[awscreo]

Thx for the input, Mark. I can see why you would need to have a very high spec computer, given your professional needs at your business.

Our budget and needs would be less, but still we want something that performs and hopefully will be able to handle increasing technological demands over the next few years. I'm hoping for at least five years solid performance.

My wife and I after digesting all the wonderful computer information and advice in this thread from those more expert than we, are considering another Asus laptop. This one has a Ryzen 4800 as opposed to a Ryzen 3700.

Wonder what you and others think ?

It is a gaming computer.

Here are the specs:

https://www.costco.ca/asus-tuf-a15-tuf506ih-rs74-english-gaming-laptop%2c-am...100657699.html

Another puzzlement for me is that the cheaper Asus Ryzen 3700 has two drives , a 1 TB HDD and a 512 GB SSD, while the more expensive Asus Ryzen 4800 has only one drive, a 512 GB SSD.

Again I'm not that knowledgeable but it would seem that having two drives over one drive in a computer would be an advantage.

I think we can do better spec-wise are you based in US Les?

I'm putting a short list of laptops that I think might be a good choice. I'll be updating them as I go today. (i'll also try to dig about those models and see if reviews are good later on). I'd suggest not rushing the purchase and finding that one computer that you'd be happy with and will last you a while)

Non gaming ones:
https://www.amazon.com/Lenovo-ThinkPad-E15-Octa-Core-i7-1065G7/dp/B08HMJZRZ5
https://www.amazon.com/Lenovo-IdeaPad-inch-FHD-Beats-i7-10510U-iCarp-Wireles.../dp/B08G4N5G4W
https://www.amazon.com/HP-Touchscreen-i7-8550U-Keyboard-Fingerprint/dp/B08C256788

Gaming ones:
https://www.amazon.com/ASUS-IPS-Type-GeForce-Battery-TUF506IU-ES74/dp/B0863DW238
https://www.amazon.com/Lenovo-Legion-300nits-4-20Ghz-Bakclit/dp/B08HSQF74S

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Last edited by awscreo; 09-17-2020 at 07:34 AM.

[landrew]

Hi

Yes US based. Asus makes great gear. I own a Asus ROG desktop and Asus router. The Zenbook and Q series laptops are great as well. The TUF and ROG laptops are high spec but generally heavier then most. I find the newer HP Envys to be a great compromise between weight, specs, and battery life. I also have a zenbook for travel and a hp envy 15.6 for work. I find that i'm using the hp envy more for photo edit, surfing, watching tv, etc than I originally thought.

Anyway good luck on the search. You can't go wrong, IMHO, with Asus, HP envy or spectre, and Lenovo

regards
gary

[awscreo]

Imo the best solution for a home computer is building a desktop PC, dollar per dollar there's no comparison in terms of performance and flexibility. But that requires finding someone to put it together lol, or following a one of many youtube tutorials on how to do it) I do it myself as a hobby, so I save the cost there, plus I have a microcenter 10 minutes drive from me which was awesome for getting good deals on my parts..

Also, timing for getting a laptop is rather bad now, due to covid a lot of people are buying them for work and kids to do homework on, so a lot of good models are sold out and are in high demand. Like I can't actually find a 4800u laptop for sale right now, seems they've been sold out.

[nocturnal]

Lesmote49, that laptop looks great.

You are far better without a HDD in the laptop better to use a portable USB HDD and plug it in when you need it.

I took out the HDD in my laptop and replaced it with an SSD. Now runs quieter and I have several portable HDDs I swap between computers and media players etc.

You can buy a 5TB USB portable drive for around £100 GBP for example or smaller if you want less. Or a portable USB SSD?

You can even get a 1TB USB flash pen drive nowadays... Amazing!

[jcdoss]

You are far better without a HDD in the laptop better to use a portable USB HDD and plug it in when you need it.

I upgraded the SSD in my laptop (an Asus Zenbook that I bought for super-small size, but now regret giving performance) and also picked up a network drive that I loaded half-way with 8T. I was running hard drives thru USB and/or high capacity flash drives, but if you use your laptop on your actual lap like I do, you might get tired of burying yourself in tech. The network drive is slow, but probably not much slower than the USB transfers were, and it is looking to be more storage than I'll need for a decade.

Nevertheless, that Lenovo gaming laptop @awscreo posted looks sweet... :-)

[ehrwien]

Another puzzlement for me is that the cheaper Asus Ryzen 3700 has two drives , a 1 TB HDD and a 512 GB SSD, while the more expensive Asus Ryzen 4800 has only one drive, a 512 GB SSD.

Again I'm not that knowledgeable but it would seem that having two drives over one drive in a computer would be an advantage.

Only you can know how much disk space you need on the machine itself. For a laptop my advice would be to go for all-SSD storage, the main advantage of SSDs over HDDs being that there are no moving parts inside them, and they are faster to access (both read and write speeds). The main disadvantage is that SSDs are more expensive per GB than HDDs.
Not that I've ever had it happen or that it would be especially probable, but inside HDDs there are spinning magnetic disks (spinning at thousands of RPM), and reading/writing is done by adjusting a head to the position of the disk that shall be accessed, like a grammophone reads a vinyl (but ideally without touching), and if you're very unlucky and move around with the laptop in your hands and the HDD tries to access some data on the drive, your movements may affect the HDD so that the head touches the disk, which could lead to the whole drive failing because of that.
There's no such risk (however small it may be for HDDs) with SSDs. So for a portable device I'd always go for all solid state storage. I did this with my desktop PC as well a while ago, because of the better speeds that SSDs offer. I only have external HDDs (and an external SSD as well) for backup reasons.

[The Squirrel Mafia]

Imo the best solution for a home computer is building a desktop PC, dollar per dollar there's no comparison in terms of performance and flexibility.

Indeed! Nothing beats a machine that you can build yourself. There are so many advantages that you can't really go wrong. You get far better parts & quality for a lot less than buying a similar built machine from Dell, HP, & others. If something "breaks", you can just replace that one thing, instead of replacing the whole machine do to proprietary compatibility issues with PC manufacturers.

I just built an AMD Ryzen 5 3600 machine using a Gigabyte Aorus Pro B550 chipset board & 64GB of RAM. It blows my old 8 core AMD FX-8350 machine by a long shot. It seems like the AMD B550 chipset boards will be compatible with the 4th generation Ryzen CPUs for future proofness too.

As it is, this 6 core Ryzen 5 3600 can do anything without a hiccup. I can eventually replace it with a much faster single & multithread performance AMD Ryzen 7 3800XT later down the road when AMD starts blowing them out to make room for the 4th generation Ryzen CPUs. I could eventually replace that 3800XT CPU with some newer 4th generation CPU farther down the road as well.

It takes about +-15 minutes to build a machine once you have all the parts & you know what you're doing or about 2 hours or so fumbling around.

[awscreo]

just built an AMD Ryzen 5 3600 machine using a Gigabyte Aorus Pro B550 chipset board & 64GB of RAM. It blows my old 8 core AMD FX-8350 machine by a long shot. It seems like the AMD B550 chipset boards will be compatible with the 4th generation Ryzen CPUs for future proofness too.

Haha i had a FX8350 machine back in the day as well. I also randomly got some sort of settlement that AMD had to do for that chip last year lol. Apparently they were not super transparent in their marketing materials

I'm running the 3800x in my desktop, and it's a beast. But due to using this machine for 3D rendering/Animation/working with big comps in PSD etc, i want to upgrade to 3950x soon, should be a huge boost in performance. And the new nvidia 3080 looks super tasty with insane amount of CUDA cores to boost performance for work applications too.

[nocturnal]

I upgraded the SSD in my laptop (an Asus Zenbook that I bought for super-small size, but now regret giving performance) and also picked up a network drive that I loaded half-way with 8T. I was running hard drives thru USB and/or high capacity flash drives, but if you use your laptop on your actual lap like I do, you might get tired of burying yourself in tech. The network drive is slow, but probably not much slower than the USB transfers were, and it is looking to be more storage than I'll need for a decade.

Nevertheless, that Lenovo gaming laptop @awscreo posted looks sweet... :-)

That new laptop has USB-C ports and with a USB-C portable SSD drive it would give really fast data transfer speed.

I already get around 110 MB/s from my USB 3.0 portable which is pretty fast. You would need a 1Gb/s network to get close to this. The old 100Mb/s networks are far too slow nowadays.

Remember that 1 Byte = 8 bits ( 1B = 8b )

I doubt the OP can be bothered with network NAS drives etc... A bit like myself 👍

[reh321]

Is a computer designed for gaming have more of a focus on game requirements and less of a focus on what my wife and I use a computer for ? Wonder of the 3700u would be good for a number of years (4-5 ?) considering what we use a computer for ?

A computer built for gaming should meet your needs just fine for years to come - it will have a powerful CPU and good display hardware.

The computer I am typing this on began its life as a gaming computer some time ago. When the motherboard of my Win8 machine died, our older daughter - knowing that I didn't want to get a Win10 machine - took a box which had been her boyfriend's {now her husband's} gaming computer, added memory and peripherals from the remains of our Win8 machine and a new hard-drive, 'creating' a new Linux computer for us; we may use it until this mother board also gives up {we have her old gaming computer in the closet - but we would have to get a new monitor to use it}.

[landrew]

hi

out of the laptops listed in the below list ( a few strings down). I like the Thinkpad E15 and the Envy. Also MSI and gigabyte make great gaming / all purpose laptops but those tend to be more expensive. Check Lenovo's website for outlet/clearance you might be surprised what they have. Also HP was running some great deals recently directly from the hp website.

I generally agree on building your own desktop. But some of the prebuilt "gamng" desktops go so cheap, used or refurbished, that its better to upgrade. which is what i did with the Asus ROG desktop. Another good source, btw, is MicroCenter. The have some great deals on higher end computers.

regards
gary

[awscreo]

If you can find someone to build it for you, I can come up with a build for your budget on pcpartapicker. You can source it online or in a local microcenter.

If you can find someone to build it for you, I can come up with a build for your budget on pcpartapicker. You can source it online or in a local microcenter.

You can also get a great deal at MicroCenter on rebuilt computers, which are generally better than new, because everything gets tested on an individual machine basis, not a statistical sample on an assembly line.

My suggestion is to make sure first that you know what software you want to use. Then see if you could live with the operating system that your chosen software requires (you may have options). Then, figure out what hardware you'll want that will make your chosen software and operating system run best on (i.e., how much cpu and memory "oomph" you need to run the software - and plan extra for updates that will surely get bigger and slower).

I've pretty much hated every operating system made since MVS and VM/CMS. (My native language is PL/1.) I did learn to appreciate MS-DOS v.6.2 (with Word v. 5.5). (C afficianadoes: Why would you want to write in code that requires you to remember three different ways to say "not" and program on a computer that has the high-order bit on the wrong side?)

[awscreo]

Yeah buying a pre-built pc from microcenter might be a good option. You can pretty much get all the pieces there, including monitors, mice, keyboards etc. They are pretty helpful and will definitely give you an advice on what machine/parts would suit your needs.

[lesmore49]

I want to thank all the posters who have provided such valuable information to my wife and I, while we make our decision regarding the purchase of a computer. I was mentioning to my wife this morning after we reviewed all the posts, that for people like us, who are not technologically savvy, we've received a wealth of info and had a thorough education on what type of computer is best for our needs, through the input we've received on this thread on the PF.

The stage we are at, right now is that we are hopefully near the final decision and when we make that decision I will post on this thread.

Thanks to all who have participated in this thread and if you think of anything else, please post.

---------- Post added 09-17-20 at 04:49 PM ----------

[/COLOR]We have ordered our new computer. Here it is.

https://www.costco.ca/asus-rog-zephyrus-g15-ga502iu-xs74-gaming-laptop%2c-am...100659825.html

Should be here in 4 to 10 days.

It has Windows 10 Pro .

What would you suggest for a browser for this system ?

Question, is the Edge Chromium browser pretty good, or glitchy ?

Thanks to all for your help. With your input we were able to make an informed decision.


We may be asking questions again, once it arrives.

We're senior learners.

Les and Mrs. Les [COLOR="Silver"]