How's this for light gaming?

I'm not much of a gamer, the only game I play several times a week would be FIFA. My old Toshiba A300 runs the latest FIFA game fine on low to medium setting so I'm sure a new computer will be able to run it on high.
I also play stuff like Civilization and old Call of Dutys but that's rare.

Anyway, a few laptops have caught my eye. I must say as much as I'd like a massive gaming laptop like the Lenovo Y510p or others in that vain, I just can't justify buying one that expensive and I have other things, more satisfying things to do with the money. Anyway, the laptops that I'm looking at.

There's one Acer Aspire V5-552. It has an AMD A8-5557M Quad Core 2.10GHz (3.10 on turbo) processor and 4GB AMD HD 8550G graphics chip. Has 8 gigs of RAM that can be expanded to 16gigs and a 1TB HDD.

Then there's Acer Aspire V5-573G. It has an Intel Core i5-4200U and 4GB GeForce GT750M. 12gigs of RAM, that's the maximum for this machine, only 500GB HDD though.

Then finally, HP Pavilion 15. It has an Intel Core i7-3632QM 2.2GHz and 2GB AMD HD8670G graphics chip. However it only has a maximum 8GB of RAM and 750GB HDD.

What can you guys tell me about these? Which one would you go for?
Although I must state that I'm not getting anything until January/February

 

Any of them will run FIFA 14 at maximum and will be able to run the latest Call of Duty (Call of Duty: Ghosts) and Civilization (Civilization 5) games at medium settings, but you'll get the best gaming performance of the three from the Intel processor and Nvidia 750m graphics in the Acer Aspire V5-573G. Of course, the quad-core processor on the HP Pavilion 15 would make it much more useful than the others for general computing purposes.

Regarding memory, 8GB is probably enough for your usage. I have a ton of memory on my system (32GB), and it generally uses between only 3-6GB in most cases.

 

Middle one (i5 and GT 750M) for sure. Don't underestimate the hardware hunger of CoD: Ghosts though. It's got serious optimization issues. Runs worse than BF4 yet still looks like crap.

 

Thanks for your responses.
So, the Intel dual cores are better than the AMD quad core? There are also some similarly priced Toshibas that have quad core processors however they're really badly designed.

Quad core isn't that big deal for me but it would be nice, since it's perhaps more future proof. I'm running an old Core Duo at 1.8GHz and it does all I want with relative ease.

But as for gaming, I have very little interest in the latest CoD games. For some reason I feel like many of the recent shooters lacking something compared to the old ones. Also, they take up way too much space on my HDD

 

40gb of dawg yo!

 

i5 is faster than A8, both are slower than i7. But GPU matters most for gaming and GT 750M is the fastest of the bunch, so you'd want the Acer in the middle.

 

Wise man chooses the Acer Aspire V5-573G.

 

Dunno about Ghosts but 750M runs BO2 fine, also even if i shut off 2 cores of my i7 i still get an almost identical amount of FPS.

If ghosts is badly optimized then it will hurt you no matter which card you choose.

APU's are inferior to dedicated solutions and are only recommended in budget notebooks OR gimmicky GPU compute rigs like the MSI GX60.

 

There's one Acer that's identical to the middle one but has an i7-4500U, but it's quite expensive. however I might get it if I get discount from work haha.

 

Ah, well that doesn't matter to me really. I'm not playing Ghosts. I mostly use my computer for the internet and Google Earth

 

Don't bother with the i7-4500U if it's significantly more expensive. It's still an ULV dual-core like the i5-4200U, just a little bit faster. FYI that GT 750M is the DDR3 variant which is considerably slower than the more common GDDR5 one. But if you're playing old CoD games it will rip through all of them up to MW3 at 1080p max settings. BLOPS 2 is more demanding, Ghosts is much more so (read extremely unoptimized). But nothing to worry about since you're not gonna be playing it. Don't know which V5 model you're getting, but some configurations come with a really nice matte 1080p IPS screen, which I would definitely get if it's within your budget.

 

I'm actually just thinking of getting it today. This seems to fit all my needs
A buddy of mine was playing some games at work on the dual core intel graphics laptop he has at work. Big games, Borderlands and Bioshock....played fine. This leads me to believe that system reqs might be a little..hmm..wrong

 

Quad core is not really more future proof. More cores just means doing more things at once, like lots of internet tabs, or many programs at once. Most programs do not take advantage of more cores. It has been this way for a long time.

Borderlands and Bioshock don't push the computer too hard, Crysis and Battlefield do. Take a look at notebookcheck and the 750M, just google those two words, and you will get an idea of game performance.

 

Uh it's not 2007 anymore.

 

That's why we are waiting for Mantle, it is said that FX 8350 downclocked at 2ghz is on pair with i7 4770k. It's all about multicore now...

Oxide Games AMD Mantle Presentation and Demo - YouTube

 

Well I bought it. It's good, although it's quiet noisy at times and the HDD is making a lot of noise :/