Help choosing a laptop as a gift

[Malloric]

Recommended is generally what you need to run the game well, which sounds about right for ARK. My gaming desktop has a GTX 970. It runs well enough on medium settings. I haven't tried playing it on my laptop (GTX 1060).

The OP (Walmart house brand) is pretty good at the price.

OP compared to a Dell G3 is $86 less and includes a 128 GB SSD ($20-40). Call it $100 less to be conservative. Plus it has the 144hz display which is interesting. Good for CS:GO but meaningless for more demanding games.

edit: Actually, looks like it's a Tongfang (Eleuktronics Mech G2) chassis. Which means the display is quite good, astoundingly good for that price. The major draw back would be battery life won't be great. Other than that it's a steal.

Dell G3 uses a non-reference 1050. It's the old 1050 2GB design. They just stuck 4 GB of 112 GB/s memory on it which solves one of the major problems the original 1050 had, not enough memory, without creating a new one that the 1050 3GB has (ridiculously slow memory). Kind of interesting there. But at the end of the day a non-reference 1050 2GB with 4GB of memory isn't worth $100 so for that price on specs alone Walmart Wins.

Comparing it to Peregine's second Amazon Dell is just kind of dumb. One is a modern computer. The other one is a computer that's been sitting on a shelf for three years somewhere. At $400-500 it would be worth looking at. For $800, well, it's not 2015 anymore. A 1050 and 8300H are substantially faster and more energy efficient than a 960m and 6300HQ. Thus is progress.

[Peregrine]

Originally Posted by Malloric

Comparing it to Peregine's second Amazon Dell is just kind of dumb. One is a modern computer. The other one is a computer that's been sitting on a shelf for three years somewhere. At $400-500 it would be worth looking at. For $800, well, it's not 2015 anymore. A 1050 and 8300H are substantially faster and more energy efficient than a 960m and 6300HQ. Thus is progress.

You don't think it proves what a great deal the Wallmart one is?? Really? It's older. Has a slower video card. Larger hd only real advantage... and they want MORE for it?

[Malloric]

Originally Posted by Peregrine

You don't think it proves what a great deal the Wallmart one is?? Really? It's older. Has a slower video card. Larger hd only real advantage... and they want MORE for it?

No. It just proves predatory sellers list things on Amazon hoping people buy them. The replacements of that laptop with 7300HQ processors and GTX 1060 graphics were cleared out for $600-700 when they became obsolete earlier this year. A predatory seller trying to unload something on an unsuspecting buyer isn't useful in assessing the value of much of anything.

Here's another option:

https://www.amazon.com/HP-3WE99UA-AB...SIN=B07C6WRMC1

$49 more than Walmart but has a 1050 Ti. Also a good buy. I'm a bit of a screen snob. The Pavillion is likewise available with a good 144hz panel, but it's only in the higher spec laptops. The base display is about what you get with anyone else, meh. Pavillions have thermal issues, not horrible but another advantage to the Walmart. Probably get an extra hour of battery life than the Walmart. Dell G3 would get another hour or so on top of that.

Tougher choice there. Being a screen snob, I'd lean towards the slower Walmart PC but $50 for a 1050 Ti is likewise compelling. Again, at the price it's a steal. At the full price of around $900, no. Same deal with Walmart. It's a steal because of the $600 price tag. For the original price of $1,000 there's better options out there.