Shopping for a laptop with a lengthy list of system requirements can prove difficult. Finding the right notebook gets even harder when you need a quad-core CPU and a solid GPU and your budget is under $1,000.
Such is the plight of forum member casebier.ken, who wrote to ask for help finding a 15- or 17-inch laptop with a full-HD (1920 x 1080-pixel) screen, 1TB of storage and "a really good screen, graphics card and processor." Specifically, the graphics card should be similar to the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060.
Well, I've got good news (I've found two laptops to recommend) and not-so-good news (neither is the exact laptop you're looking for). We'll get to the key component each is missing in a second, but I'd say both are definitely worth your consideration.
The first option, the one I'd get if I were you, is the 15-inch Lenovo Yoga 720. Lenovo has two configurations of it that fit your budget. Both feature bright, colorful 1080p displays (producing 114 percent of the sRGB spectrum and emitting up to 272 nits) and an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1050 GPU.
MORE: Laptops with the Most Colorful Screens
For $900, you can get the Yoga 720 with a Core i5-7300HQ CPU, and for $950, you can get it with a Core i7-7700HQ CPU. The only issue, though, is that these sub-$1,000 configurations have 256GB of storage, which is less than the 1TB casebier.ken requests. But the model with a 1TB SSD costs a whopping $1,365, and that SSD is a lot faster and more reliable than the 1TB hard drives found in sub-$1,000 laptops.
Speaking of which, meet the HP Omen 15t. This 15-inch laptop starts at $800 for a model with a Core i7-7700HQ CPU and an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1050 GPU. Sounds like you'll want to spend the $190 to upgrade its graphics to a GTX 1050 Ti card, which has 4GB of memory -- — twice as much as you get in that $800 config.
And while the Omen gives you the 1TB hard drive you asked for, it's a 7,200-rpm hard drive, which isn't as trustworthy or speedy as an SSD. If 512GB of storage would do, consider picking out the $800 configuration and upgrading it to a 512GB SSD, which brings the notebook to $959.
The big problem with the Omen, though, is its 15-inch 1080p screen has subpar color output and brightness. It produces 71 percent of the sRGB spectrum and emitting up to 247 nits; both of those measurements are significantly lower than the scores from the Yoga 720.
Still, both the Lenovo Yoga 720 and the HP Omen 15t are good, if not great, machines. You just need to figure out if you value storage over screen, or vice versa. Personally, I'd get the Yoga and use a portable external hard drive alongside it.
