Hardware Which of these laptops are better to use?

[jDSX]

I want to help my friend buy a laptop since he needs one for school soon and doesn't have much money which means he's limited we got it down to these two laptop, bare in mind his budget is $200 and he can't get a weak atom/celeron since he will be doing low end gaming during vacations and snes emulation.

1st laptop:
hp
AMD A8 4500m apu 1.9ghz
1tb
8gb ram
radeon 7640g
nice big 17' screen

2nd
toshiba
Intel core i3 3120m 2.5ghz
750gb
8gb ram
intel hd 4000
nicer keyboard but smaller screen

the third choice was a sandy bridge pentium with 610m.. I don't think it can match either of them. He really wants the AMD one but I don't think it will do anything compared to the i3 will. Any help would be great.

 

[Deleted User]

I would choose the second one. The gpu on the first one is better but not by much. But on the second laptop the cpu is much better. Also it's better to have smaller screen if he want to take it to vacations. It would be easier to put it in his bag.

 

[jDSX]

I would choose the second one. The gpu on the first one is better but not by much. But on the second laptop the cpu is much better. Also it's better to have smaller screen if he want to take it to vacations. It would be easier to put it in his bag.

I heard that it goes up to 2gb of vram does that mean it beats the intel hd 4000 with the same configuration potentially?

 

[Deleted User]

Well I'm not gpu expert. i just looked in the benchmark site and saw there that radeon got 600. The integrated intel gpu got 400 and something. It's enough to run games like sims 3, gta san Andreas, rayman legends, nfs hot persuit,etc. Also because the cpu is better on the second laptop the emulation would also be better not only for snes games.

 

[Luckkill4u]

Both laptops are bottom tier. I'd go with the AMD A8 over the Intel i3 for gaming but overall the i3 should be the better CPU as said above. If your looking for a laptop for light gaming I'd try to expand that tiny budget. In the end your probably going to be wasting money on a laptop when you could probably get a better experience with a cheap Tablet.

Sent from my Samsung Galaxy S7

 

[FAST6191]

Is SNES emulation that demanding these days? I know things have gone up slightly, and of course you could go full bsnes/higan, but I still recall doing it just fine on sub GHz single core things back when. If we were talking 32 bit and newer then there might be something to talk about but outside of crazy accuracy and filters, and possibly some Amiga stuff, then 16 bit and older is doable on everything you might find these days.

Strictly speaking when asking "what is better to use" it has to be in the user's opinion. I can tell you what screen is more accurately colour calibrated and some physics related numbers for the keyboard, however it is the one using it that matters. On keyboards then if you are doing games you will have a mouse and if you have a mouse you have a desk and with that you can have a keyboard. Technically you could also pipe it a screen out over HDMI or something but that might be getting a bit silly for a budget and size.

Anyway that is a bit of hard decision. Games wise yay radeon, CPU wise yay intel in this case, GPU wise boo Intel for games -- they have got better (you might play some games beyond minesweeper now) but it is still not good. Personally I inclined to ditch most games on laptops as an impossible task (give or take emulation of older systems, similar vintage games and stuff like the DRM free offerings from humble bundle type places).

 

[jDSX]

Both laptops are bottom tier. I'd go with the AMD A8 over the Intel i3 for gaming but overall the i3 should be the better CPU as said above. If your looking for a laptop for light gaming I'd try to expand that tiny budget. In the end your probably going to be wasting money on a laptop when you could probably get a better experience with a cheap Tablet.

Sent from my Samsung Galaxy S7

Yeah but a tablet doesn't have (full sized) usb ports or hdmi/vga ports also no disk drive.

 

[hii915]

2nd one emulation is crap on amd

 

[Jay Clay]

I will definitely go with toshiba, hp has one of the worst technical support, as for the tech specs they both are really similar with the performance. In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the Intel HD Graphics 4000 Mobile are very slightly better than the AMD Radeon HD 7640G, plus if is for school, a 17" screen laptop is too bulky to my teste. The second one for me.

 

[Phya]

I would go for the second one, allthough the first one's graphics are better, I play higher end games on my hd 4000 and if you go to the lowest settings there almost playable, and a i3 would be perfect for emulation due to its low amount of cores, it could be enough firepower to run wii and gamecube games at decent framerates...