Ask HN: Ryzen 5 Gaming laptop for development

[amitheonlyone]

I was looking for a multi-purpose laptop for some light gaming and also Android and Web development. I have been searching for a while, but with a tight budget, I finally found a gaming laptop with specs: - Ryzen 5 4600H - 16GB RAM - 512 GB SSD - NVIDIA GTX 1650 (4GB) - 120Hz Display - Windows 10

Now two things I didn't like was the weight at 2.2kg and screen size 15". I'd have like to have a 14" screen and weight around 1.5kg. There's a kind of business variant of this laptop which has an Intel i5 11th gen chip without the NVIDIA graphics and costs around the same. The advantage is that is it is 1.7kg.

I have been primarily using Linux for around 2 years now, so I do plan to dual boot Linux at the minimum. So I am worried about Ryzen compatibility. Can the HN crowd please give your opinion on whether the specs is ok for my use or I should look at something else?

I've posted about buying a laptop before but my budget didn't let me purchase it before.

The laptop I was looking at: https://www.amazon.in/dp/B096SKGTCG/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_glt_fabc_55E34DY0PP1WZ0NFG277

[AccordionGuy]

The specs for the laptop you’re interested in are pretty close to the ones for the Acer Nitro 5 (2020 model, Intel i5 10300H processor, NVIDIA HTX 1650 with 4 GB RAM). I wrote about it here:

https://www.globalnerdy.com/2021/07/29/buying-a-used-laptop-...

I’ve had it only a few days, but I’m enjoying it. It runs circles around my previous Windows laptop (my work-issued machine is a MacBook Pro), my trusty ThinkPad T430 with 16GB RAM, especially since I used my Amazon points to bump the RAM up to the maximum 32 GB. I’ve been using it to build Android and Flutter mobile apps, learning Unity, Spring Boot/Kotlin web applications, and some Jupyter Notebook work. It also does a lovely job of playing GTA V.

[amitheonlyone]

It looks like I don't have an option to bump the RAM up and there's only the 8GB variant for the model you mentioned. I hope there won't be any drastic performance difference between i5 and Ryzen 5 4600H

[AccordionGuy]

The i5 10300H and Ryzen 5 4600H are pretty similar, according to the data on UserBenchmark:

https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core-i5-10300H-v...

[SheinhardtWigCo]

Looks like a good spec for the price. You won't have a problem with Ryzen on Linux, but with a dGPU, it's often necessary to use an ACPI hack to keep the dGPU fully powered off, or it'll hurt battery life for no benefit.

Inexpensive gaming laptops are always a significant compromise in some way. If you mostly use it for development and only use it for gaming occasionally, you might end up feeling like the compromise wasn't worth it. It depends how much gaming you want to do and whether you could do it elsewhere, like a console or PC.

There's a good subreddit for this kind of question: https://www.reddit.com/r/SuggestALaptop

[amitheonlyone]

I have used a Lenovo laptop with PoP OS, which had a dedicated NVIDIA card. I don't game too heavy, just some small platformers and occassionally CSGO. And with a 512 GB SSD, I might also need to expand the storage if I plan to game more I guess

[Grazester]

There is no issue with the Ryzen and Linux. What you may have some frustrations with Nvidia Linux drivers.

[amitheonlyone]

I had used PopOs with an Nvidia card before. And it worked out of the box. I did have issues with some of the driver updates and had to roll back the driver multiple times