Techie’s Guide: How to Choose the Best Laptop for You

Walking into a computer store to buy a laptop should be like choosing a reliable partner. With many options available in the market navigating through the sea of specifications, features, and prices can feel overwhelming. Whether you’re a tech enthusiast or just a casual user finding the perfect laptop requires thinking and informed decision making.

Setting the scenario

You went to the computer store to buy a laptop upon arriving at the store a store employee greeted you and he asked you what you wanted, and your reply to him was “I need a powerful laptop for work and probably gaming too” he recommends a laptop and when you looked at the laptop in detail you saw that the graphics card was something with MX and you thought it has a very good card, then you looked at the processor when you saw that the processor was i7 you said okay this is the laptop I was looking for. You didn’t even bother comparing prices in other stores because you were too impressed with the laptop and you went ahead and bought the laptop.

Upon reaching home and installing all the programs and games you need, you are disappointed by the performance on testing it out. The performance you get in games is very bad and the rendering times in programs take a long time but you still think you’re getting the best laptop you can get for this price — because you don’t know about laptops. You ask yourself, is the processor model of the laptop good, is the graphics card good, is the RAM capacity of the laptop enough — you don’t have the slightest idea and yet you could have bought a better laptop but you bought a weak laptop model that is not enough for you. And it’s not just these because you didn’t do price research from other stores you bought the laptop for more than its normal price.

So what should you do to avoid getting this same problem?

You need to know about processors, graphics cards, storage, and RAM components when it comes to computers. So, let’s explain the components to you;

Before we jump into what this article is about, here’s something that you need to know. If you have a budget and plan to buy a computer, desktop PCs that you can buy for the same price are more powerful than laptops. Because the engineering work of the components in laptops is more costly than desktops, as a result, laptops cost more than desktops, therefore, if you do not travel a lot and do not need to move the computer, building a computer is much more advantageous than buying a laptop.

That said, when you’re planning to buy a laptop, you need to decide the purpose you’re going to use the laptop. Let’s look at three cases; Gaming, Rendering, and Business.

So if you’re buying a laptop to play games, the most important component is the graphics card. The processor is an important component but you do not need an incredible processor — so put the focus more on the graphics card.

When you’re getting a laptop for rendering (editing videos and other productions), the processor is an important component —but you also need a good graphics card for these tasks. Critics have recommended you choose a laptop with an Nvidia graphics card because the core called CUDA in Nvidia graphics cards is very performant in rendering.

But why is the graphic card important in rendering? Well, we know that while playing games we can get higher performance. But why is the graphics card important in rendering? Here’s why, until a few years ago render engines were able to render mostly using the cores in the processor but now render engines use the cores of the graphics card instead of the processor cores, and although this is a newer technology, especially in the 3D rendering industry, many of the render engines can now render with the graphics card. In addition, rendering using the graphics card takes much less time than rendering using the processor.

For gaming and rendering scenarios, they both have the disadvantage of short battery life due to the high power consumption, therefore, in these two scenarios, you will use the laptop mostly plugged in.

The last scenario is a laptop for business. These will not be used for gaming and rendering, so you get low performance and long battery life.

Components

1. Processors: Laptops are seen with marks such as i5, i7, i9, or Ryzen 5, and Ryzen 7. These are the laptop processor models — AMD produces Ryzen processors, and Intel produces the i versions. The performance hierarchy in Intel processors is as follows i3 are entry-level, i5 are mid-range, and i7 & I9 are high-end processors — and the same hierarchy exists in AMD’s Ryzen processors (from low to high i.e. 3,5,7,9).

These processors also have other numbers and letters which show the generation of the processor. For example; i7-11800H —where (11) means the processor is an 11th generation i7 processor, and (H —on other processors you will see G1, G7, Y, and U) mean;

• • Processors with the letter U at the end are processors designed for low power consumption. These processors are not very performant but they provide long battery life this allows us to use these laptops for a long time without being connected to the charger.
  • Processors with the letter Y processors consume even less power than processors with the letter U so they are ultra-low power consumption.
  • Processors with the letters G1 and G7 indicate the level of the internal graphics card in the laptop. The internal graphics card of the processor with the G7 is more powerful than the processor with the G1. If you are doing things/tasks that require high performance such as playing games, rendering, and 3D modeling you will need to choose processors with the letter H.

Thus, in the three cases (Gaming, Rendering, and Business) — processors with H are good for Gaming and Rending, and processors with U, Y, G1, and G7 are good for Business

2. Graphics Card: AMD and NVIDIA are the most preferred graphics card manufacturers. If the graphics card has RTX, GTX, and Quadro in its name, then the card is produced by Nvidia. On the other hand, if the card has RX in its name, it is produced by AMD.

RTX series cards developed by Nvidia are known for technologies such as Ray tracing and DLSS — where Ray tracing is a technology for creating realistic images that calculate reflections in the image — it is worth knowing that Ray tracing technology does not work very well on AMD cards. On the other hand, if you are interested in rendering you still have to choose a laptop with an Nvidia card because they have CUDA which is very performant in rendering therefore it will be much better for you to choose Nvidia cards.

How to know which card is more performant

Notably, in a video card series the higher the number of video cards the more powerful it is. For example, RTX 3080 is better than RTX 3070, RTX 3060, and RTX 3050 (the same applies to the rest, ascending). Watts also matters— this is the maximum wattage consumed by the graphics card. For example, RTX 3060 80W and RTX 3060 130W, the model with higher wattage is more performant and consumes more power than the other. So not only is the model of the graphics cards important, but the watts values consumed are also important.

Tip: You can play games on the laptop you choose for rendering (vice-versa) —in other words, there is no rule that rendering is impossible on a gaming laptop.

For the Business scenario, you can get laptops in the MSi Summit series, Huawei’s MateBook series, Lenovo’s ThinkPad series, and Asus’s Zenbook series. These can be given as examples you can look at the laptops in these series and decide on the laptop you will buy according to your needs

3. RAM, SSD, and Laptop Screen: Other components like RAM, SSD, and laptop screen are also important, but the options are more limited.

RAM: For today’s games and programs you need to buy a laptop with at least 16GBs of RAM. And with time to come, 16GBs will be insufficient. Even now you can get insufficient RAM errors with 16GBs. Indeed, you do not need high-capacity RAM for games but when it comes to rendering, even 16GBs can be insufficient but 16GB is enough for entry-level.

SSD: Buy a laptop with at least 512GB SSD. The size of today’s games and programs has increased a lot so buying less than 512GB SSD may be the wrong choice — where over time you may have to delete something to free up disk space.

Laptop Screen: If you’re going to play games with a laptop it will be much better for you to buy a laptop with a high screen refresh rate because playing on a screen with a high screen refresh rate especially while playing competitive games increases your performance in the game. For this reason, critics recommend buying a laptop with at least a 144Hz screen for gaming. But if you’re not gaming and need more accurate colors you need a screen with high color accuracy there are standards such as NTSC and sRGB that have been developed to determine this color accuracy.

If you look at the detailed technical specifications of the laptop you will buy you will see the percentage values of these standards, for example, %72 NTSC, means that this screen can display 72% of the NTSC color gamut. The higher this percentage value the more saturated and accurate the colors are, therefore, you need to choose a laptop with high color accuracy.

One more addition, in Gaming, and Rendering cases, your laptop (if it is Windows-based) has to stay plugged in if you want to get full performance from the processor and graphics card because after unplugging the laptop the processor and graphics card reduce their performance to save power, therefore, you cannot get high performance from them.

So if you want to do your work and render at high performance without being plugged in, you can opt for Apple’s MacBook series. The new MacBooks with M1 and M2 processors are both incredible performances and can give this performance for a long time without being plugged in, therefore, if you travel a lot and play games you can look at MacBook models with M1 and M2 processors.

Editor’s Note: Written with contribution from The Mysterious Tech