Review

A few years ago, it was almost impossible to buy a laptop for 300 dollars with superior performance. Often, at this price point, they came with a time lag due to the smaller memory size and poor processor, which affected the user experience. As a result, purchasing a PC costing around $300 was not recommended.

With the development of technology, the laptops have become cheaper and cheaper, the 300-dollar laptops also have relatively good performance, they are generally equipped with Intel Pentium N3530, Intel Celeron 3205U and other processors, coupled with 4GB of memory, they are enough for us to do some light work.

With the evolution of technology, the laptops have become cheaper and cheaper. Even the 300-dollar laptops have made performance improvements. Coupled with 4GB of memory, they are equipped with Intel Pentium N3530, Intel Celeron 3205U, and other processors, which make them good enough for performing light work.

For playing games, editing videos, and other heavy computing needs however, it is still unrealistic to select a laptop under 300 dollars. They are often equipped with an integrated graphics capability with display performance that comes short of meeting the gaming requirements. We recommend you to increase your budget to around 500 dollars. Of course, if you just enjoy playing some older games, there are still some models at this price point that will meet your requirements.

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The PC gaming market is flooded with newer and more efficient hardware which has the gaming community psyched since the Nvidia Pascal release in 2016. Given all of this, it is curious to see how many budget gaming laptops still use the older GPUs, mostly GTX 950M and 960M. We will see as we look closely at individual laptops, how good of a performance they pack for the aforementioned budget. The most crucial deciding factor other than the GPU, will be high speed storage, CPU and of course, the display.

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In our previous article we reviewed four of the most loaded laptops around the $500 tag. We have lowered it further to $400 to see what the market segmentation is like at that price point. The point of high end laptops was to provide performance and we cared little about weight and battery life. Surely, at this budget if we are not asking for gaming, we can get good laptops for lightweight productivity and casual use. Can’t We?

Well the market is segmented differently from the perspective of a few manufacturers. Somehow, they want to convince consumers that at $400 they can provide everything just as well as those high end products. As a result, we end up with products that aren’t good for power users or the casual ones. These are the products which you would want to avoid. Also considering your personal needs is important while deciding what you might prefer. For example, if you are a blogger who likes to travel to different places and write about them then reliable battery performance is going to matter more than CPU performance or the RAM size. Similarly, a corporate executive can appreciate a faster SSD which would make boot time extremely small and programs like Microsoft Office would load quickly.

Notice that we are considering products that can be regarded as laptops and are not convertible tablets or Chromebooks. The main reason for doing this is not so much the form factor but the CPU inside it. Anything with an Intel Core M from any generation is something we are intentionally avoiding just to stick to laptop department alone. There is an entire range of Macbooks and Microsoft Surface Pro and Surface Book, but those things cost north of a $1000 price tag. Something a budget conscious person would avoid.

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