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Laptop shopping - low end/budget gaming specs?

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Hi! I'm in the situation where I'm laptop shopping for something I can give the hackintosh makeover, and wanting to make sure I'm not missing any possibilities here. I'm wanting to run some specific software on the OSX side for audio/video creation, that has me looking toward the older/low end gaming offerings. Specifically I could make use of:

- dedicated graphics, pref Nvidia with a couple of gigs of vram
- an HDMI out
- capacity for 16gb (min) or better 4 slots and 32gb RAM
- dual hard drive bays, although I might be able to get by with an SD card slot in lieu of

Fairly low cost would be a plus. I know some of these old gaming laptops can be had on eBay in decent condition in the $300-400 usd range.

The dual bays has me looking at 17" machines, and I've zero'd in on the Asus ROG G750jw/G750jx. They seem to have 100% compatibility, and specs are checking all the boxes. 765m vid card, 2gb ram and the guides seems to have it all nicely working without issue. I used to have a ROG from the previous gen of that line, and it was great.

I've dug through the forums but it's hard to screen for these sorts of specs, so I thought I'd ask - are there any others in this same vein that should be on my list? Any tips here would be appreciated - I feel like I'm going to buy very soon, so some last minute diligence. Thanks!
 
Hi! I'm in the situation where I'm laptop shopping for something I can give the hackintosh makeover, and wanting to make sure I'm not missing any possibilities here. I'm wanting to run some specific software on the OSX side for audio/video creation, that has me looking toward the older/low end gaming offerings. Specifically I could make use of:

- dedicated graphics, pref Nvidia with a couple of gigs of vram
- an HDMI out
- capacity for 16gb (min) or better 4 slots and 32gb RAM
- dual hard drive bays, although I might be able to get by with an SD card slot in lieu of

Fairly low cost would be a plus. I know some of these old gaming laptops can be had on eBay in decent condition in the $300-400 usd range.

The dual bays has me looking at 17" machines, and I've zero'd in on the Asus ROG G750jw/G750jx. They seem to have 100% compatibility, and specs are checking all the boxes. 765m vid card, 2gb ram and the guides seems to have it all nicely working without issue. I used to have a ROG from the previous gen of that line, and it was great.

I've dug through the forums but it's hard to screen for these sorts of specs, so I thought I'd ask - are there any others in this same vein that should be on my list? Any tips here would be appreciated - I feel like I'm going to buy very soon, so some last minute diligence. Thanks!
nvidia will only work on High Sierra

would be better off looking for AMD dedicated laptop
 
Ah - now that you mention it, there are only g750j guides through High Sierra. Thanks, did not pick up on that.
AMD graphics should be fine for what I'm doing - nothing specifically requires nvidia or cuda and some future proofing for Mojave and beyond would be nice. Would hate to do all this work and then be stuck forever on 10.13

I don't know the AMD side of things well but will do some more looking + research.
 
Ah - now that you mention it, there are only g750j guides through High Sierra. Thanks, did not pick up on that.
AMD graphics should be fine for what I'm doing - nothing specifically requires nvidia or cuda and some future proofing for Mojave and beyond would be nice. Would hate to do all this work and then be stuck forever on 10.13

I don't know the AMD side of things well but will do some more looking + research.
also some laptops have dual gpu amd and intel or nvidia and intel

those setups could b problematic in that only the intel graphics will only work

if you get to look at one before you buy, make sure that the intel (if any) can be disabled via BIOS

or check in windows Device Manager -> Display Adaptors and make sure only AMD is listed
 
Ended up with an inexpensive Dell 15R SE 7520. There are mojave guides, but I've not found one that's not deactivating the discrete 7730m 2gb gpu. I figure I'll get up and running and then work on that once I've got a base install in place.
Thanks for the tips.
 
...and now being much more familiar with the shared architecture of both certain AMD and Optimas/Nvidia after hacking around for a bit, I've bailed on the 15R SE 7520, sold it off and switched over to a Dell M4800 running a k2100m gpu. The quadro is natively supported by OSX. Much better, seems to be one of the few laptops up for these kinds of gpu needs.
 
It's rare to find one that doesn't force Optimus, is my understanding.

On the other hand, something called Polaris22Fixup was just released, which makes it possible to use Kaby Lake-G with the built-in Radeon RX Vega M. At least, it's working on the Hades Canyon NUC: https://www.tonymacx86.com/threads/intel-hades-canyon-nuc.250600/post-1985207

There are only a couple of these laptops out there with an M.2 slot for wifi, though. Acer ConceptD 5, for one (and also the older Acers with the same processor). I'm thinking of trying that one.
 
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