Hello — I’m heading to college soon and need a laptop I can use on the bus and at school. My budget is under $1,000 and I’d like something that can run light-to-moderate games (Minecraft, Rocket League). I’ve been looking at MacBooks (mixed reviews) and the Lenovo LOQ 17 (reports of poor battery life). I’d appreciate recommendations for models that balance performance, battery life, and portability for frequent travel.
The best option would be probably to wait from time to time you can get a open box vivo book s15 with the Ryzen AI 9 hx 370 with 32 GB of RAM and one TB of storage for just over 800 so if you have the some time to wait in order to get the best deal that would definitely be a good option because it is basically the same as the vivo book s16 which for my experience is amazing but with the a 16x9 display instead of 16x10
I would suggest you to not choose the Lenovo LOQ. My friend bought it a year ago and got fed up with it- poor battery life, motherboard and heating issues. I myself am a university student and I know very well how crucial battery life is. After suffering for a year he sold the loq for the Lenovo yoga pro7. It’s not as good at performance as the Lenovo LOQ but it has better battery life and a fabulous screen. This varient doesn’t have a dedicated GPU that’s why it runs cooler and doesn’t stress the battery. Small- medium games like Minecraft, rocket league, valo, league of legends, etc can be played. My friend playes counter strike and at 1200p medium he used to get 100+ fps (the chip and igpu is capable enough for games like these. Battery life lasts for 7-8 hours of normal use- web browsing, netflix, coding At 50% brightness. It’s not heavy and quite portable. Othr options could be the ThinkPad X9, Asus zenbook S14.
That being said, the ThinkPad X9 and Zenbook S14 are not powerful enough for moderate gaming. Anything more than Minecraft or indie games and iGPUs (apart from the AMD Strix Halo iGPUs) can struggle.
Unfortunately, at this price point, you’ll have to prioritize the portability and battery life versus performance aspect. You won’t get both below $1800 - $2000 unfortunately without a sale.
tho I wonder if the GPU on Intel’s Panther Lake next year will finally be strong enough for more games
Yes, but prices of those might be very high given the current RAM prices going through the roof and then some.
If 16 is enough than this would be nice
Yes the highest varient( core ultra X9) has the best igpu among intel chips which is around 40-50% better than the current best igpu (arc 140T) that’s why I’m waiting for next year to switch my electronic heater with a screen and display.