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What is the best bang/buck laptop brand?


fur

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I'm just curious as to what brands have the best prices for the highest performance. I've found brands like iBuypower are decently priced compared to alienware and msi. Granted they do cut corners on things that are less essential such as the trackpad and mic to get the price down. Also, what sites do ou find are the best for shopping for a gaming laptop? I personally used newegg for my last two laptops (the first wasn't really a gaming laptop).

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I bought a valkyrie cz 17 with the nvidia gtx 675mx in feb. Took 2 weeks to hit my door. It arrived with none of the software drivers installed took a n hour or so to get it all running smooth. All running but the touch buttons to each side of the power button. One of these forces the fan to run in turbo mode until switched off. The fan without the switch functioning still runs low to high cooling as needed, the switch just forces high rpm. I looked up on the web and found nightmare posts about how horrible their customer service is especially with RMA repairs so I've been running it as It came.

I know all bad experiences hit the web to vent frustration, but the good experiences seldom do. No complaints no posts.

6 months later still running great. Just decided to RMA it to have those touch buttons replaced/repaired before my warranty is up, just in case it takes a few returns to have it fixed. I'll let you know how it ends up. I'm a bit worried, some peoples stories are pretty bad.

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just got the lenovo y500 and i think its a killer deal considering the performance is equal to 12-1300$ books. not to mention i got it for $800. i keep the 1tb drive and added a refurbished 256gb msata drive for another $140 and its snappier then ever.

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Newegg or amazon (also depending on tax) are definitely great especially with the holiday season/black friday coming around again (and with the frequent lenovo deals) Otherwise, I did make a recent purchase for a clevo laptop from lpc-digital and they were fairly reasonable and responsive to emails if you're int he market for a customizable gaming laptop..

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Now, when you say bang for buck do you mean the performance? If so, Clevo and their resellers (some mentioned here) would be the best option. The thing is, when it comes to high-end laptops, there's more to it than just power. What about durability and long term reliability? How good is support? Can I overclock the components and will the cooling system handle it at full load? What about the extra features, ports, upgradebility options?

If you try and look for answers to the above questions, you may find that Clevo's aren't always the best choice though I agree, price/performance ratio is their top selling point. Personally, I'd look into something that will last and handle everything I might wanna throw at it.

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If the question was "which is the best bang-per-buck smallest notebook" then the answer would be a 12.5" HP 2570P for reasons as outlined in http://forum.techinferno.com/hp-business-class-notebooks/2537-12-5-hp-elitebook-2570p-owners-lounge.html :

A 2570P can be had for as little as US$400 on ebay , still with remaining 3yr global onsite warranty. A bargain when you consider it's following unique, impressive performance features and durable MIL-spec build quality:

<ul>

<li>socketted CPU allows a user upgrade up to a 45W i7-quad resulting the smallest, most powerful systems available that can function as a desktop replacement. Competitors like a 12-14" Lenovo X230/X1C/T430s, Dell E6230/E6330, Toshiba R930/R940 or 13" Macbook Pro all have soldered dual-core CPUs making CPU upgrades unfeasible. Need to upsize to a larger 14" Lenovo T430 to get a socketted CPU.

<li>5Gbps expresscard slot allows implementing a ~$200 [email protected] DIY eGPU for gaming graphics, CUDA/OpenCL processing and/or driving more external LCDs. HP could uprate this to 8Gbps pci-e 3.0 by attaching to the Northbridge rather than the 5Gbps pci-e 2.0 Southbridge. Doing so would nearly give Thunderbolt's 10Gbps bandwidth but with the added benefit of pci-e compression (x1.3Opt).

<li>optical drive can be swapped with a second 2.5" 9.5mm SATA-III SSD or HDD in a caddy & in a JBOD, RAID-0 (performance) or RAID-1 (redundancy) configuration

<li>upgradeable wifi : can upgrade to recently-released 802.11AC standard with a Intel 7260 HMW card. Generally not something that's possible on HP systems due to their wifi whitelisting policy. Suspect due to either a BIOS bug or easter egg here.

<li>battery options include a 31Wh 3-cell, 62Wh 6-cell (9hrs) and 100Wh 9-cell battery (15hrs). Enjoy biggthumpup1.gif</ul>

Comparison: http://forum.techinferno.com/what-notebook-best-fits-my-needs/2580-12-5-ultraportable-lenovo-x230-dell-e6230-hp-2570p.html#post34610 concludes the 2570P is the best one.

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I too would recommend a lenovo. I got a y510p 750SLI with bluray player 24GB m.2 cache drive 1tb 5400 drive for $1080 refurbished from tiger direct. got a 256gb samsung 840 for $130, and i love it...if I can figure out how to get rid of the stupid whitelist for the wireless card.

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I'd also recommend a clevo/sager machine, but it all depends on your budget and if you want to go for vhigh/ultra in games, as well as if you would be OK with a large or heavy laptop.

Personally I got a Clevo p375sm with two 8970m's and loved it (until I semi bricked it heh)

But I'm sorta used to desktop gaming and with mobile GPUs being so weak, not going sli/cfx would have killed me :P

Sent from my Nexus 7 using Tapatalk

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The reason I like my y500 is the overall good value. Things like a metal body, with great speakers and wonderful ventilation (really this baby never heats up for me) add to the fact that is can run sli graphics really well. I would recommend getting the sli version from amazon so you don't drop that much more for the second GPU

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I am using lenovo y510p right now. It costs me about $1075 include tax. so far I think this is the best laptop compare to the price. It has i7 4700mq, 8gb ram, 1tb +24ssd, gt750m, 1920x71080 HD resolution and can upgrade to SLI. The only crappy part is the wirless card, but you can upgrade it once if you unlock the bios.

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I know it has been said so many times in this thread but if you can afford it then Lenovo Y-series do offer a lot of bang-for-buck. I got $1000 off my Y580 thanks to employee discount on top of a sale at my last job, and while there are better laptops out now I'm really still happy with this one.

Unfortunately ideapads in general lag thinkpads so hard for good support from Lenovo. The BIOS problems are detailed elsewhere on techninferno, and the Windows 8 & Windows 8.1 support offered is abysmal with very poor drivers, constant BSODing and no way to control UEFI Secure Boot from stock bios. I am going back to W7 as soon as I can practically afford a break in working to do the reinstall.

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I have a few modern (Samsung, HP, and MSI) laptops and a dell tablet. Of all the money that I have spent on these "toys" I have found that I use my MSI GT60 the most and have found it to be the best value per dollar. Although I have owned a Lenovo Think-pad T510 in the past and even though it may not have had the best performance value per dollar it BY FAR had the best build quality of any laptop that I have owned.

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Try those Clevo/Sager by XoticPC. For 1100 you get a GTX 770M, which is not bad at all if you want to do gaming and stuff. Those laptops are also very easy to disassemble for replacing/upgrading hardware or just cleaning. The only problem is they don't have backlit keyboards.

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Asus and Lenovo have good laptops that have a decent graphics card and aren't priced too high. I purchased the Lenovo y410p myself for $820 from the Lenovo site and it's pretty decent at gaming. I usually buy laptops from the manufatures themselves or Amazon. Dell also has some good laptops but the price is a little higher. Acer's V series is the best budget values for I7's and GT 740m graphics.

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I spent $879 on a y410p recently. If I didn't have work specific requirements, I would have gone for one of the new Dell Inspiron 7000's. There are some nice options there.

You can find cheaper Asus Vivobook's with touchscreen for about $650. If the funky build doesn't bother you I'd say these give you more hardware for the price MINUS a dedicated graphics card.

The discreet card requirement really messed up my buying options, but I am very, VERY happy with the y410p. It has same specs as a $2700 macbook pro. Isn't that bang enough for your buck?

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