A Dilemma of Laptops.

[similar.squirrel]

Okay, this hasn't garnered much advice in the tech-help corner, so I thought I'd give the query more exposure:

I'm thinking of buying a laptop for college, but I want it to be powerful enough for gaming. I'm not looking at something that will run current-gen titles, but I'd like to be able to at least run Minecraft at maximum draw-distance with a decent framerate, and play things like Psychonauts and maybe Portal/Portal 2 [custom maps!] on low settings.

I've got some pretty tight budget constraints, but I've found two machines which look sort of promising:
http://www.elara.ie/productdetail.aspx?productcode=ECE2063439
and
http://www.elara.ie/productdetail.aspx?productcode=WCEXF483EAABU

Would these be beefy enough for my purposes? Extra RAM can always be bought, of course, but the processor and the GPU can't really be switched around on laptops, or so I've heard.
Is the i3 considerably better than the dual-core on the first one? Also, I'll probably be dual-booting a Linux distro on this thing, so are there any particular hardware-compatibility issues I should be aware of?
As you can probably tell, I'm not very good at this sort of thing, so any help would be appreciated.

Thank you very much, tech-wizards!

 

[Ziadaine_v1legacy]

What's your rough price-range on spending?

 

[xxcloud417xx]

404 page not found.

Fix your links plz.

Yes the i3 is better than a regular dual-core since it has hyperthreading and also does have dual-cores. I would still suggest an i5 though myself.

You won't really need more than 4GB of RAM so no worries about ram and a 500GB Hard Drive should do fine too. The important thing is your video card. I would get myself something around the AMD Radeon 6550 range. It's a 1GB card so you'll get plenty of kick from it when needed.

The only issue right now is we have absolutely no idea what your budget for this purchase is. What I just suggested (i5, 4GB RAM, AMD Radeon 6550) is around $700CAD. Can you fork that out and also think about your Software, Warranty, etc.

 

[similar.squirrel]

What's your rough price-range on spending?

Definitely below 500 euro.

404 page not found.

Fix your links plz.

Yes the i3 is better than a regular dual-core since it has hyperthreading and also does have dual-cores. I would still suggest an i5 though myself.

You won't really need more than 4GB of RAM so no worries about ram and a 500GB Hard Drive should do fine too. The important thing is your video card. I would get myself something around the AMD Radeon 6550 range. It's a 1GB card so you'll get plenty of kick from it when needed.

The only issue right now is we have absolutely no idea what your budget for this purchase is. What I just suggested (i5, 4GB RAM, AMD Radeon 6550) is around $700CAD. Can you fork that out and also think about your Software, Warranty, etc.

Sorry, fixed that for you. i3 does seem like the better option at the moment, at 2.26 GHz..They both seem to have integrated graphics cards. I don't know how they'd measure up to the ones you mentioned. My budget, as I said above, is below 500 euro.

 

[AnAngryMoose]

You won't get away with much gaming on integrated graphics unless you're playing Minecraft and Portal at a push.

 

[ShakeyJake]

Integrated graphics are great for everyday use, but for gaming Just Say No!

It'd be much easier to go for a desktop system, especially at your budget, so unless you have a specific reason to go laptop that'd be my recommendation. Whilst a powerfully specced machine could maybe be had in your price rangem you'll undoubtedly be compromising somewhere. Unfortunately on cheaper laptops this is usually in the areas of build quality, cooling ability and screen quality.

For either a laptop or desktop, a Nvidia gpu will play much nicer with your linux OS, particularly allowing you to use hardware decoding of HD videos. Essentially AMD/ATI chips cannot play HD videos on linux at the moment.