New Gaming Laptop for Dragon Age Inquisition & Witcher 3

August 31, 2016 4:00 PM

I want to play Dragon Age: Inquisition and Witcher 3, but my current laptop is not sufficient. What should I buy? I don't need the prettiest graphical experience ever, although, of course, that's nice. It'd be awesome if the laptop were good enough to allow me to play the next Mass Effect, next DA 4, and even the next Elder Scrolls game (maybe this is wistful thinking, given that a release date isn't even out yet...). Should I just go with the Wirecutter's suggested laptop, or is there a better choice for me?

Other details:
- Yes, this question lit the fire.
- We don't have a TV, just a projector, but maybe that plus a console would be a better option? Let me know if that's the case. I played Skyrim on an Xbox and enjoyed the experience, but haven't researched how DA:I or Witcher play on the consoles.
- Timing is flexible, since I don't need to play the games right now (but I want to!), so if waiting a few months for a price drop makes sense based on the technology release cycle, please let me know.
- We don't really have room for a desktop and a desk, and don't want to rearrange the house to try to make that work. So either laptop or console + projector are the two options in play.
- I have a three-month-old baby (read: three months of ongoing sleep deprivation) and am not particularly technology-inclined, so links to the exact model I should buy are very much appreciated.

posted by Jaclyn to Sports, Hobbies, & Recreation (9 answers total)

What's your budget?

If you go laptop, Nvidia just released mobile versions of their Pascal GPUs: the Geforce 1060, 1070, and 1080. The 1080 is overkill but the other two will run DA:I easily. They are power-efficient and barely slower than the desktop parts so I'd look for a laptop with one of those chipsets.

Another option would be to buy a desktop PC, rather than a console, and connect THAT to the projector as a living-room PC. This would be cheaper than the laptop and more flexible than the console. You can build a gaming PC that's not much bigger than a PS4 or XB1.

If you go console, wait to see what Sony is announcing September 7th. They are tipped to release a new PS4 that will be more powerful.

PS: Bethesda has hinted that we are not going to see a new Elder Scrolls game for a long time, so I would concentrate more on your other titles. I REALLY hope there is a Dragon Age 4, but I would guess Q2 2018 at the absolute earliest for that one.
posted by selfnoise at 4:21 PM on August 31, 2016

Note: right now the Pascal laptops are just making their way out, so I would agree with the Wirecutter's recommendation to wait for them.
posted by selfnoise at 4:23 PM on August 31, 2016

Another option is to get a laptop that can connect via USB3 to an external PC graphics card. It solves a lot of the disadvantages of putting a high end graphics in a laptop, and can save money, while offering better performance, and allows the graphics card to be upgraded easily, but it's also less convenient. (I think there are sleek portable proprietary options, and often-not-so-sleek DIY options.)
posted by anonymisc at 4:55 PM on August 31, 2016

If you do go the console route, I'm pretty pleased with my XBox One for both the Witcher and Inquisition.
posted by MsMolly at 4:58 PM on August 31, 2016

Response by poster: My budget is flexible - obviously less is better, but we're spending a lot of time at home with the baby (= not spending any entertainment money otherwise), and I know both my husband and I will get tons of game play out of the two games I listed (plus whatever else), so I'll willing to spend a fair amount given how much play time I expect we'll get out of the new laptop. Let's say $2k as a maximum.

Is that a reasonable amount to spend on a higher-end laptop nowadays? We've been using work laptops for casual gaming the past 4 - 5 years...
posted by Jaclyn at 5:08 PM on August 31, 2016

PS4 Neo is supposed to be announced in early Sept. The Neo is supposed to be able to output 4k and I suspect more capable with the forthcoming Sony VR headset. The rumor sites say sub $500 price on the Neo console so that would be more tempting than dropping big cash on a laptop.
posted by LoveHam at 6:54 PM on August 31, 2016

If you don't want to build a gaming rig PC desktop, I'd go console route. Both games are on both PS4 and Xbox One I believe. I used to work in the gaming industry as well as the gaming hardware industry and I always advise people to just build their own rig unless they are frequently mobile and need something they can take with them. I don't think laptop technology is quite yet there for gaming. Gaming laptops are crazy expensive and not that good.
posted by raw sugar at 6:56 PM on August 31, 2016

Yes, that should be fine. For instance, this laptop has a 1070 and is $1700. Unfortunately it's badly backordered, but as more of these Pascal machines come out that should be alleviated. MSI does have a number of machines that are available now, but I can't recommend them as I've never used an MSI laptop before.

Note that if 4K is desirable: the PS4 Neo will output to 4K resolution but will not render games at 4k; that's difficult for $600 cards to do at the moment.
posted by selfnoise at 7:12 PM on August 31, 2016

I have a slightly older model of that laptop (my questions about gaming laptops in general is here) and so far I'm really liking it. It's heavy as hell and the battery life is lousy, but it's quiet, never gets hot (except for the rear fins) and so far runs everything I've wanted at high resolution and high framerate. I don't know quite how future proof it is, as I tend to play older games, but it had no problem with Doom/Fallout 4/DA:I on 1080 (not sure if i or p, honestly, I can't see the difference).

Also, if you can afford to, spring for a larger SSD. You can map Steam games to the HDD after you fill up the SSD, but the loss of startup speed is slightly noticeable.

Someone wrote me in February after my questions and I replied with this:

(The sound seems to have stopped echoing after I sent it back for a bad power socket after 6 months. It doesn't seem to have this as a general issue, just bad luck on my part. The crashes in Firefox were due to an issue with the version of Firefox combined with NoScript. Since updating Firefox a while ago, this issue has fixed itself.)

I'm pretty happy with it and I'd recommend it, albeit with a few small caveats.

Cons: I have had four issues, two of which I still haven't dealt with. I had to download a new driver to get the mouse to scroll in the right direction (it was set up to scroll like the new macs do, which just irritates me), which was annoying, but just a personal thing. The optical drive opens if you brush the left side, which I just have to be aware of. The sound is echo-y when doing anything other than gaming. I think I need to look at drivers and settings, but I've been lazy about it, and it hasn't stopped me from being able to have extended skype calls or watching movies/tv. Finally, it crashes completely very occasionally, but seemingly only when I'm browsing Metafilter. I'm wonder if it's a combination of the extensions I'm running in Firefox. The crashing almost entirely went away after I finally downloaded the windows updates it needed. Also, there are several keys above the standard keyboard that I have not yet unmapped via the registry that I really should. One launches steam's big picture, which is horrible and should not exist, the other launches and presumably starts up a recording software for streaming/recording games. Given that I don't tend to do that, it's near useless to me. On the plus side, if you just leave the program in the startup phase, it won't drop you out of the screen when you hit the button again.

One more con that I just remembered: I have Flux on it, which makes the screen redder at night. It works perfectly without the extreme color changes enabled, but if you enable to very red settings, flux will cause the screen to flicker if it starts on boot up. After about 30 seconds, I can restart Flux without any problem. I don't know if it's the video card, the fact that I use the extra settings on Flux that it has a warning about or Windows 10 and honestly, it's a small issue.

Pros: It's brilliantly fast compared to what I'm used to. I haven't played any brand really new games on it yet, I'm still working through the older ones that I missed that I picked up on Steam, but this is my first experience with an SSD. I wish I'd gotten the larger SSD, as it can hold at most 3-4 games at a time. The restart time is so quick that at first when I experienced that crash with metafilter, I thought it had gone to sleep and woken back up. I've been playing Dragon Age Inquisition and Deus Ex Human Revolution lately and being able to play them in bed/in the living room/at my mom's place when I visit is great. The cooling is amazing. The fans slightly power up to the point that I can slightly hear them during Dragon Age with all the settings on max. They are not needed for CIV 5, which is amazing compared to what I'm used to. I've never had a frame skip or stuttering. Once I had a light layer of oil from my hands on the touchpad, it feels amazing, almost as good as a mac's. The keyboard backlight is really nice, especially the red part, as I use Flux after about 9pm so that I'm not looking at blue light.

Not pros or cons, but just notes: It's heavy and makes me very glad I have a laptop backpack, as a shoulder back would just be too much. The battery life is what the reviews say it is, so be aware that when playing games, you get maybe 60-90 minutes of battery time. The keyboard is full size and requires a little more force than I was used to on a laptop. I didn't get the one with the newer intel processor, as I really couldn't see a reason to, although that may come back to bite me later. The air intake is on the bottom like most laptops, which can be bad if I'm using it in bed and am not conscientious about making sure the intake is not blocked by the covers. I was coming from Windows 7, so installing Launchy has made up for the fact that I really don't like the Windows 10 start menu.

I haven't tried out Fallout 4 or the Witcher 3 and I'm not a online gamer, so I'm not playing and FPSs where frame rate is crucial for playing. I can't speak to how cool it stays playing the most current crop of games, but given the accuracy of everything else I read online, I think it will be fine.

tl;dr: It's good, I'm still glad I got it, I think it was the best option, I wish I had bought the larger SSD hard drive, it's still a compromise vs. what I could have gotten with a tower. The reviews (other than the ones about it being broken out of the box) are fairly accurate.

That was a lot longer than I thought it would be when I set out to write it. Hope it helps. It was a bit stream of conscious, so if anything doesn't make sense, feel free to ask me to clarify.

Also, given the fact that I did plunk down 1.4k for this, there is probably some bit of me that wants to like it because of how much money I put into it. So keep that in mind.

Feel free to memail me if there's any particular questions you have about this one.
posted by Hactar at 9:00 AM on September 1, 2016