I just bought this yesterday for my 16 year old son. He is in year 11, doing subjects heavy in maths and science. His old laptop was 8 years old and falling. I had a budget of $1200, reluctantly, as I knew that DDR prices and storage prices had gone through the roof recently. Typically, I have spent $700-800 on laptops for my kids.
I walked into a local retailer and this was presented as a laptop that had been ordered and not collected or paid for. Price was $1,999 firm.
After some negotiation, I walked out with it for $1,500. Way more than I was comfortable spending but it seems to be a good deal, unless I am missing something?
That’s a good deal for 1500 AUD. The Ryzen 7 250 might sound weak based on category alone (“two gens old”, mid-midrange), but it’s still a Zen4 Hawk Point 8C/16T little guy at 26-30W TDP, comes with a quite performant Radeon 780M (meaning you could game on it without the RTX, even!), and it easily goes toe to toe with the Apple M4 (regular base model, non-Pro/Max!).
What this means is that while the dedicated GPU is disabled, you should get pretty solid battery life - up to 5-6 hours I reckon - while also being able to game with slightly better performance than the Steam Deck, AND with the dedicated GPU - usually while connected to mains - you’ll get proper performance around 90-120fps on high/est settings in most games.
Oh, and one more thing. You might’ve spent a bit more than you intended BUT you bought a more future-proof hardware at a steep discount (you spent 25% more than intended, the seller got 25% less than intended). That laptop will last you about as more in time as much more as you spent on it.
The 200 and 300 series processors are better than the new 400 series processors as they removed cores to cut costs.
The x50 hasn’t seen any removed cores. Both 250 and 450 come with 8C/16T config, but the 450 has ~50% more raw performance based on benchmarks.
Except most laptop manufacturers are using the 445 which is only 2x zen 5 + 4x zen 5c.
Except that doesn’t matter because we’re doing model by model comparison.
“ooh, a lower end device that is marked to be lower end, did exactly that and lowered the end result”