Gadgetory

hey how's it going guys this is Dave 2d and this is a video on how to purchase the best notebook when you're on a budget so I often get emails or messages about just people asking me what the best notebook is right now or which of this short list is the best notebook for me and the truth is no one knows what the best notebook is for you better than you do so just to get this out of the way this isn't like a top 10 list of the cheapest notebooks or anything it's more of a guide on how to purchase the notebook that best suits you so the first thing you need to figure out is what you plan on using your notebook for I mean what specifically do you use it for now the standard response is oh I do a bunch of things like web browsing email game programming app programing photo editing video editing you know gaming 3d rendering and like 99% of the time this just isn't accurate there are very few people in this world that actually do all these things off of one machine so figure out what it is that you'll be doing and more specifically what apps or games you want to run and you'll often find that you don't need as powerful of a machine as you thought you did so if you're student going to college for engineering or architecture or comps I speak to students in older years like the sophomore year and ask them what programs they're running on their computers and if you're into like music production or something try to figure out what production suite you're going to be working with because once you figure out what apps or games you want to be running it's a lot easier to figure out what things you need to focus on and what features you can be kind of cut out now most people don't need particularly powerful notebooks they use them for school and work and like media consumption like YouTube or Netflix and maybe some light photo editing and gaming and I would classify this as normal use and most programmers actually fit in here as well you can code most apps or 2d games with very light hardware your compiled times might be a little slow but there's tons of successful apps and games that were coded using really slow computers and you can do it too so for a normal user what kind of specs are we looking for in terms of your CPU don't give it too much thought even like a core M or Atom on the surface three those things are sufficient to run normal tasks and the graphics cards same thing don't worry about it it really doesn't matter any notebook purchased in 2015 complacent light games using the integrated graphics so you're good now for memory it depends on how many programs and tabs you want open at a time anything from two to four gigs is sufficient you can comfortably get by with four gigs even in Windows 10 and it's actually pretty hard to make use of eight gigs even an app or a game development now if you're on a tight budget as a normal user the one area I would still focus on is the drive get something with an SSD or install your own because this will make your computer feel faster than any other upgrade that you would put at it again if you're a normal user don't worry about the CPU don't worry about the graphics don't worry too much but Ram just get a fast solid-state drive if you do some heavy photo editing or if you do a lot of digital illustration or if you're an amateur video editor making YouTube videos hardware is important the type of footage you work with affects the caliber of hardware that you need so at the most basic level you want to pick up as many CPU cores as you can and as much RAM as you can fit into your budget if it's 1080p footage you're working with dual-core CPUs are good i threes are good and I 5s are great you just want multiple cores to process stuff concurrently now 4k footage is kind of gnarly to process on two cores you can work with it but quad core i7 chips are significantly better so if it fits your budget go for a quad core and for the graphics card if you work with the Adobe suite like with Premiere or After Effects you don't really need a graphics card they help but integrated graphics chips in 2015 are pretty respectable for video editing so don't sweat it now for random 8 gigs of ram is comfortable for 1080p footage and it's usable for 4k footage but aim for 16 gigs if 4k footage is your thing in terms of drives SSDs are very useful but they're not required you can always add an external SSD like the ua SP enclosures like I mentioned in a previous video I'll put the link up here but those are some things that you can add after you've purchased the notebook so a quick recap for video or heavy photo editing on a budget focus more on CPU cores RAM and an SSD if you can afford it don't put too much thought into the video card it may seem counterintuitive just skimp out on a video card for video editing but really it's not that important the last group of users are gamers if you plan on playing a lot of games on your notebook then you're in this group and depending on the games you want to play your requirements will vary but in general the GPU is king here the better your GPU the better your performance now the bad news is a lot of companies charge really hefty premiums for dedicated video cards Apple comes to mind but the good news is you can still find some really great deals on gaming notebooks you just need to do a little digging and be patient now for RAM when you're on a budget try not to get more than 8 gigs of RAM anything more than that you're not using in most games and if you have to the other thing you can kind of chintz out on is your drive SSDs are awesome for System snappiness and load times for apps and games but it has almost no effect on frame rates in games so if you can get yourself a better graphics card by sticking with 8 gigs of RAM and using a regular hard drive I'd do it a better graphics card is invariably going to make your games run better and you can always upgrade the drive later down the road so for gamers get a beefed video card because that's most important don't worry too much with the CPU dual cores are fine don't money on RAM and if you need to sticking with the standard disk drive is okay the last thing I want to talk about is pricing and brands now if you've noticed I haven't talked about any specific models or brand so far and the reason is this the best value for a notebook is going to come from big volume brands like Dell or HP or Lenovo the big volume guys that sell a ton of notebooks every year and their pricing is normally on sale but once in a while they have some real sales like really steep sales and stuff just goes on like 30 40 50 percent off and that's where the money is I did a review on the Alienware 13 a few months ago and that thing was priced at $1500 now it was a reasonably well specs notebook it played games pretty well and it was reasonably well built but it was really overpriced at $1500 and then a few weeks later after a review came out it dropped down to 1,200 bucks and then a month and a half later after that I've dropped down to $900 and at that point it was a pretty good pickup so the seemingly obvious conclusion is this figure it exactly what you want your notebook to do so you can kind of determine what features you need to focus on and what features you can kind of get rid of and then purchase your notebook from a big volume seller like Dell or HP or Lenovo when their stuff is on a really big sale like right now so in terms of actual recommendations it's pretty tough to give one just because prices for these things fluctuate a lot and there's literally hundreds of configurations and like options that you can kind of tweak to make a notebook fit your needs but if I had to choose some favorites right now all right for normal users the Lenovo G 50 which you can get for around 4 or 500 if it's Specht well the 15-inch Dell Inspiron 3004 or 500 bucks depending on how you spec it and I also like the ACS f55 5 which is a little bit more expensive but I think the build quality is slightly better on that one and for all of these just make sure you're getting the newer Broadwell chips so you can take advantage of the newer integrated graphics cards for gamers there's two they kind of stick out right now the lenovo y40 it's 800 bucks and it plays games pretty well or if you want something that's a little more durable but quite a bit beefier the Alienware 13 it's currently at 950 dollars but I think that'll go up and down a little bit and eventually it'll hit $900 again for 1080p edits the top pick for me right now is the previously mentioned $800 lenovo y40 now just look at this thing the amount of tech that they're delivering for $800 is crazy now for 4k video edits i would recommend the lenovo y50 which comes in around eleven twelve hundred dollars for a 4k screen i normally wouldn't recommend a 4k screen for any kind of budget oriented notebook purchase for one they drain batteries quicker you need better support and hardware and it's just more expensive but if you want to edit 4k videos you can't have to pay the price that's the end of this video I hope you guys liked it and if you have any questions comments type low up again I'm always open to helping you guys out just ask away and yeah hope you guys learned a thing or two it's been nice and I'll see you guys next time oh I forgot to mention I'm running a Mac please don't hate I haven't switched over to the dark side or anything I wanted to give El Capitan a little more screen time just to kind of use it more so I can give you guys my thoughts on that all right