Best laptop for £800.00?

[Conal]

What's the best possible laptop I could get for £800?

Desired specifications:
64-bit,
Windows 7,
About 1080p x 1920 resolution (16:9) or more,
High performance for playing games such N64 ROMs,
Blu-ray optical disk drive,
At least 200GB or more HDD space,
Super-threading,
About 4 or more USB ports,
SATA port near the back (if not, PATA).

Usage:
Games,
Microsoft Office work,
Animation (CS5 Master Collection),
DJing (VDJ Pro 7),
Net surfing,
4K video publishing (or just 1080p),
Testing & using external hard disks.

[Ryusen]

I'd suggest taking a look at this ASUS G Series or this ASUS, as they both seem to have gotten very high reviews on Newegg.

[RobbieThe1st]

First off, you -won't- find a PATA(also known as ATA) port on a laptop. Niether will you find a SATA port. You -may- however find an eSATA port, which is basically the same thing.
I suggest a USB -> sata/pata/2.5"-pata adaptor, one of which can be found for $6 on eBay, or around $20 bundled with a molex/sata power supply.

Second, it's hyper-threading not super-threading, and - provided you have a dual or quad-core laptop - is not needed. Mainly because you can already run two or four threads at once on -top- of the timesharing the OS already does. On a single-core processor, perhaps. But with a dual-core; no real need.
Also, it limits you to Intel processors - AMD processors can often provide more bang for your buck.

Third - n64 emulation: You should be able to do it on any modern system. Also, single-core clock speed will determine performance; it's not multithreaded. You won't get -any- benefit from hyper-threading here, especially with two or more cores.

Fourth - 64-bit. Any modern system will be 64-bit capable(Intel since Core2, Amd since the Athlon64 many years ago), whether or not it's got the right version of Windows installed on it. You will just have to install your own 64-bit version if you want to use it.

Fifth - a 1920x1080 screen means you're looking at a 17" or so laptop, generally. And 17" laptops are a pain to work with.
1680x1050's a more realistic expectation, and you can find it on 15-inchers, which are a -lot- better size-wise.


That all being said, do you really need a laptop? You would do a lot better buying a desktop, and perhaps a netbook or tablet/phone instead. It'd be a lot cheaper, and provide loads more performance - Laptops use 5400rpm drives which are quite a bit slower than the 7200rpm drives desktops use. And with video editing, that counts for a -lot-.

[aj]

First off, seconding everything that Robbie said.

Except for AMD being more bang for your buck. In the lower end, yes, but for higher end stuff, no way. Intel is retaining the performance crown for a while yet. And you're going to want the higher end stuff I'm afraid.

Usage:
...
Animation (CS5 Master Collection),
...
4K video publishing (or just 1080p),
...

... Seriously? £800 isn't going to come close for a laptop that has reasonable specs for either of those two tasks. And even a desktop is just barely getting there, and that's building it yourself. A professional video studio a friend works at spent upwards of $5k on one system, and they only do 1080p video, not even 4K. Admittedly you can strip out some of their components, like go for a lower spec CPU (i7 instead of Xeon), less RAM, lose the RAID1 hard drives, build it yourself instead of buying it from HP, etc.

For £800 I think you're going to be looking at consumer grade laptops. But to get any decent performance, you're going to want a really good CPU - Wikipedia says "Editing the very high resolution 4K files directly is extremely processor intensive and outside the capabilities of most current computers." And the video studio I mentioned? Their animations person has enough time to go for coffee break while the animations are rendering. And most of the time, it's fairly simple stuff: 5 or so layers in After Effects, 30, 45 seconds max.

I suspect that doing any kind of video work on a laptop will be hell. Upgrading from my laptop to my desktop just for doing photo work was a relief. I didn't know how annoying it was having to wait while Lightroom applied a White Balance adjustment to my photo, or applied a graduated mask until I changed. But using it now, the slight lag between moving the mouse and it being reflected on the screen is extremely annoying and irritating. Now I use it primarily for web surfing and word processing, and not much else. (Admittedly, I moved to an i7 from a Core2Duo, so processor speed + RAM have a role. But a desktop is far more customizable than a laptop, and I took advantage of that when I upgraded.)

You're welcome to try and spend £800 on a laptop - Asus is quite good at having performance at low prices, but I think you end up paying for it in bad design. For basic web/email/word processing, using a family member's Asus is fine. But I hesitate to use it for anything more. So, no, I just don't see a laptop as being remotely near good performance for your proposed use of video/animation production. Seriously, go with a desktop.

[RobbieThe1st]

Except for AMD being more bang for your buck. In the lower end, yes, but for higher end stuff, no way. Intel is retaining the performance crown for a while yet. And you're going to want the higher end stuff I'm afraid.

I disagree. Unless you need absolute-top-end power, you will save -loads- of money by using an AMD Phenom II (x4 or x6) processor.
Consider this benchmark test & comparison: http://benchmarkreviews.com/index.php?o ... mitstart=4
A Phenom x6 1090T at $229 provides half the performance of Intel's top offering, the i7 980X which costs $950.
Literally, you could take four Phenoms on a quad-processor board and get double the raw performance of the 790X for the same cost.
However... That's not really possible - There are no AM3 multi-socket boards. You'd end up getting into AMD's server offerings if you want that much power.

In reality though, I'd try to make sure my tools use OpenCL or CUDA - Stick a GTX 480(or two) in there, and you'd have a -huge- amount more performance than even the i7 can muster for the tasks you want to do.

[aj]

I disagree. Unless you need absolute-top-end power, you will save -loads- of money by using an AMD Phenom II (x4 or x6) processor.
Consider this benchmark test & comparison: http://benchmarkreviews.com/index.php?o ... mitstart=4
A Phenom x6 1090T at $229 provides half the performance of Intel's top offering, the i7 980X which costs $950.
Literally, you could take four Phenoms on a quad-processor board and get double the raw performance of the 790X for the same cost.
However... That's not really possible - There are no AM3 multi-socket boards. You'd end up getting into AMD's server offerings if you want that much power.

In reality though, I'd try to make sure my tools use OpenCL or CUDA - Stick a GTX 480(or two) in there, and you'd have a -huge- amount more performance than even the i7 can muster for the tasks you want to do.

This shows 3 things:
1. I really need to read more hardware reviews.
2. I need to type stuff in less of a rush. XD
3. I should look at AMD for my next hardware refresh. ^^

What I was going for was more "power is necessary, Intel has that power" than "Intel has a better price/performance ratio".

So, yeah, I'm retracting that Intel > AMD thing...

[RobbieThe1st]

This shows 3 things:
1. I really need to read more hardware reviews.
2. I need to type stuff in less of a rush. XD
3. I should look at AMD for my next hardware refresh. ^^

What I was going for was more "power is necessary, Intel has that power" than "Intel has a better price/performance ratio".

So, yeah, I'm retracting that Intel > AMD thing...

To be fair, you -were- correct. Which is why people with extremely specific needs may use a high-end intel. But you pay a lot for it.
Also, this is one of my "pet" topics - I got an AMD Phenom processor myself, have this great two-year-old system that's still good for everything, and as such I love bringing up how AMD is superior.
Either way though, the really interesting part is that no matter -how- powerful your CPU, even a midrange GPU'll beat it... at -some- tasks. But finding CUDA/OpenCL enabled applications can be tricky.