Hello fellas,

I’m looking to buy a new laptop for office/programming work and entertainment up to mid-range games for a while. I had Intel/NVIDIA on my desktop and have Intel in my current laptop and I’d love to try out a laptop with AMD CPU and GPU before I get my next desktop. I’m thinking about running some arch-based distro or falling back to something like Pop_OS! if it doesn’t go well. Honestly, I’m entirely unexperienced in choosing hardware and I would deeply appreciate any guidance.

I’ve read through comments for some laptop manufacturers including Lenvo, Asus, MSI, Acer, MSI, etc. and there doesn’t appear to be any concensus. Apparently all of the hardware, manufacturing quality, customer service, etc. has entirely gone to shit at every company. I’m looking for a qwertz keyboard layout and shipping from within Germany so companies like system76 and framework 16 are a bit difficult.

My biggest question is about AMD laptop GPUs. Sometimes the shops just say “Radeon Graphics” or something like “780M” but I assume those are integrated graphics (?) and the ones I’m actually looking for are listed on here. Shops usually don’t have a filter for those though, so I’m having a hard time finding them. The steam deck has an AMD APU listed but I haven’t seen that in any shops as an option and doesn’t appear to support ROCm.

As far as I can tell what I’m looking for are “AMD advantage laptops” but the only ones available in Germany I can find are

ASUS ROG Zephyrus G14

  • AMD Ryzen 9 6900HS
  • AMD Radeon RX 6700S

ASUS TUF Gaming A16

  • AMD Ryzen 9 7940HS
  • AMD Radeon RX 7600S

MSI Delta 15

  • AMD Ryzen 9 5900HX
  • AMD Radeon RX 6700M

They’re only available without configuration options like 32 instead of 16 GB RAM or without Windows, secondary drive, etc. Is this it? There appear to be a billion options for laptops with NVIDIA GPUs. Is this a silly experiment of mine and I should give up? Or are the above listed viable options?

Any insights are appreciated!

  • unmagical@lemmy.ml
    4·
    7 months ago

    If it just says something like “Radeon Graphics” there’s a decent chance that it’s just whatever graphics are bundled on the CPU. This isn’t necessarily bad, but it’s not what I would consider for “mid-range games for a while.” The steam deck APU is a similar setup. It doesn’t have a separate dedicated GPU chip, but it gets away with it by running things at lower resolution, framerate, and quality. Those kinds of chips are generally fine for displaying things on screen and handling video playback, but they’re not powerhouses.

    That being said you’ll want to keep an eye out for a dedicated graphics card which will generally be heavily branded (think “AMD Radeon RX 7…M XT” kind of thing).

    Since you’re considering running Linux on this anyway why not look into a Linux first vendor? Tuxedo computers is based in Germany and has an all AMD laptop, the Sirius 16.

  • velox_vulnus@lemmy.mlEnglish
    2·
    7 months ago

    TL:DR; look for a Ryzen 7045 aka Dragon Range laptop, that’s probably what you’re looking for. Powerful Zen4 processor, weaker iGPU to pair with a discrete one - they come with Nvidia cards, unfortunately.

    The 5000 and 6000 series are old - just letting you know, if that bother you - they also have Zen2/Zen3 processors, and are paired with GCN5/RDNA2 - Lucienne, Cezanne and Barcelo for the 5000 series and Rembrandt for the 6000 series. They’re almost the same as 7020, 7030 and 7035 processors - Mendocino, Barcelo-R and Rembrandt-R respectively, aka the faux-7000 series. Maybe you can avail some discounts on the former for stock clearance? Anyway, the faux-7000 series laptops are way cheaper than their Intel alternatives, at least that’s what I’ve noticed while checking out the Lenovo and HP page.

    You’re not going to get a lot of options out of AMD from their Zen4 mobile series, especially the Phoenix, Dragon Range and Hawk Point, especially in their lower-end segment. I know, pretty sad situation. Personally, I’ve been looking for a Phoenix/Hawk Point processor - you know, the usual Zen 4/4c CPU + RDNA3 combo iGPU, especially the 7440U and the 7540U in slim format. And even if they do, only PRO versions of it are available, not the regular ones - which are quite expensive. However, you’ll have some luck with 7540U and 7840U in their workstation/gaming laptop format, paired with Nvidia or AMD discrete GPU. And even if they don’t come with a discrete GPU, the 780M is a really good iGPU, close to 1650. The 760M and 740M are slightly weaker.

    You can get ThinkPad and ThinkBook laptops only from India (that’s the only site I’m aware of, where you have a choice), with the choice to opt out of Windows. Similarly, if you’re looking at the 2024 refresh, they have modular RAM, which is a nice addition. But you don’t have a lot of options.