SUBSIM Radio Room Forums - View Single Post - Lil' advice on gaming laptop for old SIMs?

Drmbb · 09-27-19, 07:39 PM

Hey y'all,

So I have not had a gaming PC since around 2012 or so when my old ACER desktop died. That and its predecessor had worked well for about 9-10 years with Destroyer Command, Silent Hunter III, IV and V and a few other titles like Jutland. So now I would like to get (some) of those and others (UBoat for one) up and running again. By necessity, I would like to use a 17" laptop as I already have two desks occupied with work related hardware - a 2018 Mac mini with 2 27" displays and peripherals for personal & work stuff, and an employer provided Lenovo T460P with docking station and 32" monitor - so there really is nowhere to put another desktop, and I don't want to go back to switches and that cabling mess/nightmare with shared monitors and such.

I was looking at Sager as I know a bit about their history. Not averse to Alienware or MSI or ACER or any others really though. The Sager build I was thinking of was a 17.3" (1920 x 1080) with a 9th gen 8-core i7, 32GB RAM and 1TB Samsung SSD and either an Nvidia GTX 2060 or 2070 and I would upgrade to Windows 10 Pro (I also have old licenses for Windows XP, 7 and 8 I could use and may in virtual machines if needed)

My thinking on this is I can still use this for some coding and simulations I sometimes do for work (mostly in R) but it should be fine for the sort of naval SIMs I like to play both old and new. The GTX 2080 seems gross overkill and is not worth the price premium to my mind over the 2060 or 2070 with this years updates by NVidia. Similarly, the price premium for an i9 cpu doesn't seem worth it to me, not for the gaming certainly, but also for my work (if I need that much of a difference over an i7 I would turn to available AWS cloud servers anyway with a lot more cores available).

I would appreciate thoughts from you folks since you are all running and using the exact sorts of PC games I want to get going again.

While I have to use Windows 10 on my work laptop, I really don't claim to be all that savvy with it. I know MacOS and Linux like the back of my hand (was an OS X public beta user 20 years ago, and have used UNIX (mostly IRIX and Solaris) & Linux for decades), but Windows I sort of just muddle through. And I have been out of the mainstream PC gaming tech for awhile so catching up!

Thanks for advice, thoughts, tidbits and all!

09-27-19, 07:39 PM	#1
Drmbb Swabbie Join Date: Sep 2019 Posts: 5 Downloads: 8 Uploads: 0	Lil' advice on gaming laptop for old SIMs? Hey y'all, So I have not had a gaming PC since around 2012 or so when my old ACER desktop died. That and its predecessor had worked well for about 9-10 years with Destroyer Command, Silent Hunter III, IV and V and a few other titles like Jutland. So now I would like to get (some) of those and others (UBoat for one) up and running again. By necessity, I would like to use a 17" laptop as I already have two desks occupied with work related hardware - a 2018 Mac mini with 2 27" displays and peripherals for personal & work stuff, and an employer provided Lenovo T460P with docking station and 32" monitor - so there really is nowhere to put another desktop, and I don't want to go back to switches and that cabling mess/nightmare with shared monitors and such. I was looking at Sager as I know a bit about their history. Not averse to Alienware or MSI or ACER or any others really though. The Sager build I was thinking of was a 17.3" (1920 x 1080) with a 9th gen 8-core i7, 32GB RAM and 1TB Samsung SSD and either an Nvidia GTX 2060 or 2070 and I would upgrade to Windows 10 Pro (I also have old licenses for Windows XP, 7 and 8 I could use and may in virtual machines if needed) My thinking on this is I can still use this for some coding and simulations I sometimes do for work (mostly in R) but it should be fine for the sort of naval SIMs I like to play both old and new. The GTX 2080 seems gross overkill and is not worth the price premium to my mind over the 2060 or 2070 with this years updates by NVidia. Similarly, the price premium for an i9 cpu doesn't seem worth it to me, not for the gaming certainly, but also for my work (if I need that much of a difference over an i7 I would turn to available AWS cloud servers anyway with a lot more cores available). I would appreciate thoughts from you folks since you are all running and using the exact sorts of PC games I want to get going again. While I have to use Windows 10 on my work laptop, I really don't claim to be all that savvy with it. I know MacOS and Linux like the back of my hand (was an OS X public beta user 20 years ago, and have used UNIX (mostly IRIX and Solaris) & Linux for decades), but Windows I sort of just muddle through. And I have been out of the mainstream PC gaming tech for awhile so catching up! Thanks for advice, thoughts, tidbits and all!