I stopped gaming about four years ago and now want to get back into it. I need a replacement for my aging daily-use laptop as well as hardware capable of running games such as Skyrim, The Witcher 3, Red Dead Redemption 2, and smaller indie titles. I may also mod older games fairly heavily. My budget is approximately £1,200, and I'm based in the UK. Portability would be useful but isn't essential, and I already have a monitor, keyboard, and mouse. I've been comparing a custom desktop build—possibly using DDR4—with gaming laptops such as Lenovo's LOQ Essential range. For mostly playing five- to ten-year-old AAA games and older modded titles, would a DDR4 desktop provide the best value, or are a prebuilt or laptop likely to offer similar performance for the money? Where could I reasonably save without hurting my experience?
3 Answers
Don’t feel pressured to spend the entire £1,200. Since you’re keeping the monitor and peripherals, a sensible midrange desktop should handle those games very well. Put most of the budget into the graphics card, then choose a capable but not excessive CPU, 16GB or 32GB of RAM, and a decent SSD and power supply. You can save money by avoiding flagship processors, excessive RGB, and premium motherboards. A carefully selected prebuilt can also be worthwhile if its graphics card, power supply, and upgrade options are clearly listed, but compare it against the cost of building yourself.
For your situation, a desktop is probably the better value. At the same price, it will generally offer stronger gaming performance, better cooling, less noise, and much more room for upgrades. A laptop only really makes sense if you’ll regularly carry it around or need one device for gaming away from home. Gaming laptops also tend to spend most of their plugged-in time, and their batteries and cooling systems can become weaknesses as they age.
DDR4 is still perfectly adequate for the games you listed, especially at 1440p where the graphics card is usually the limiting component. DDR5 gives you a newer upgrade path, but it isn’t automatically faster enough to justify compromising on the GPU. A good DDR4 system with a strong graphics card could be excellent value, while a newer platform may be preferable if you expect to upgrade the CPU several times. For heavily modded Skyrim, prioritize plenty of system memory, fast storage, and a graphics card with enough VRAM rather than focusing only on the RAM generation.
That matches my instincts. I already have the peripherals and I’m comfortable choosing parts and working with Linux, so portability is probably not worth the trade-off for me.