Is This a Nice Computer for Beam?

At the moment, I own a Dell Latitude E5530 and I'm contemplating if I should get the Dell Inspiron 15 7000 Gaming for BeamNG.drive. It's $700 at my local Costco and I want to make sure it'll run Beam well and it's not just a waste of money.

 

I know very little about computers so you probably shouldn't take anything I say too seriously.

TLDR for the following rant: I have an Asus laptop which I use for games and I love it. I've ownded 2 Dell notebooks in the past year and a half and the build quality is poor at best. I have heard good things about the laptop you are looking at for its performance/price ratio, but not its build quality. Seems to me like a good value but a poor long term investment.

For gaming I have an Asus Q550LF I bought maybe 4 years ago for around 1k USD. I only recently started having problems with it, but it's nothing difficult to ignore (stuff like the 3.5mm jack being finicky and it taking a long time to turn off). I can play BeamNG with 3 cars and a mix of medium/low graphics, World of Tanks at 50fps with medium graphics, Fallout 4 and Just Cause 2 have no problems. Just Cause 3 and Wreckfest are difficult. Judging by te steam reviews for JC3, there aren't many computers that can play it well and as for Wreckfest... Meh... It's a very heavy laptop and has a brushed aluminum finish, making it poor for traveling, which is a bit of an issue for a laptop... It is a nice looking laptop, which is annoyingly hard to find IMO. The touchscreen is a nice luxury that occasionally becomes useful for games. Nowadays you can pick these up for pretty cheap. I tell all my friends who want to get into gaming to consider getting one and right now it looks like it's going to continue to be my primary laptop and relevant to most modern games for a while. I know the BeamNG dev's have a couple of the fancy Asus gaming laptops and IIRC they like them, but those are expensive.

Last year I needed a laptop that can be easily transported and I got a Dell Inspiron, paid about $400 USD. The build quality was horrible. It was in the store maintnance center for major issues more often than in my possession. Eventually they gave up and gave me store credit, so I got another Dell Inspiron just because I liked how it looked and wanted to give Dell another chance. This time it was an Inspiron 11 3000 2 in 1 (basically the same as my first one but with a 220GB SSD instead of a 1/2TB traditional drive... And gold color, because that's all that was in stock at the time and I didn't have time to wait. I was expecting some horribly color but it actually isn't too bad). My issues with this one have been mostly limited to the keyboard and a couple lights breaking, though I did have one really weird issue related to the volume control that made it impossible to do anything with audio. Really wish I got something else. So for me it's been 0/2 good experiences with recent Dell laptops. A lot of my friends try to stay away from Dell, but the only one who has recently owned one had a good experience (it was an Inspiron identical to my first one, only used for accademics).

I heard that the Dell Inspiron 15 7000 is really good for performance in its price range but suffers elsewhere to get the price down (such as having a poor quality touchpad and display). If I was to get a new gaming laptop under $1000, this would not be out of the question but I can't say more than that after my poor experience with them and great experience with Asus.

 

If you do go for the deal at Costco make sure it has an IPS display. The other panel is horrendous. Otherwise it sounds like a good deal. I've done a lot of research into that price range and the 7000 Gaming series is on top of this list, preferably with a 1050 ti in it.

 

If you haven't bought yet, look for a PC with a decent warranty first and foremost if you'll be keeping it a while and don't know a load about computers. Second of all, if you love beamng.drive, the AMD Ryzen performance is easily on-par with the intels PLUS you can generally run 50% more cars in play at once with the Ryzen vs the Intel as you get more CORES on the processor on AMD for your money vs Intel.
DO NOT listen to folks telling you an i5 is better in any way for Beamng.drive. The new Ryzen chip is great, the old AMD APU and FX are the stinkers you don't want (APU's are often found in laptop computers). So if you look on Amazon or Newegg for a gaming computer pre-assembled, you can easily find a good deal on a Ryzen 1600 or 1600x for a little bit more performance. A good part of the deal is the high video card prices most likely won't affect the system price right now especially if it's older stock.

 

Is there any chance that there is a Ryzen laptop? I'll keep the 1600 in mind but I'll get the most use out of a laptop

 

No, Ryzen mobile is due out Q3 2017 at the EARLIEST. It will be worth the wait though, and if you can't wait, well, intel can fit the bill. Goto a pawn shop with 200$ (or equivalent) in your country, and see what you can get for a laptop, sometimes you can find some nice i5 or i7 laptops for Beamng.drive. Make sure it has a half decent graphics card, and an intel processor that clocks up to at-least 3.x GHZ turbo mode, for smoothest Beamng.drive playback. If you *DO* buy used make sure it has a valid activated copy of Windows and buy some antivirus software for it too.
On the flip side, the newest Skylake and Kabylake chips have half-decent integrated graphics (on the desktop anyways) so you may be able to run Beamng.drive @ 720p on low/medium graphics* if it's like the desktop counterpart's graphics. You'll have to see if these chip's graphics are as good as the desktop versions, that I don't know (I *DO* know the GHZ speed is reduced by usually about 25~40% from the higher-end desktop i5 and i7 chips, to fit a lower wattage/TDP for longer battery life, I don't know if it has the same graphics). So definitely do your research. So... *If* you buy new, definitely get one with an added graphics card from AMD or NVIDIA, to be sure.

DO NOT GET AN AMD APU LAPTOP TO RUN BEAMNG.DRIVE WITH. I IMPLORE YOU. YOU WILL HAVE BETTER LUCK WITH AN ABACUS OR AN ENIAC !!!

It's tough to find a good laptop to game with for a decent price. Try and find something on sale. If you get one that's just barely capable, you will have to plug it into the wall to play at the best FPS, and it will heat up if it's on your lap (say, on the train, with it plugged, if your trains have plugs where you are), and you'll end up with what we call a 'wiener-roast' situation in the tech industry, where it gets too hot to keep on your lap due to the heat and power used to try and run the game on sub-standard hardware. So getting a machine that's plenty capable has it's high-points where it's not going to have to work as hard to keep up and might not turn your legs and such into chicken tenders.

So, while some of these points may seem to be contradictory at first, it's because some of them are. There's no clean-cut choice here. A laptop with a solid cpu and 8~16gb of RAM, a fairly decent video card (say, Nvidia 9xx or something, or AMD R7 or R9 graphics) would run this game fully playable on medium or better. Any i5 or i7 made in the last 3 years *SHOULD* suffice fine.
So a good way to narrow down is that:
*You'll need a mobile intel CPU-based machine, an AMD APU won't do, it just doesn't have close to the brute force (13FPS MAX!) to run this
*You'll *WANT* to have something better than integrated intel graphics, you want an AMD or NVIDIA video card in it.
*You'll want 8 or more GB of RAM, to run current games, some will run with 4~6GB, but the OS hogs 1~2gb right off the bat at boot up. More=better here.
Hard drive space isn't really a serious thing if you're not a software/movie pirate. I hope you're not one of those. My gaming machine has 1.6tb of SSD space, which I mention is quite plentiful if you don't need to have every game installed. I have a few 100 gb free even with gobs of mods and my beamng.drive maps. You can always buy an external drive and hook it up at your house when you need it most, and should have one to back up (this is a separate purchase, usually 100$ or less). ALWAYS backup your important data. Hard drives often fail without notice!!!
An SSD is nice, it's still a luxury limited to the higher-end models, but it really puts the system in a whole different class of FAST. If your desktop has an SSD, you might want to pony up for one. It's a luxury, not a requirement, at all; but it will keep battery life lasting a touch longer.

*note from above about Skylake graphics: This game can be run on SKYLAKE k-series CPU's and like-models integrated graphics, with reflections, AA, etc, off, on low-to-medium settings, with 1gb of video memory allocated, a 720p and 1080p smoothly, lesser equipped models may only be able to do 720p smoothly. Yes, the Skylake can even run my ROANE COUNTY map smoothly, this has been tested. Even my intel 460 (?) integrated graphics on my 4790k with some fast DDR3 (running over CPU specification) is quite capable at 720p.

--I hope somehow, in some way shape or form, this was helpful besides being a good example of a big disorganized mess! --Cheers!