Laptop Graphics and gaming

[Knyterage]

Greetings all you wonderful people.

I am aiding my friend in picking out a new laptop and for the most part I know what to look for, however laptop graphic cards are my weak spot. He's not a heavy gamer but what he is looking for is a laptop that will run the Total War series especially the most recent ones. I am at a loss on what laptop graphics card can handle such games. I found a laptop with a quad core amd a8 2.0 ghz, 8gb ram, 1 tb hdd and this vid card: AMD Radeon R4 graphics I just do not know if it will support the requirements for his game tastes. If anyone could recommend what video cards I should be looking for I would greatly appreciate the assistance. Current budget for the laptop is $500-$600. Thanks in advance to anyone who can help out.

 

[jaguarskx]

I would avoid that laptop you are looking at which has the Radeon R4 graphics core. That is in an APU series called "Beema" which are low end APUs for inexpensive laptops. The CPU processing power and graphics capabilities are rather low.

I recommend the following Lenovo ThinkPad E545 for $520. It has an AMD A10-5750m APU which has the Radeon HD 8650g integrated graphics core. This was the most powerful integrated graphics core in a laptop until AMD recently released the "Kaveri" generation APUs.

http/www.amazon.com/ThinkPad-Edge-E545-20B2000YUS-Notebook/dp/B00FZ2Q6SI/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&qid=1408731968&sr=8-5&keywords=lenovo+thinkpad+edge+e545

The ThinkPad E545 is a business laptop and this version comes with Windows 7 Professional. It comes with 1 stick of 4GB RAM. I recommend that you install another 4GB stick so that more RAM will be automatically allocated to the GPU. Additionally, two sticks of RAM will allows the RAM to operate at full speed rather than half speed. This is especially important when playing game using integrated graphics.

The below link contains info and benchmarks for the Radeon HD 8650g. Total War: Shogun 2 and Total War: Rome II are benchmarked.

http/www.notebookcheck.net/AMD-Radeon-HD-8650G.87916.0.html

If your friend is looking for better performance, then he will need to increase his budget to get a laptop with a dedicated graphics chip.