Seeking guidance on an AMD laptop purchase
Seeking guidance on an AMD laptop purchase
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!
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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.
Thank you very much! Tuxedo looks very promising