Good laptop for gaming
 

So my 8 yo bro wants a laptop to play games, not hardcore games but games like Minecraft, Grand Theft Auto IV and maybe Battlefield 3, yes, he is pretty good at those (I trained him well, I am an awesome brother). So, I found the following and I want your advice whether it's a good laptop to run GTA IV at maxed out with an ENB Series mod:

HP Pavillion G6
8 GB RAM
Intel Core i7 @2 GHz
NVIDIA GeForce GT 630M 2 GB
Windows 8 Single Language x64
Edit: AFAIR it's 1 TB HDD
Final Price: $850

What do you think?

Re: Good laptop for gaming
 

Seems fair for the price, though we know nothing of the GFX card from that. Though if possible, which I think it is since the specs there are not what is listed on the other Pavillion G6's I can find, I would go down on harddrive space and go up on the GFX card. A kid doesn't need 1 TB, heck I dont need 1 TB. He needs 250gb. Maybe less. Or maybe you can get a SSD instead if the GFX card is fair.

And I just read the last part of your message. No 850$ laptop is gonna run GTA IV maxed perfectly super extreme smooth. However, if the gfx card is decent it will run it smooth at high settings without shadows and low AA. Not that I play GTA IV.

Re: Good laptop for gaming
 

Should be fine, though depends on resolution. Managed to run latest Tomb Raider on quite similar laptop (Lenovo IdeaPad y580, uses nvidia's 660m instead of radeon though) in ultra, though not in fullHD, on 1600x900 worked well (by that I mean >=30fps). Managed to find similar to this one (http://www.bestbuybusiness.com/bbfb/...tID=BB12390642) that was a 'display model' in the shop for ~800USD. In fullHD you'll have to go for medium settings

Re: Good laptop for gaming
 

It depends. Whether it's a crappy Ati card or a 7970 mobile. We need more details.

Re: Good laptop for gaming
 

I don't really know what the card is, but my cousin has the same exact laptop and it runs Minecraft with realistic texture pack pretty smooth, GTA SA with ENB Series mod which is way better than the original GTA IV graphics extremely smooth, and it does run GTA IV pretty smooth, but not maxed out. So?

Re: Good laptop for gaming
 

Well since the Pavillion G6's I find differ a bit in the hardware compartment we really need to know more about the GFX card. However, I can tell you that with a 850$ laptop you are most likely gonna see lag and fps drops in newer'ish games from time to time, not that it's gonna happen constantly but under hard conditions it will lag. I dont game much though. Though I think a laptop like that is pretty darn good for a 8 year old.

Re: Good laptop for gaming
 

Minecraft mostly uses CPU just like dwarf fortress and any other lo-fi high-demand games (also any voxel games, graphic cards are useful for old texture-on-triangles approach to rendering, voxel stuff is not HW-accelerated yet by any GPU afaik). GTA IV is a 2008 game, any 'gaming' laptop from 2010+ should run it without problems (only problem might be if the texture pack you mention needs crazy amount of GB of GPU ram to load those = super high def resolution), but again, going for lower resolution should make it easy for GPU.

Re: Good laptop for gaming
 

Just mentioning the fact that he's 8 years old, he doesn't need that much of resolution. And yes, remember the fact that GTA IV was released 5 years ago and everyone is looking forward for GTA V now, not IV. So I think it's pretty good for GTA IV which is basically the maximum he needs.

Re: Good laptop for gaming
 

Indeed. But if you're thinking of not spending another 1000 bucks in the near future (as you mentioned GTA V comes out soon), you might want to look for y500 double nvidia card setup, similar in price, much more future proof when it comes to old-school (non-voxel) type of gaming (doubt minecraft uses both GPUs, but for mainstream AAA titles will work wonders)

Re: Good laptop for gaming
 

For me, I have an Xbox 360, good enough for me, cause all my modding is done on my desktop PC, but GTA V will definitely belong to my Xbox :D