I currently have an HP Touchsmart Laptop, with an i5-4200m processor (2.5ghz up to 3.2ghz) and NVIDIA GeForce 840m graphics card. Unfortunately the screen is broken on my laptop and I will need to get a new one.

I know a laptop isn't the best for FSX, but right now a laptop is what I need for work and uni.

I'm looking at a couple of options for processors: i5-7300HQ (2.5ghz up to 3.5ghz) or i7-7700HQ (2.8ghz up to 3.8ghz)

And for graphics cards: GT950M (2gb DDR5) or GTX 1050 (2gb DDR5).

I have a few questions:

1) Will there be a noticeable difference in FSX performance between the i5-4200m and the i5-7300HQ? What about the i7?

2) Would there be a noticeable difference between the i5-7400HQ and the i7-7700HQ?

3) How much of a difference would the 1050 GPU make over the 950M?

I'm just looking at my options and trying to decide between cost and performance, any advice would be really appreciated.

I use an MSI laptop and it performs very well with FSX-SE, my specs are listed below.

Of your choices I would go with the i7 and the GTX 1050, I didn't have that choice when I purchased my MSI last year.

After doing many tweaks over the months and only using DX9 my FPS was consistently between 35 and up to 75 depending on the scenery and after I uninstalled many of my FPS hogging ORBX sceneries and only use the ORBX Global Base. This week I installed Steve's DX10 Fixer and switched to DX10 along with more Nvidia Inspector tweaking - I lost 10 FPS but my system runs smoothly and looks much better so I am good with that (it's not always about FPS).

Hi Sam,

 

I think you are splitting hairs a little.  I think you will not see any markable difference if you were to test an i5 to an i5 or a 1050 and a 950 in a laptop environment.

If it was me I would make the following rule: purchase the most PC that my budget would allow.  An i7, a separate graphics card (as you plan to I see), and as much ram (and fastest), that you can fit.  Also an SSD card.  Having said that your system will perform only as good as the slowest component so try to keep all pieces relatively equal.

I would suggest posting hardware questions in the hardware forum as you may get better insight.

Clutch

Unless you're tied to a laptop for other reasons, I'd strongly recommend holding off and going with a Desktop.  Laptops, even those built especially for gaming, just don't have the internal bandwidth of desktops, and the graphics cards in non-gaming laptops are really emulators rather than graphics cards.

The desktop would be increasingly important if you ever decide to move to X-Plane or P3D.

My very best wishes.

 

Hi. I've been using laptops for flightsim offand on since 2002. Just upgraded a month ago to a MSI GT73 with an I7-7700, nvidia 1070, 16 gigs ram, m.2 drives etc. When home I plug a 34" dell monitor into it. Runs both P3dV3 & V4 just fine. This includes PMDG aircraft and lots of scenery.

i'd suggest buying as much horsepower as you can fit in the budget as there are only a handful of laptops that can have hardware upgraded. You'll get the longest life out of your laptop that way. I'm totally happy with my laptop for P3d.

Thank you so much for the replies, I've been eyeing up this laptop: http://www.laptopsdirect.co.uk/msi-leopard-gp62-7rd-core-i7-7700hq-8gb-1tb-128gb-ssd-dvd-rw-gtx-1050-15.6-9s7-16j942-011/version.asp

It looks like the best spec I can get for the money, the same configuration on pcspecialist comes to over £900

29 minutes ago, Sam Kennedy said:

Thank you so much for the replies, I've been eyeing up this laptop: http://www.laptopsdirect.co.uk/msi-leopard-gp62-7rd-core-i7-7700hq-8gb-1tb-128gb-ssd-dvd-rw-gtx-1050-15.6-9s7-16j942-011/version.asp

It looks like the best spec I can get for the money, the same configuration on pcspecialist comes to over £900

You will be happy with MSI, if you look at my specs you will see what I have. I like your i7-7700 and your GTX-1050. But it would be nice to have 16gb RAM and also a 500gb SSD. My system did not come with an SSD so I added my Samsung EVO-850 and with 500gb you can put your entire operating system on it and have lots of room for all your sim programs on the SSD as well. You will find with both the operating system as well as your sim programs on the SSD load times are greatly improved, but also note that game performance is not improved with the SSD.

I have the older version of that laptop, with an i5 7300hq CPU and Geforce 960M.  I've not tried FSX or P3D yet, but it plays anything else I've thrown at it with ease, Project Cars, Fifa 16, FM17