As per the thread title, I was looking at a cheap laptop but I would consider a small, light weight case to take out of the house on a monthly basis. Games usually on the agenda are things like Warcraft 3, some C&C and Everquest, etc. I would like the option to play some of the 2d retro type of games on Steam (Terraria) but the most important thing is it's not going to be my main pc/ laptop. Should I look at a laptop or some sort of Bitfenix prodigy build? Any help would be appreciated... Was looking at spending around £400.00 - I have a few hard drives that I can use but that's pretty much it.
Personally, I always preferred a desktop, no matter how small it is. The two main reasons were heat and upgradeability. With a laptop in your budget, you won't have much upgradeability, if any at all. Have you had a look at the Aerocool Dead Silence Cube case? Its pretty much the same size as the Prodigy and its got some really good reviews. I researched for ages and chose that case (it should arrive tomorrow, yippee!) You can build yourself a decent gaming pc for cheap these days, and if its just for LANs, then you don't have to splash out on the best hardware to do it. You can always upgrade part by part as your finances allow.
Whilst I'm still looking at a LAN build, can I get a quick bit of advice? The Motherboard in my sig can clearly take an i7 but I'm not sure at how current I can go... Ivy Bridge I think but Haswell is a no go, right? I've had the Twin Frozr 560ti 2gb for a while now and will relegate that to the lan machine I am making - if I have £200 to spend, any recommendations?
With it not being your main machine, just use what you have and add some cheap parts. The 560ti will be fine for all of those games you mentioned and a cheap pentium for that board would be okay or even an ivy 3220 which is what I have at the moment, which is a solid CPU for the price. If you're not using it all of the time, there's no need to splash out for i7s and such. As for a replacement? For up to £200 in the Nvidia arena you can get something like a GTX 760 which is a pretty good card, or you can get a GTX 770 for a smidgen under 200.
Thanks Darkwisdom. My plan is now to take some of the parts from my existing rig into the LAN unit and then upgrade some parts such as the i7 and gfx card. I am still under the (wrong) impression that AMD delivers better performance for £... Is that a safe assumption?
Erm, it'll depend on the mindset of the person who gives you that opinion XD AMD does give a good bang for buck, but they're weak cores. They're bad at any single task. For older games that don't use multiple cores because multi-core cpus were still new and shiny, you're not going to get much use out of that 8-core AMD. Intels are strong either way, although AMD is superior at multi-tasking (except for Enthusiast intels, but they cost a massive premium).