almost perfect

This is a nice budget,entry level gaming laptop. With one little, but easily fixable, detail. The screen is nothing to write home about. But it is FDH and more than enough for gaming. For design and color sensitive work, I recommend hooking this up to an external monitor. I bought this for my wife who is a designer. She also bought an external, very color accurate monitor to work with. The keyboard is one of the high points of this laptop. Feels really nice to type on. normal trackpad. Not amazing but not terrible. I recommend using a mouse. The graphics card is a little outdated for modern AAA gaming. And the cpu is decent , but it is not a powerhouse. You can lower settings and play almost any game, Or you can play older games at decent settings. Also really good for emulators. I tried Cemu and played mario Kart 8, and BoTW, at FHD ,60fps cap, flawlessly. Now for the LITTLE DETAIL. This machine comes with 8gb of ram. Seems like decent specs right? No. This machine comes with the ryzen 5 3550 apu + the nvidia 1050 graphics card. The default configuration of this machine uses the internal vega graphics to power on the display, and the nvidia to power intensive apps and games. This means the internal vega graphics is always up and running. This apu consumes 2 GB of ram for its operation. That, + whatever the windows OS uses, leaves you with little over 5GB of effective ram for your use. That is simply too little ram in 2019, and it shows. You open up too many chrome tabs, it starts to show. You open photoshop and illustrarot. it shows. you open up cinema and load up a big model, it shows. There is , at least not up to this date, a way to reduce the ram taken up by the vega graphics. There are 2 ways you can get around this issue. Disable the vega graphics card. I have not tried this myself but people say this + a reboot frees up the full 8 gb of system ram. Or buy another ram stick. This is what I did. I bought a cheap sub $40 8 gb ram sick and placed it in . Opening up this laptop is super easy. And it comes with a free ram slot so you can upgrade without worry. Once the extra 8gb of ram are in, this becomes the perfect budget laptop. I recommend anyone buying this laptop to shell a couple $20 bills and upgrade the ram. It is worth it. I would say it is even necessary to run this machine to its full potential.Read full review

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