades including 16 gigs of ram as well as a 500 gigabyte Samsung 850 Evo SSD inside you'll find a dual core i5 4210 u so this is a Haswell chip from a couple generations ago you can essentially think of it as an ultrabook CPU not exactly what you want to find in your gaming laptop whoever thankfully it is going to be backed up by some pretty decent graphics the nvidia geforce gtx 860m well it won't make a big difference for gaming that 16 gigs of ram and SSD does make a big difference from normal day-to-day use but when it comes to actual gameplay on this guy while the cpu is going to be a little bit of a bottleneck the GPU should be capable of some pretty decent modern games put the two side-by-side and Geekbench and you'll see that they new eighth generation Core i5 in the Acer Aspire 5 absolutely runs of rings around the Alienware however jump over to the GPU side of things and it's actually surprisingly even so not only in the times pi benchmark but as well as in fire strike you're going to be getting very very similar performance first up we have csgo and here we're running at high at 1080p now we're getting a pretty decent 60 to 80 frames per second here and this is one of the easy ways to be able to tell that you're not supposed to walk around the corner Cisco's actually a pretty good game to test though because while we have that solid GPU we're going to be missing a little bit on the CPU side now csgo even though it's easy to run at fairly low frames especially when you get up and they like the ATS hundred 150 whatever the case is it actually is really helpful to have that solid CPU but so far it's actually not too bad move over to the aspire 5 and on those same settings at 1080p medium we are getting a noticeable bump in framerate so right now actually averaging about a hundred which is pretty impressive and I think something else is kind of nice is that the Wi-Fi chip in this laptop actually seems to be a little bit more robust so especially because we're kind of a little bit farther from the normal point it actually does smooth out some of the latency as well next up because it is 2018 after all we have fortnight battle royale so again here at 1080p this time I'm medium settings we're getting decent frame rates in the 40s to upper 30s now it's not going to be the most smooth playable experience in the world but if you do want a little bit more framerate it's easy to knock down the graphics a little bit or even bump the resolution back down to something like 720p I'm surprised that I hadn't really noticed a lot of CPU limitation yet now I'm sure if this did have a quad-core CPU or even a faster dual-core chip we're probably getting slightly higher frame rates but it's actually not a crazy pairing with this 860m it does seem to be reasonably balanced although I'd like a little more power of course if you guys want to know more about Fortnight I actually did do an entire video on it and how it can run on pretty much everything from a super high-end gaming PC all the way down to a 200 all a laptop well if you've really try hard at least well the nice things about Fortnight is that it does actually look nice almost regardless of what setting you're running on I mean come on you can run it on your phone it doesn't look that bad but here 1080p medium settings on the PC we're getting a pretty nice looking experience move over to the Acer and with those same settings and for tonight yet again we are seeing a slight performance improvement so as opposed to being in the high 30s and low 40s or mostly in the upper 40s here not a massive change but it is something you're going to be able to notice if I don't fall off this close next up we have pub G a game that is not particularly nice to lower end hardware I think this is actually spot we're going to see the dual-core CPU struggle here well that's not encouraging it's able to play the game I mean we're seeing some of the neighborhood of 25 frames per second now but the stuttering is really bad it's weird I feel like this game should be playable but right now I mean this is a stuttering mess technically it's running and I mean again my framerate it's not too bad showing like 35 36 right now but there's something very very wrong here yeah even reloading the game on very low settings restarting everything we're still getting that same stuttering issue technically this actually is slightly below the minimum spec for pub G so I guess it can't be too upset but come over to the Acer and we have no such problems so I did turn into graphics down to 720p on low but we're getting a pretty consistent 45 to 50 frames per second and thankfully none of those weird stuttering issues this is much much more like it it's kinda disappointing really so I like the Alienware it's a good laptop but at the end of the day you're probably gonna want to play games like pub G and well sure the GPU is not too bad I do feel like that CPU does let it down don't get me wrong I really didn't want to like the Alienware 13 but with options like the aspire 5 at $600 it makes it very very difficult to recommend most gaming laptops that are going to be used now this guy isn't too far off with a lack of a higher-end CPU really does hurt it's going new is always going to be a safer bet so not only do you get that brand new chassis but you get the warranty you don't have to worry about any kind of weird blemishes on your used laptop it's going to be a safer bet but if you do go used my main piece of advice would be be very careful what you pick so the idea of going something that's going to be slightly newer versus slightly older especially in laptop terms can mean a huge performance difference pick your choice wisely at minimum I would go with a quad-core processor and don't skimp on the graphics either similarly the 860m inside the Alienware isn't going to be too bad but a lot of times with gaming laptops you can spend a little bit more money to get a lot more performance so I'm curious would you let you ever want to pick up a used gaming laptop let me know in the comments below and I will catch you on the next one