When planning to Choose a Laptop, you need to ask yourself the main question: for what purposes you need it. It can be a universal home device, a powerful gaming gadget, or a budget option for home and office.
In each case, you need to consider many characteristics, from the screen diagonal and ending with the amount of RAM, processor frequency and video core quality.
Looking for the right gadget for your daily needs or gaming? Then, pay attention to these criteria to Choose a Laptop.
Table of Contents
Screen Diagonal and Resolution- Choose a Laptop
The resolution of the screen should be directly proportional to the power of the processor. It is bad if a productive device has a low resolution and average picture quality, and it is just as bad if a weak laptop has a great screen.
Talking about the diagonal, you can adhere to the following rules:
- For traveling, pay attention to compact laptops with a diagonal of 13.3 to 14 inches.
- Universal home laptops may have a screen with a diagonal of 15.6 to 17.3 inches.
- Laptops for gaming or movies should have a screen diagonal of 17.3 inches or more.
Laptops with a miniature screen cannot have good resolution, because small models usually have stripped-down versions of discrete graphics cards.
The golden mean for convenience and comfort are models with a diagonal of 15.6 inches. If they are equipped with a good graphics base, they are suitable for working with word processing, web surfing, gaming and watching video content.
As for the resolution, it is worth starting from your personal needs. To communicate in social networks and play online Roulette games at Playamo, you do not need high figures. The full potential of graphics won’t be used, but you will have to pay for the powerful laptop.
Different Processors for Different Purposes
For those who are well versed in processors, this criterion will be the main factor when choosing a laptop. It determines the performance and power of the device, and its speed.
In other words, the cooler the processor, the smoother, more stable, and correct the laptop, the fewer errors and brakes, and the more resource-intensive apps and games will be available. On the microprocessor market today, AMD and Intel share the leadership.
Each corporation offers several CPU series, and there’s a large variety of models.
Intel processors are subdivided into the following series:
- Atom;
- Celeron;
- Pentium;
- Core i3;
- Core i5;
- Core i7;
- Core i9.
The first three series are found in budget devices, and Core ones are more powerful and expensive.
For work and entertainment, the Intel Core i5 processors of the tenth generation are the most useful.
Speaking about the main competitor of Intel, we should consider only AMD Ryzen processors no older than 2000 generation: it is after the release of these CPUs the company was noticed and appreciated on the microprocessor market.
A Graphics Card for Your Laptop
Almost all mobile processors have a built-in video card. But since the size of the processor is small, it is physically impossible to build a powerful video core into it.
In many laptops, besides the built-in video core processor, a discrete video card is added.
In some laptops there are no discrete graphics cards, and they work only on the built-in video core. It reduces the cost of a laptop and decreases battery consumption when working with graphics, but the performance of the laptop will be much lower in graphics tasks and games.
Some modern games cannot be played without a discrete graphics card, and programs that can use the power of the graphics card will run several times slower without it.
There are laptops with discrete graphics cards from Nvidia and AMD. The leader is Nvidia with its GeForce graphics cards.
How Much RAM Is Enough
RAM is the amount of storage that stores data for quick access when you are working on your laptop. A good example is several open browser tabs. Each tab’s data is temporarily loaded into RAM, so switching between them is instantaneous.
Here’s how much RAM you should have for comfortable work:
- 8 GB, if the laptop is designed for office, daily tasks and running some games.
- 16 GB, if the laptop is mainly gaming and multimedia, or is designed to run resource-intensive apps.
At first it may seem that 4GBs are enough, but over time, the speed will become too low.
Laptops with 32 GB of RAM are suitable for the most powerful gamers and professional systems, but it makes no sense for the average user to overpay for storage, most of which will not be involved in work.
HDD or SSD- Choose a Laptop
A laptop has built-in memory that can store photos, movies, documents, games, and more. It also stores the installed operating system.
There are three types of memory:
- Hard Disk Drive (HDD).
- Solid-State Drive (SSD).
- Hybrid hard disk drive (SSHD).
Hard disks appeared long ago, their main advantage is a large volume.
They have 2 major drawbacks:
- Slow performance.
- It’s better to avoid strong shaking, especially when powered on.
SSDs are a more modern format of internal data storage.
Here are the advantages of SSDs:
- Faster performance than HDDs (about 3 to 5 times faster, depending on the task and the specific drives being compared).
- They keep working even after strong shakes.
But the cost of SSDs is much higher than HDDs. Another questionable disadvantage you may hear about is the limited write endurance of files on SSDs.
