Currently I use ThinkPad x230 with coreboot. Awesome machine for daily use, plays any (that I know of) free/open source game. Can edit video too but takes a while. I do not compile code often. I wish to upgrade to USB-C charging as I travel alot. Also I want my pc to be silent or fan less (are chrome books any good ?). Obv I want to run as little proprietary firmware as possible aswell.

As for gaming / editing, I think about getting a laptop with M$ Windows “air gabbed” and NVIDIA card. But all models seem to have major flaws with cooling or design or just cost unreasonably much ($3k).

I can stick with my current setup if nothing worth it is for sale, thanks if you can give advice !

  • Arden@lemmy.ml
    1·
    5 years ago

    When is it time to upgrade? When efficiency and portability matters… My Ryzen5 laptop has enough power and battery to last the day. The previous laptop was a corei7 gaming laptop with sub 5 hour battery and weighed 4kg while the new one will get 8+ hours and is < 2kg.

    USB-C charging - THIS… I can plug in a spare 20AH battery and recharge if I’m away from power for even longer or quick charge using my 65W USB-C charger, both of which can also charge my phone, tablet, etc…

    Bandwidth - newer devices will have 802.11ac dual band dual antenna, up to 860Mbps or even WiFi6. They will have super fast NVME storage. Even old school 600MB/sec SSDs do not stack up against 2GB/sec NVME storage. They will have USB 3.2 Gen2 for 10Gbps bandwidth - I recently got a NVME to USB3.2 external drive, so I can transfer between old USB2 (40MB/sec), USB3 (480MB/sec) and new Gen2 devices at 980MB/sec. Unless you prefer watching progress bars…

    Graphics - I was using a (very) old-but-beefy Radeon 7990 GPU from 2013 for home gaming on a PC, but when it came to encoding x265 video it could not do it. My Ryzen5 laptop with it’s built in Vega8 GPU, not a beefy GPU by any means could do hardware encoding of X265 when editing and transcoding video from my action camera.

    Gaming - I even dual-boot to an M$ os so I can take my gaming to friend’s LAN parties. Sure, when in a Zerg rush it starts to get choppy… but it’s Vega8 gfx handles the games I want to play good enough.

    My laptop is a Huawei Magicbook and cost me about $1k, but there are other Ryzen laptops around for reasonable $ such as Lenovo, which I recently got suggested for a friend who is also super happy with her purchase