Werid CPU to pair the GPU with.

This is a cracking deal imo.

Yes if the processor was an i5 or i7 it would be better. Yes if if it had an SSD it would be better. Yes it I was buying a gaming laptop I would save for the several hundred more such an upgrade would entail.

Simple fact is that if I literally had only £500 to spend then this is actually is a laptop that can play today's generation of games and will probably be good for a few years worth of new releases provided you don't mind moving the detail levels down a few notches as the years go by.

Compared to some laptops that brand themselves as "gaming" which you can find for a similar price and would barely handle Solitaire at least with this you won't find yourself opening on X-mas day only to find you have a glorified typewriter :wink:

Sorry but that's an antiquated view and hasn't been true for years at this point.

All of the modern main engines like Unreal, Crytek and Unity 5 use multi-cores.

Nearly all AAA releases this year were optimised for multicore including Forza Horizon 3, Watch Dogs 2 and BF1.

Moving forward into Vulkan and DX12 multiple cores are able to address the GPU simultaneously which previously wasn't possible and cores will become a direct factor.

This laptop is better than most in terms of price to gaming performance. Much better than an i7 with Intel gfx, but the i3 will struggle very quickly. i3 is aimed much more at light gaming and user duty like web browsing, HD video viewing.

This doesn't mean it can't game, but pretending there would be little difference with an i5 or i7 is just misleading.

While not as low as that figure it does manage 720p in fallout 4 quite well the GTX950m. 1080 is a no go at high or settings or beyond but medium with some tweaks will work on a 950m. That or ultra setting at 720p depending on which you place more value on in terms of the settings.

http://www.notebookcheck.net/NVIDIA-GeForce-GTX-950M.138026.0.html

Well I have no idea what the fps were whilst playing Fallout 4 on Ultra settings as I realised many years ago when I was into benchmarking that actually if the game you are playing is smooth then fps don't matter, enjoy playing the game. Now having been into benchmarking in the past I do know when a game is struggling and when settings have to be reduced. I did not have to reduce settings whilst playing at ultra, much to my surprise, I found it smooth and playable, it was obviously not 5-10fps. As for whether others believe me or not that is for them to decide I have no reason to lie and it doesn't bother me.

You find 5-10fps smooth and consistent? :confused:

--
ok thanks, i still don't know. I guess running some other stress tests on this machine will help me decide to swap it for an upgrade! i was hoping for a nvidia dedicated, but even in black friday none really stood out particularly.

If you can find a better deal please share it rather than just being unhelpful.

This is not a good price for a 950m and i3 u.

Better spending a bit more for a lot more.

The GTX line of graphics cards are Gaming Class graphics cards. Hence why this laptop was advertised as a gaming laptop. A few years back Alienware were selling the Alienware 14 with a GT 750m which isn't evening a gaming grade GPU, as a gaming laptop. There is no definitive rule on what makes a gaming laptop, but a gaming grade GPU is a good place to start. I know its entry but having used this GPU myself with a dual-core cpu, I was pleasantly surprised at how well it performed.

So there is no empirical definition for what a 'Gaming Laptop' actually is, but usually when a computer has a Gaming grade graphics card (any Nvidia GPU with the 'GTX' prefix) like this one does, it can be considered a gaming laptop. If you go on Nvidia's website who make the graphics card (http://www.geforce.co.uk/hardware/notebook-gpus/geforce-gtx-950m) you will see that it states:

"GeForce GTX 950M delivers great gaming performance at 1080p with inspired GameWorks technologies for fluid, life-like visuals. With GeForce Experience for quick gaming optimization, and BatteryBoost for improved battery life you can game longer, unplugged."

Now I know that this is an entry Gaming Graphics card, but if a parent has a budget and doesn't know about technology, something like an AMD R7 or a GT 940m may be the best GPU's they are going to find on sub £500 laptops anywhere else. And if you know anything about gaming then you know the jump from GT to GTX is a huge leap with regards to performance. It can be argued that the CPU is slightly underpowered but it is capable of playing any game, and hey its £479, so it will have to do. My friends £1400 alienware 17 with a GTX 970m hits 24FPS in games like ESO at 1080p in large scale battles, but this is just something laptop gamers have to deal with. Tweaking graphics and resolution settings is part and pass of laptop gaming. Little Johnnie will be happy he's not stuck with an AMD R7.

Hi there, traditionally on desktops, an i3 processor has 2 cores (imagine cores to be like car lanes on a motorway for data) and is hyper-threaded (similar to cores but imagine them like bicycle lanes for data), where as an desktop i5 has 4 cores but no hyper-threading, and a desktop i7 had both 4 cores(or more) and hyper threaded. When it comes to mobile versions of these chips (laptop ones) its more complicated as there are dual-core varieties of both i5 and i7 chips which are far weaker than their mobile quadcore/hyperthreaded(i7) and desktop quad-core versions. The i5-6200u is better than the i3-6100u but only by tiny margin. The real benefit of that Very deal is the SSD hard drive which will really give a speed boost. My only gripe with that deal is that you have to faff around getting money back and applying discounts, where as the tesco deal is a straight forward purchase. In gamining terms both these laptops will perform the same with a very minor advantage to the i5-6200u. If you are happy to get money back later etc then go with the very deal, if you dont have the extra £100+ pounds now and cant wait for a partial refund then get the tesco deal. From owning an dual-core i7 with a gtx 950m in the past, I would just go for the Tesco deal as lots of these lower end dual core CPU's from intel perform quite similarly with badges like i3,i5,i7 being used to manipulate consumers.

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eh? def not dedicated mate.. its shared graphics, but thanks... the R7 is supposed to be one of the best shared graphics you can get, i was told by a trusted friend.
..but so far, mixed results... maybe due to 1. tweaking the amd graphics manually.. and 2. not playing 'quad core optimised games'?? someone else was trying to explain that dual cores are much better, esp for GTA.. agh i cant get my head around this stuff!
but my budget will stick to around £400... 500 will just keep me worrying all the time (i go everywhere with it).
cheers

This is not a gaming laptop. Not sure why OP insists it is.
The fact it has a dedicated GPU does not make it a gaming laptop.

Just imagine the disappointment on little Johnie's face Christmas Day when he unwraps this "gaming laptop".The very deal is a much better deal and is worth the extra. I just think that as 95% of the population don't really know what they are looking for in a computer or laptop (obviously not the OP or most who have commented on this thread) it is good to have some constructive criticism of this deal as it not a gaming laptop. Yes it can play games and yes some of them may play smoothly with medium settings but it is not going to play new games 1080p on high. It doesn't have to either there is nothing wrong with that as long as you know what you are buying in the first place. So please if you considering buying this just beware that it is a very low entry level "gaming laptop" it would be better considered as a work / education laptop that can play some games during a break rather than thinking it's a gaming laptop. Otherwise unfortunately the person you are buying it for may just be a little disappointed.

I'm surprised the graphics on the Lenovo isn't great as the link you've posted has a dedicated AMD R7 graphics card.

between the tesco and very acer deals, you're getting more for your money with the very deal. I've been told by Very that I will get £100 credit making it £485, but you can play it safe and just go fr the £100 credit (automatically credited and no form filling) making it £550. for an extra £70, you'll be getting 128gb SSD, 4gb NVIDIA instead of 2gb and an i5 processor.

My budget was sub-£500 too (and hopefully itll work out) but realised you have to go over to future proof your laptop.

hope this helps.

can i pick people's brains on here?
i already bought the amd a12, *12gb ram, r7 shared graphics Lenovo (10 cores A12-9700P)... as i thought for latest gen and latest amd for 330pounds was a steal.
http://www.johnlewis.com/lenovo-ideapad-310-laptop-amd-a12-8gb-ram-1tb-15-6-full-hd-black/p2913186

its for on the go-work,and only want to play some of the older classic games too...(CS source, dod, bf2, maybe newer battlefields) but hoped i could pull off gta 4 and gta 5 on low settings. sadly its not playing gta 4 so well, so i have low hopes for gta 5, among other stuff.
my old HP A8 amd (shared graphics too) did a pretty good job running most of those games, except gta 4 of course, which still ran, but laggy as hell. ...im so suprised this A12, a latest gen laptop and..what..4 models(?) later with latest shared graphics cant play this same game that much better.
also this Lenovo's keyboard layout is fudged up, and the worst... the battery is shockingly less than 3hours at best! outrageous frankly. ...not to mention a few software issues, which might be down to user-error (me!) or win8 stuff...and video amd driver issues.

**...so i now have a decision to up my budget and go for dedicated gpu laptop (ideally with ssd and fhd) maybe with i3 or i5.... or just accept the fact i got an ok price considering the fhd screen and processor!

im just struggling to get to grips with new tech of newer processors of intel and hyperthreading of the skyflake models etc... and looking at this tesco deal and the very deal, both look ok, but i dont like the i3 so much (despite reading peoples comments above).

please help?
thanks, appreciate it :smiley:

There's a code for 10% off and i've been told that the credit will be applied to my account in January which can go towards paying off the laptop

I thought Very credited the account and didnt need claiming, surely all that is required is screenshots of the offer screens which are the first thing you see on the site anyway.

Please build a laptop on pc specialist for the same money and put the spec up on here. I bought a pc from pc specialist before and would not advise it. They use cheap components from random companies, they don't maintain the software for them and they fail. I had a host of sound card issues in my laptop from them and they refused to sort it without paying.

Its £649.99 and you have to try and claim back money after christmas.

good price but thought the deal I added was similar price with SSD hard drive, i5 processor and 4Gb graphics card.

http://www.hotukdeals.com/deals/acer-aspire-f15-laptop-i5-8gb-ram-128gb-ssd-4gb-nvidia-fhd-very-for-484-99-after-2574214?p=29573995

for this price you build a brandnew from pcspecialist....

By definition it is an entry gaming laptop. I have owned a laptop with a GTX 950m with a dual-core CPU and it played everything at 40+FPS on medium to high settings.

You rarely see a mobile gaming graphics card (I know the GTX 950m is an entry gaming graphics card) paired with a mobile i3, so I think that's why it seems strange. There is such a bias away from the i3 for gaming, but it really is fine for a lot of games.

If you take a closer look at the benchmarks, the GDDR5 950m is paired with a quad-core i7 cpu where as the GDDR3 is paired with a dual-core i5. The data seems slightly biased, but again I think you just proved my earlier point about how CPU's often don't have a huge impact with regards as price to performance compared to GPU's.

Not really. 950 is under powered. i3-U is under powered. Happy bedfellows.

I never said that the difference was massive, but that is still an increase of 16%. The frame rate is **** for both. I never said the difference was night and day, but I did say that the difference was between 15% and 20% which that test shows.

I wouldn't call this a gaming machine tbh but if you use it for mainly work / education and then want an hour break this would be a good laptop for that.

Ok so in Tomb Raider the GDDR5 version has a 3FPS increase over the GDDR3 version... I think you just proved my point?

Here you go
http://www.notebookcheck.net/NVIDIA-GeForce-GTX-950M-DDR3-vs-GDDR5-Review.159861.0.html

Send me the link for that information please. I also read an article on it showing next to no difference. When you understand how memory works, you'll see how that makes no sense e.g. Fury X with its HBM 2 being surpassed with the GTX 980 ti with GDDR5 (not even GDDR5X). GDDR5 is obviously better than GDDR3, so on the same card GDDR5 on a GTX 950m will be better, but 20% better FPS in games is just plain old bull.

In like for like tests, 2 950Ms, both with 2 GB, one GDDR5 and one DDR3, the one with GDDR5 outshone the other by a factor of between 15% and 20% in a variety of benchmarks.

This i3 is 2.3GHz and the i5-6200U is also 2.3GHz with Turbo Boost up to 2.8 for single core loads and I think 2.6 for multi-core loads which will include many games.
So the i5 is up to 21% faster for single core loads and up to 13% for multi-core loads.
I think the rest of the features on the two chips are the same:
http://ark.intel.com/compare/88180,88193

I have a 7 year old 620-m that clocks a similar benchmark to a cpu that has been out for 3 months. I don't consider myself a snob, only someone that actually considers what a processor might realistically achieve.And when you have worked with pcs for a while, you will realise that the ultra-low voltage parts typically don't perform as well as you want after a couple of years. In something considered to be a gaming laptop, these things matter.

I acknowledged that there are new titles that do make use of them. I said that right off the bat, but many PC games like Elder Scrolls Online and World of Warcraft could not give a fig if you have 8 cores or 2. I would say there are far more titles that dont use DX12 or Vulcan, compared to those that do. AMD made a point of ensuring battlefield 1 was designed to use multicores/threads, hence why old FX's outperform newer i5's, but to suggest multi-cores should be prioritised over a good GPU for gaming is simply erroneous. An i3 with a GTX 1080 will always beat an i7 with a GTX 1060, even in battlefield 1.

​couldn't agree more, the new frostbite engine on Battlefield One specifically asks for 4 core Intel or 8 core AMD systems.

It's the ssd that will increase the speed a lot not the processor. I did it without the new supplier code so it went to 550, cash back went into my account the day it stated no issues at all. I'd honestly pay a bit late to have the two drives it will improve the computer a lot. I have a nettop PC with a similar i3 chip and it runs terrible on an hdd but with the ssd it's perfect

For music creation you would be better off buying a computer with the best CPU in your price range. The Graphics card is more important for Gaming and video editing.

Not normally a fan of comments that i'm about to make, as it smacks of laziness and an inability to find the answers out for yourself. But it seems like there are far more knowledgable people on here when it comes to laptops, than i am. I intend to buy a new laptop for portable music production. (have a mac in the office). I use ableton, for which these are the minimum requirements.
PC with Windows 7, Windows 8 or Windows 10
Multicore processor
4 GB RAM
1024x768 display
DVD drive or broadband internet connection for installation

I don't see the graphics side of things being of great importance over general power/usability. Would I be wasting my time getting this and be better off with a faster processor, or would this suffice?

​great. thanks for that mate. looks great to me.

Hi Craig, the i3 6100u is only slightly weaker than the i5-6200u. In gaming terms these 2 processors are basically the same. Here is a video of someone playing GTA 5 with an i5-6200u with a GTX 950m (note that he is also using recording software to make his video at the same time as gaming so you would get better results than what is seen).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ALkpbeFwsxM

The gaming improvement would so minor for the increase in cost.

This with i5 and you have got a deal.

such mixed opinions. I know nothing about laptops, was going to buy the refurbished Dell for £199. but now this has come up, I know it's 200 more. But I need it for work, but would be excellent to be able to play new games on it too on train etc as people it can handle all new games? GTA, Battlefield etc.

also mum works at tesco so can get 10% off.

good buy?

Good for arcade gaming thats for sure. :wink:

​Your right I totally agree anything can go wrong, as I said these are issues I've had, and I wouldn't risk it. wrong or right, i take a lot of peoples opinions into account on here and I'm glad we can all share our thoughts.

Any piece of technology can go wrong. Personally I have had really bad problems with Lenovo, but no issues with Acer.

Personally nothing but bad luck with Acer's tablets and Chromebooks. So I wouldn't be prepared to risk it on a more expensive item like this.

You clearly aren't schooled in deal finding. Just to prove that, here is the same laptop you just posted for £70 less: http://www.ebuyer.com/748760-msi-gl62-6qd-gaming-laptop-9s7-16j612-409

That MSI is over £100 more which is fine if you have the extra money but if you don't your argument is pure conjecture.

Hey core i3 with a GTX 950m will give you a higher fps than A quad-core i7 with no dedicated GPU.

Stone cold.

To turn this into something acceptable you would have to spend the price difference between this laptop and something with good specs, so it's in no way a deal.

https://www.scan.co.uk/products/173-msi-gl72-6qd-220-quad-core-i5-6300hq-fhd-8gb-ddr4-1tb-hdd-2gb-gtx-950m-dvdrw-mdp-hdmi-usb-30-win

If you're on a budget, get an MSI. Extremely upgradeable and you won't get some dual core CPU with no turbo boost that would struggle with office work.

haha lol. ha
gaming laptop with a Core i3

​There's plenty off laptops that don't have a gpu for that price as well as full HD so yes a bargain.

Gaming laptop is pretty much an oxymoron unless you're willing to pay 2 or 3 times as much.

For the price it's a nice bit of kit. Personally after using a SSD now for a few years i could never go back to using a hard drive so for me that lets it down more than anything else.

I don't see a problem with the cpu and gpu combo. Pairing it with a dual core i5 will make very little difference since the difference between the two is very small. The true 4 core+ variants cost a lot more too. The 950m isn't exactly top of the line and should work fine with the i3.

Great bang for the buck tbh. :smiley:

Very unusual for a laptop to skimp on the CPU to concentrate on GPU but this is by far the best gaming laptop you'll get for the money.

I'd expect 30fps on medium or better for the majority of games :http://www.notebookcheck.net/NVIDIA-GeForce-GTX-950M.138026.0.html

Some caveats :

Very likely the CPU will bottleneck it for some games so there will be a noticable FPS hit compared to those benchmarks.

Acer are fairly well known for low build quality.

Expect this to get very hot when gaming, you probably won't want it resting on your lap without some added insulation.

Werid CPU to pair the GPU with.

This is a cracking deal imo.

Yes if the processor was an i5 or i7 it would be better. Yes if if it had an SSD it would be better. Yes it I was buying a gaming laptop I would save for the several hundred more such an upgrade would entail.

Simple fact is that if I literally had only £500 to spend then this is actually is a laptop that can play today's generation of games and will probably be good for a few years worth of new releases provided you don't mind moving the detail levels down a few notches as the years go by.

Compared to some laptops that brand themselves as "gaming" which you can find for a similar price and would barely handle Solitaire at least with this you won't find yourself opening on X-mas day only to find you have a glorified typewriter :wink:

no ssd. cold

Gotta watch the 950m, some have GDDR5 memory but some only have DDR3 so it's a bit of a crap shoot as to which you'll get if it doesn't specify.

I eyed this up myself, but you have to dick around claiming money back in the new year, so actually you are paying £584.99 and have to jump through their loop-holes etc to get your £100 back. I used to work for the now extinct Comet electrical retailers. Every warranty we sold became void after we went bust. I would always avoid deals like this where you have to claim money back. Also I know that one has an i5, but really the increase in performance, especially for gaming would be minimal, s they are both low powered dual-core CPU's, although in other scenarios the i5 could be much more useful. All in all, if that deal you posted up was straight up £484.99 rather than the ACTUAL price of 584.99 and then having to try and get some of your money back, it would be a much 'hotter' deal.

Decent price with a gtx 950m and full HD screen, cpu not the greatest for games though probably bottleneck some games and I would replace that slow hard drive.

I agree there are gaming that utlise more than one core effecively, but the i3 too has more than one core, so it too wil benefit (although not as much), as other quad-core/multithreaded CPU's. I only play games like Elder Scrolls Online and World of warcraft, which are not CPU optimised. From testing a variety of games, and even though these games are meant to be 'CPU intense'(possibly due to a combination of poor optimisation and the type of game ironically), they heavily rely on the GPU. Again this build is all about price. For £479 this laptop is affordable and anyone who is willing to lower settings/resolution can have a lot of fun playing any AAA title.

http://www.hotukdeals.com/deals/acer-aspire-f15-laptop-i5-8gb-ram-128gb-ssd-4gb-nvidia-fhd-very-for-484-99-after-2574214

Much better deal...

Why do the CPU badge snobs always deride this i3 part, it's as close as makes no difference to the 5th gen i7
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i7-5500U+%40+2.40GHz

Ugh i3 COLD

If you are a single parent with a couple of kids who all want 'gaming laptops' this is going to be the best option, again I know something like an Alienware will be much better, but a dedicated entry class gaming GPU for £479 is the best deal around for those on a budget. It was also advertised on the Tesco website as a gaming laptop, so that's why I said it.

I agree that a more powerful CPU will give better FPS, but there will be a disproportionally low increase unless the game was coded to use DX12 or Vulkan. This is because without that, games are only utilising one core effectively, hence why AMD 8 core processors are often beaten by intel i5 Quad core.

I really cant fault this at the price. I know that CES is upcoming and there's going to hopefully be a lot of change in the laptop space very soon but for the price you're getting quite a lot of computer. Yes the processor might not be the greatest thing in the world but it should work well alongside the graphics card. RAM is reasonable, decent capacity hard disk (SSD is a lot of an ask with the rest of the specs). Full HD screen is a nice feature to see but remains to be seen just how good the screens on these will be.

GAMING laptop? :laughing: Hahaha

Good deal, people complaining about the i3 don't understand how CPU is not the major bottle neck for gaming and the i3 is very good anyway, just not for video editing or multi core work. The thing I would want to upgrade is the HDD to SSD.

I'd be tempted to rip out the DVD drive and whack an SSD in there for the OS/Steam/Whatever. Keep the 1TB as your storage dump.

In day to day use, it makes such a difference that I find non-SSD powered PC's almost unusable now ....

Nope, game developers have been badly slacking on that. DX11 had all the tools for better multithreading (since 2009), but devs couldn't be bothered.
Only in the last 2 years, since the PS4/Xbox360 (x64 multicore with low clock speed), and DX12/Vulkan have game developers been 'forced' to get better at it, and they've still been slow in catching on.

Things are improving though, even notoriously badly-optimised long-running games like D3 & PoE have very recently been updated to fully multithreaded 64bit DX11, with enormous improvement (particularly for AMD CPU users).
You may not care about those games, but it signals a change in developers' attitudes "not multithreaded = not good enough".

only light gaming on a950m

I needed to buy a laptop for a friend a few weeks ago and the cheapest I could find with the GTX 950m was £650. That makes this HOT HOT HOT. :smile:

Can't really complain at this price with that graphics card

What are you talking about, the first home use quad core cpu came out close to eight years ago. Of course modern games are optimised to use them.

Nvidia users haven't seen much, if any, improvement in DX12 games. Yes, AMD users have seen some gains but they aren't earth shattering like was promised.

I'm not sure the cpu will be a bottleneck for the gpu. Gaming laptops are a strange phenomenon in my book. A cheap Xbox or PS4 along with a cheaper laptop offers much more overall. If you want to do PC gaming justice it's probably best to build one.

Sorry but that's an antiquated view and hasn't been true for years at this point.

All of the modern main engines like Unreal, Crytek and Unity 5 use multi-cores.

Nearly all AAA releases this year were optimised for multicore including Forza Horizon 3, Watch Dogs 2 and BF1.

Moving forward into Vulkan and DX12 multiple cores are able to address the GPU simultaneously which previously wasn't possible and cores will become a direct factor.

This laptop is better than most in terms of price to gaming performance. Much better than an i7 with Intel gfx, but the i3 will struggle very quickly. i3 is aimed much more at light gaming and user duty like web browsing, HD video viewing.

This doesn't mean it can't game, but pretending there would be little difference with an i5 or i7 is just misleading.

This is more true on previous gen stuff. Current gen on DX12/Vulkan/well programmed from 2010 onwards should support at least 2 cores in gaming. Also CPU is seriously lacking imo - low end, low voltage, u series makes you think less power for more battery life, and then they put dedicated gpu.

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i3-6100U+%40+2.30GHz&id=2623

To give you an idea, it runs like an i5-M series ivybridge, and paired with mechanical hdd, will prob be a bit slow.
If you are gonna get this, wait until after xmas and see if it drops in price.

the GPU fits the minimum of any game this year but may not be that futureproof sadly, I am concerned the CPU wont be strong enough for some games though, it's a hell of a bottleneck if its not