Should I wait for upcoming laptops in 2015 or buy one now?

Hey, so looking at the new games coming out in 2015 I decided to save up for a good laptop that I could use for gaming and school work. The one that I came across was the razerblade 14. I think the 14 inch form factor, slim design and light weight would be perfect for me in terms of school and gaming (I need to travel with the laptop). I was wondering if I should sell my old laptop to get the 2014 version or wait until the new razerblade comes out in 2015. At this point I don't even know if they are even making the new version I am assuming they make new ones every year? I am kind of new to gaming laptops can anyone give me any advice? I technically don't need a new laptop now but there seems to be a good sale going on for the razerblade (still expensive tho ). But if the new one will be significantly better I would rather wait but I don't even know if they will make one in 2015. Also, does anyone recommend any other portable gaming laptops (preferably 13.3-14 inches) other than razerblade. Thanks!!!!

 

general rule is: buy it when you need it, otherwise you'll never buy anything if you keep waiting for the next version to come out.

 

Meh, Razer Blade is too hot, too loud, and too expensive. Opt for something like the MSI GS60 at least. It's a 15" notebook but it's very slim, houses the 970m, and runs decently cool. Only issue is meager battery life at 2.5-3 hrs at best with movies and browsing. See my review here: http://forum.notebookreview.com/msi/765829-msi-gs60-ghost-pro-gtx-970m-6gb-review-htwingnut.html

Otherwise if you really want 13-14" then you may want to hold out a few more months when Razer and Aorus will likely update their 14" and 13" models.

 

Last I checked, the previous GS60 had an even harder time handling the heat of the 870M than the 2014 Blade 14 did. 2015 Blade 14 with 970M should be just fine. But it'll cost a pretty penny and the OP might be waiting quite a number of months for it.

 

The point is that the GS60 can handle the 970m just fine, it's available now, and it's cheaper.

 

If anyone would know, it is you :thumbsup:

 

I prefer the blade myself, that's only one person's opinion though.

 

Yes, it's a nice machine. But someone buying now I'd recommend going with the 970m over the 870m, especially if you're going to fork over $2000+.

 

If you're really dead set on the razer blade, I'd recommend you wait a few months (probably around March?) for them to refresh their lineup to include the 970M or another 900M series graphics card. The 870M is just a lot hotter and worse performer than the newer card.

 

I completely agree with HT on this one. If you have to have a 13-14", wait, as the Razerblade is now out dated and in need of a refresh. Best guess I've read is April/May. Will be an awesome machine with Maxwell 970m or 980m, but the current version isn't worth the money at this point with the slower/hotter Kepler 870m.

If you are buying now, I'd go with the GS60 with the 970m... great machine, love mine but it's got the now outdated Kepler 860m. It's crazy the performance packed in these new round of Maxwell machines.

 

In my opinion, it depends on how long you expect to keep a new system. Maxwell components will outlast Kepler components by at least one year. Broadwell may not be much of an improvement over Haswell, performance wise, but should be more efficient and run cooler. So, yeah, there's always a benefit to waiting some. But you can't wait forever... As said above, there will always be something better within 12-18 months - that's just how it is. If you need something now, go buy something now. Just choose wisely. :thumbsup:

 

I agree as well, I've been saying the same thing. Just voicing my preference over MSI.

 

My prediction from last year - that there'd be minor improvements on performance in the mid-range/actually portable designs, but relevant improvements on performance per watt - that actually hit home.

So why not do another one: I suspect that we're going to see a bit of the same for the next year as well. That the low watt designs will catch up with the current top-range cards in performance, the prices for the performance that is sufficient enough to drive the current "normal" standard will drop. That the lithium polymer batteries and the better screens is what you'll pay a premium for rather than performance. And that we're not really going to see any interesting developments elsewhere.

But the thing is that if you bought a 650m/i7 based rig two years ago, you would still have reasonably acceptable performance to play current games. And it will actually be sufficient to run things in medium/1280x720@30fps likely for as long as the current conventions in games-development are kept. Basically, you can add graphics card grunt and add more post-filters, increase the resolution, and so on. But the hardware requirement needed to run the game at "console" level hasn't actually been raised. It's going to stay that way until we get some kind of very low watt integrated cpu/gpu solution, and - and this is the problem, of course - that games-developers will actually adopt this as the go-to architectures.

We've seen some of that happening with the Tegra devices, in that you can heap on a fair amount of eyecandy without increasing the watt-drain, or needing higher clock-speeds, etc. And that has worked really well. From a portable gaming viewpoint, this is probably the most interesting development that has happened lately - arm-cores with integrated and licensed instruction sets, running in a shared memory space with the cpu, basically. Scaling that solution up is possible, but it's likely many years away.

So a recommendation might be to either buy the high-tier mobile graphics cards with a solid quad-core, and live with the 2h battery life, hilarious heat envelope, and so on. And then have fairly passable gaming performance, if you wanted to have something you can easily pack with you and plug in whenever you want to play. Or otherwise look into one of the mid-range maxwell solutions that actually have /reasonably good/ gaming performance (and get one with a lithium polymer battery), and where you can play on battery for 3-4h with passable performance. Since either will likely be good enough for newer, heavy 3d games for quite a while - but at different detail levels/resolution/post-processing.

I suppose you could also say that the prices for the absolutely best system is comparatively lower now compared to what the top-tier was to the mid-level two years ago. So it's a good purchase in that sense. On the other hand, paying for solid screens, a good battery, and getting actual portable gaming performance, that's also worth something.

 

I wouldn't buy a laptop until CES 2015 is over at this point (I so wanted to buy a laptop last few months as well, but it is kinda late at this point). My guess is that all ultrabook type laptops will get a Broadwell update + Razer Blade 2015 might (very low chance though) release with 970m (this is guaranteed). I have a Razer Blade 2013 and it handles temperatures quite well actually, I never had a problem (keyboard kinda gets hot but that is what you should expect).

 

Just buy something now and exploit the "extended holiday return policy" most companies are offering. I've seen some go into mid-January.