I hate to say this but
@QARTS ; this is precisely the laptop range you want to avoid.
'Gaming' laptops at a very low cost and low wattage parts under the hood. You will have a hot, loud and underperforming lump of plastic on your lap with both options. Been there done that. This is the dreaded midrange of 'just not it' in every facet and use case. The best use is mild use, which is not what you'll be using it for. Throttling is the name of the game here, and a constant battle to keep temperature acceptable. In all likelihood this won't be a pleasant laptop to use.
The life expectancy of this sort of laptop is also very low, give it two years and it will start showing problems, possibly earlier if you're not too careful with it and keep it clean of dust.
With gaming laptops you have two options.
Go big, or go home.
That translates to get a fat and true gaming laptop with decent cooling and at least a 1060 or better, or get a thin and light with decent CPU and connect it to additional hardware such as eGPU at home. Doing something in between means it won't do well in anything.
The thing is ... Asus doesn't make any laptops. If the laptop you bought with an Asus Logo, that laptop which apparently worked out well for you may have been made by Foxconn... the one you buy this year may be made by Pegatron or Wistron. Like PSUs, laptop makers may have a model series made by one OEM and the next year switch to someone who offers to make it cheaper. The only two manufacturer's I am aware of who actually "make" the products bearing their name are MSI and Clevo ... and Clevo also sells under the Sager brand.
And fellas we need to stop talking about outdated concepts ...
1. GPUs, especially the nVidia ones, have gotten much more efficient of late
2. The difference in performance of desktop and laptop GPUs has dwindled massively
3. Properly designed gaming laptops exist ... problem is folks walking into a big box store and insisting on a gaming laptop that's under 5 pounds, has an 8 hour battery life and costs $500. Peformance laptops are readily available for years.
Note how the GPUs stack up these days (performance is 3D mark Ice Storm / Cloudgate / Firestrike:
No. 3 NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 (Desktop) = 436117 / 143576 / 27620
No. 5 NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 (Laptop) = 439340 (101%) / 134430 (94%) / 25440 (92%) ... on average the mobile GPU is 96% as fast as the desktop.
No. 6 NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Laptop Max-Q) = 444648 / 113870 / 20289
While in the old days, laptop GPU performance was limited by putting large power consuming GPUs in a tight space, this limitation no longer exists in today's world ... As the saying goes ... "the reports regarding the poor performance of modern mobile GPUs has been grossly exaggerated"
Considering your budget limitations and desire to move now, I would go no lower than a 1050 Ti and then i would expect some level of disappointment.
Spot on. But I will add it was never really a problem of poor mobile GPU performance, but rather abysmal cooling systems in this range. The limitation of those GPUs was essentially power budget, not capability (or die size).
Personally I'd suggest looking at MSI and Clevo barebone options and put them next to what you've been looking at up till now, minimum specced at full-fat Quad core (either Intel or Ryzen) with HT if budget allows, plus indeed something along the 1050ti ~ 1060 ~ RX480 performance level of GPUs (strong Nvidia preference because better perf/watt here). Barebone is nice because you get a lot of freedom in components, too and you can do things like 'make my drive cage an SSD cage' and get an optimized 2x4GB or 2x8GB DDR4 instead of single-channel like you see with OEM products. Its a lot of essentially 'free' performance there. Consider if the price premium for such a build is worth it, but I'd certainly recommend spending a little extra for that option. This also provides a laptop that is
much easier to repair and upgrade with no funny tape/glue business and dozens of weird screw heads to challenge you.
I've had one built through BTO.com a few years back, and it offered the best bang/buck at the price; just under 1K EUR I had a GTX 950M + 500GB SSD + Intel i5 Skylake quadcore (a real one sans HT). If I had picked OEM, I'd have paid the same for a GTX 950M + SSHD 250GB + Intel i7 dualcore... And on top of that, the BTO laptop came with a perfectly calibrated IPS panel that can get nice and bright and is fully legible in direct sunlight, versus glossy TN junk on the OEM side.
Maybe so, but I haven't seen an Intel Atom powered netbook with a discrete GPU, or a Celeron, and I doubt there are any i3's in gaming laptops either.
Just my opinion but low power laptops (suffixed with a U) are not conducive to performance, if you want something faster and more capable, then it has to be a higher powered unit.
Low wattage CPUs are only any good for simple office/browsing tasks and some work in the cloud. Not for gaming, they will always fall short, though with a weak GPU that problem tends to remain invisible. I have no experience with Ryzen's U-line though, but for Intel... slow as molasses because they can't turbo all the time. That has not changed over the last decade either, while GPU did become faster at the same power budget. Buyer beware...
I just saw too many teens (my son's and my daughter friends) spending their money on gaming laptops only to use as desktops, and even then very hot.
Exactly. Anyone who has used these laptops for fulltime gaming knows what's up, and knows not to go there again. To think new gen of GPU changes that is wishful thinking. Maybe next one? Maybe...