Is anyone playing with a windows 10 laptop

[tedhebert]

Wasn't sure if this is the right place for this kind of question. Moderators, if you think it should go to technical support forum or other, feel free to move it.

I've always played with a desktop. A very good one... I'm about to acquire a high end laptop, probably a gamer rig (a la alienware).

While I'm pretty convinced a rig like that will be easily able to handle Civ6 and all expansions, I do have a few questions:

1) Can those who ARE playing the game on windows 10 laptops give me some informations as to how satisfied or not they are playing the game on it

2) What should I take as order of importance when looking at the laptop spec , considering gaming and streaming are at least equally important to me as general office/web browsing usage ? I'm thinking something like this, but it's really mainly instinctive:

a) GPU
b) SSD only (unless someone thinks that's overkill and simple HD is ok)
c) CPU (I'm looking at minimum I7 or ryzen equivalent, so should not be a problem) (Is ryzen a valid option ?)
d) RAM
e) monitor size (as in 17" better than 14")

thanks for any advice

 

[Chefofrats]

I work and play Civ VI with all the additional content (expansions, DLCs, the whole lot) on an ASUS UX501J ultrabook laptop from 2015 - one which was pretty powerful back then, but is nowhere near the specs of current laptops. I can comfortably play in 1080 resolution with reasonably high graphics options (medium settings with some individual options customized to high, like dynamic lighting and bloom).

The specs are as follows: 4th genration i7 CPU (4720HQ 2,6 GHz), 8 GB RAM, GeForce 960M GPU with 2GB of RAM, SSD. The screen is 15,6" with 1920*1080 resolution.

My wife plays the game with absolutely maximum settings on her 2019 Dell G5 with an i7 9750 CPU and a GeForce 2060 GTX, but that is waaay overkill for Civ.

Currently Ryzen 7 4800H seems like the best CPU option for a laptop - it is more energy efficient than the Intel chips, and it runs cooler. Check online reviews to confirm. The recently released 2020 HP Omen gaming laptops are quite nice - the cooling solution is getting raving reviews (the 2019 version was not as good, so do not confuse them). Unike most gaming laptops, the new Omen looks stylish and elegant, which is important for office work - the average gaming laptop looks like something out of a 12 year old's wet dream, I shudder just thinking about it. I think I will upgrade to one of those new Omens when they finally reach this backward country in August. You can get one with a Ryzen 7 4800H and a Geforce 1660, which would be more than enough for Civ. 8 GB of RAM is enough for Civ I guess, but to future-proof your laptop you should aim at 16 or 32 GB of RAM.

A quick SSD is important too for quick load times, but pretty much any modern laptop has one of those.

I think 15,6" is enough for gaming. 17" might be better, but portability suffers for those larger laptops, which is not something you want in a machine used for work aswell. If you do go for something bigger, avoid the 17" ASUS gaming laptops, I've read some horrible reviews of their screens and cooling.

 

[tedhebert]

I work and play Civ VI with all the additional content (expansions, DLCs, the whole lot) on an ASUS UX501J ultrabook laptop from 2015 - one which was pretty powerful back then, but is nowhere near the specs of current laptops. I can comfortably play in 1080 resolution with reasonably high graphics options (medium settings with some individual options customized to high, like dynamic lighting and bloom).

The specs are as follows: 4th genration i7 CPU (4720HQ 2,6 GHz), 8 GB RAM, GeForce 960M GPU with 2GB of RAM, SSD. The screen is 15,6" with 1920*1080 resolution.

1) My wife plays the game with absolutely maximum settings on her 2019 Dell G5 with an i7 9750 CPU and a GeForce 2060 GTX, but that is waaay overkill for Civ.

Currently Ryzen 7 4800H seems like the best CPU option for a laptop - it is more energy efficient than the Intel chips, and it runs cooler. Check online reviews to confirm. The recently released 2020 HP Omen gaming laptops are quite nice - the cooling solution is getting raving reviews (the 2019 version was not as good, so do not confuse them). Unike most gaming laptops, the new Omen looks stylish and elegant, which is important for office work - the average gaming laptop looks like something out of a 12 year old's wet dream, I shudder just thinking about it. I think I will upgrade to one of those new Omens when they finally reach this backward country in August. You can get one with a Ryzen 7 4800H and a Geforce 1660, which would be more than enough for Civ. 8 GB of RAM is enough for Civ I guess, but to future-proof your laptop you should aim at 16 or 32 GB of RAM.

2) A quick SSD is important too for quick load times, but pretty much any modern laptop has one of those.

3) I think 15,6" is enough for gaming. 17" might be better, but portability suffers for those larger laptops, which is not something you want in a machine used for work aswell. If you do go for something bigger, avoid the 17" ASUS gaming laptops, I've read some horrible reviews of their screens and cooling.

Thanks for the info.

I'm trying to find the right spot enabling me to play with all graphics maxed out, but not going overkill if it's not needed.

I was very much looking into alienware M17 R3 ou Area 51 laptops, but the price is pretty steep. So i'm very happy to read:

1) So if a G5 well equipped is already overkill for CIV 6, I guess that it will be adequate for most other gaming needs I have... That would shave off qui a few hundreds $ of the price

2) Yeah seems like it's become pretty mainstream now... though I dislike when they offer you a 500G Raid 0 SSD, because that just means only 250G data space, and some people will just not get that

3) I prefer larger, because I won't be using this for work, I'm close to retirement. Main use will be to enable me to play and use it on my balcony/verandah, and also on the road on vacation, so it's not the end of the world if it's not the most ultra slim or lightweight laptop.

As for Ryzen... I must admit to being a little wary of AMD stuff, and I'm 100% conscious that it's very probably a bad attitude stemming from horror stories from 15-20 years ago... but it doesn't change the fact that I'd rather have an Intel CPU But I'm trying to keep an open mind. You are right, the current state or reviews seems to be veryu enthusiastic on the new Ryzen CPUs.

As for HP, I've had some in the past, and the unistallable bloatware they included with them made me so mad... Especially since the laptop itself was great. As a matter of fact, I'm presently using an elitebook 850 at work, and it's a pretty nifty product. I wonder if they stopped the forcing the HP bloatwares on their products ?

Anyways thanks again. I've tried to buy a laptop for gaming only once before, and it was a very bad experience... in the mid 2000 I bought a Dell XPS laptop for a huge price, and I never ever enjoyed playing on it, so I'm wary.. but I'm pretty convinced that laptops have evolved enough to make them a very viable gaming solutions nowadays

 

[Chefofrats]

The Alienware laptops seem terribly overpriced, the logo itself costs much more than it should.

The Dell G5 is very powerful, but the cooling is ridiculously loud while gaming. It took several months before I got used to the noise when in the same room with it at full blast. That's why the HP Omen seems like a good choice - the reviewers claim it is has the quietest and most efficient cooling system currently available (in that price range anyway).

AMD CPUs were inferior to Intel for a long time, but the current generation of Ryzens seems to break that trend, and then some. I would trust the reviews.

Bloatware seems to be much reduced in current laptops compared to those of the past. And if there is some, it can be uninstalled. I haven't ever had an HP laptop, but I helped several family members with configuring their Dell/ASUS/Acer laptops over the past few years, and all the unnecessary stuff was unistallable. And the Omen series is praised for quality by folks on a IT-oriented forum I check out regularly.

The Dell XPS series has never been the best choice for gaming - they always have powerful CPUs but weak GPUs. The build quality has always been excellent (I remember the luxurious feel of metal and genuine leather on my mother's XPS in the late-2000s), but it is generally a work-oriented product.

 

[tedhebert]

Ok I'll check out the Omens... the Dell G7 offers better hardware than the alienware equivalent for less $$$ I find that surprising but... and yes, loudness is annoying when extreme, so both G7 and alienwares get bad scores on that part...

I think I checked the 17" omens and they were quite expensive too though... not in the realm of razer which is ridiculous, but not any deal compared to the G7

 

[tedhebert]

@Chefofrats , finally went with the G7 17 in the end... almost all reviews I read about the Omen said it was great, but very noisy too... So decided to go with dell again, as I have for the last 15 years I,d say.

I'll let you know how bad the noise is... maybe it got better since G5 ?

 

[BlackChimaera]

Hi -for perspective - until I suffered my technical issue that means I still cannot actually play it (there is another thread on this- I do not believe this is hardware related), it ran well on my 10 year old Asus N55SF laptop running Win10 - albeit this was a kick-ass laptop 10 years ago (I7 etc)

I7-2670QM
Nvidia GT555M (2Gb video RAM)
16Gb DDR3 RAM
Magnetic hard disc (not SSD)

The same machine still plays Elite Dangerous, X-plane10 and Ark Survival. so it is doable,..

 

[Thorn]

The XPS series now have very capable GPUs for gaming. I've run Civ5 and Civ6 on an older XPS with zero issues (Nvidia GTX 1050 with 4GB GDDR5). Right now I have an Alienware m15 r2 (GTX 1660 Ti) with an OLED display. It is fantastic. Haters gonna hate the big dogs in the business but I've only had positive experiences with Dell/Alienware.

 

[tedhebert]

@Chefofrats , finally went with the G7 17 in the end... almost all reviews I read about the Omen said it was great, but very noisy too... So decided to go with dell again, as I have for the last 15 years I,d say.

I'll let you know how bad the noise is... maybe it got better since G5 ?

Just a follow up... Devlivery took a long time (3 weeks) but finally got my laptop a few days ago. CIV 6 is working like a charm with all the bells and whistles turned on, as hoped and expected on such a powerful machine.

Fan noise is really not that bad. Even when doing end turns on huge maps, the noise is very, very acceptable.

I DID run into that annoying RGB backlit keyboard glitch. Took me quite a while to realize it was a CIV 6 problem, and not a problem with my system, when everything started to blink bright red as soon as I started/loaded a game and it accessed the GPU. Since FX has never fixed that bug, and claims it,s a dell/alienware command center bug, I had the turn off the RGB option on the CIV 6 menus. Thank got THAT exists, otherwise the game would have been just too annoying to play. i think the idea was a neat one: FX wanted to change the color of all the lights depending on the CIV jersey color... but in some instances, it justs bugs

Anyways... Really loving my purchase so far. As @Thorn has mentioned, I,ve bought MANY computers from Dell in my life, and I have always been very satisfied with the products and the service !