As always, the purpose of the device must be answered first, before we can consider if it is "good" or "bad", as those are relative terms. It also depends on your budget.
In general, the following hold true:
1) For your hard disk, you will want a SSD in a laptop. This is because laptops in general are not meant to hold large amounts of data, because you can place such data on either an external hard disk, a desktop computer or upload to a cloud/data storage provider such as Google Drive, Dropbox, etc. Furthermore, SSD have VERY low power usage, which is important for laptop battery life. And finally, their performance for day to day use is superior, in all scenarios except streaming a large file sequentially (basically movies).
2) For main memory/RAM, you will want at least 8 gigabytes, as to have breathing room to run multiple memory intensive applications, such as a web browser, a game and the editor, at the same time. You usually can expand this after the fact, although at this current time, as we transition to DDR4 memory, the price for memory is at the top of its curve and quite unattractive at this time (I purchased 32 gigabytes of DDR3 memory for half the going price about 2 years ago).
3) For your CPU, if you intend on doing gaming only, I would suggest getting the fastest dual core cpu possible, due to the fact that games rarely use more then 2, so speed matters more then number of cores. However, if you intend to use any professional application of any kind (AutoCAD, matlab, etc.) a quad core is more useful since those applications scale to the number of cores quite well, but that is also in intensive application, large simulations or computations, etc.
4) For the GPU, if you are planning on gaming or doing modeling, you will want a discrete GPU from Nvidia or AMD. Intel integrated are fine for desktop work, and low end gaming, but are rather weak, and thus not useful for any demanding game at any setting above low.
It does have a GPU, the Core i3 series has an integrated GPU on die with the CPU, I believe it is the Intel HD4000 series GPU. Totally adequate for low end gaming, but of course has issues for any high texture game, due to the shared main memory making the memory bandwidth very bad.
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As always, the purpose of the device must be answered first, before we can consider if it is "good" or "bad", as those are relative terms. It also depends on your budget.
In general, the following hold true:
1) For your hard disk, you will want a SSD in a laptop. This is because laptops in general are not meant to hold large amounts of data, because you can place such data on either an external hard disk, a desktop computer or upload to a cloud/data storage provider such as Google Drive, Dropbox, etc. Furthermore, SSD have VERY low power usage, which is important for laptop battery life. And finally, their performance for day to day use is superior, in all scenarios except streaming a large file sequentially (basically movies).
2) For main memory/RAM, you will want at least 8 gigabytes, as to have breathing room to run multiple memory intensive applications, such as a web browser, a game and the editor, at the same time. You usually can expand this after the fact, although at this current time, as we transition to DDR4 memory, the price for memory is at the top of its curve and quite unattractive at this time (I purchased 32 gigabytes of DDR3 memory for half the going price about 2 years ago).
3) For your CPU, if you intend on doing gaming only, I would suggest getting the fastest dual core cpu possible, due to the fact that games rarely use more then 2, so speed matters more then number of cores. However, if you intend to use any professional application of any kind (AutoCAD, matlab, etc.) a quad core is more useful since those applications scale to the number of cores quite well, but that is also in intensive application, large simulations or computations, etc.
4) For the GPU, if you are planning on gaming or doing modeling, you will want a discrete GPU from Nvidia or AMD. Intel integrated are fine for desktop work, and low end gaming, but are rather weak, and thus not useful for any demanding game at any setting above low.
@hobbidude: Go
It does have a GPU, the Core i3 series has an integrated GPU on die with the CPU, I believe it is the Intel HD4000 series GPU. Totally adequate for low end gaming, but of course has issues for any high texture game, due to the shared main memory making the memory bandwidth very bad.