Yes I am a gamer, no I don’t want to use the Laptop for gaming.
The Laptop in question is the ‘Lenovo IdeaPad Gaming 3 Gen 7’, I can’t out right purchase it outright as any device is way to pricy for me. So it would be an monthly payment through 2 years.
Why do I want the Laptop?
I’ve been pushing myself to edit videos and have got to the stage that I have registered a company that I’ll be doing this under. Sure my PC would do the ok job, it runs the programs I need such as Premiere Pro but I feel a more portable set up might be needed in the future for as my partner wants to go away to so many places in the future, the ability to move rooms in the house when I feel I no longer can work in the room such as my office to the sitting room as well as if it comes to it I can use the laptop for more ‘high-end’ gaming on the go in my spare time.
Why this Laptop?
Well I saw it on my phone providers website as I was checking when my current laptop is due to finish it’s cycle (The laptop I have currently only have 4GB of ram and can barely open the internet) also it cost like ~£40 a month.
How much would I be paying?
The cost on the website is £42 a month with £10 upfront cost.
This does come with a ‘bonus’ of 2 year subscriptions of Microsoft Office 365 and Xbox Game Pass Ultimate.
I looked it up for specs and seems like it has 16GB of RAM? Do you think that will be enough? I built my own PC in 2016 and went with 32GB to future-proof it (somewhat), and I could always upgrade if needed. I don’t think you have that option with a laptop and will just be putting yourself in the same position again in the near future.
16Gb is good for most people. 32 would better suit graphic/game designers, people who never close applications etc.
32 isn’t enough for a lot of game developer jobs. I’ve had 64 GB of RAM since 2020. Although I’m an engineer who deals with memory stomps and memory stomp detection takes double the RAM. Even without that, my RAM is usually 75% in use, so when I do memory stomp detection it’s pretty much using pagefiling for a bit of it.
That said, video editors need just as much if not more RAM than game developers usually do. They have to load up 1-2 GB videos and duplicate them. If you are making stream compilations it can easily take over 32 GB of ram.
@MJBrune @moreeni I know 8GB isn’t enough that’s why I’ll upgrade to the the max (from what I can see) 16GB on that laptop. I would love to have anywhere between 32 - 128GB on a laptop to work on but knowing I’m working with about 16GB and a much worse GPU than a 3050ti that is in the laptop I feel that this is the best ‘upgrade’ I can do for myself ATM really. I do wonder what sort of game developed / video editing portable rig you can find with something close to 64GB Ram.
@eezeebee The one that I’m looking at has 8GB of RAM with the upgrade slot accessible to add another 8GB. Yes it would be annoying if I have to update in the near future but knowing a 3050ti is inside of it so that I’m not relying on the CPU & RAM alone I think it should manage it. The other downside is the Storage but there is a empty slot I can add a 1TB SSD into when I can afford it what at least will help, that an External Hard Drives are a thing.