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$70 CODA 1.1
With just $70 we have the Coda 1.1 laptop that comes with 12 months of Microsoft apps worth $60 included. The trackpad is a 5/10. It’s a little bit small and rough but it does respond to multi-touch gestures.
The keyboard is a 6/10. The keys have a nice travel which gives us a satisfying typewriter-like experience. the plastic around the keys does flex a little bit as you press, this being the only downside.
The processor is dual core 1.1GHz intel celerion. Internal memory 64GB.
It really struggles when we run Cinebench which leads to a lowly score of 308.
You don’t really need much power to run things like Microsoft word but this is plenty.
The laptops 64 gigabites of internal memory is not even enough to hold GTA 5. So, you run the game off external memory.
The laptop doesn’t have the graphics power to be able to open the GTA 5 in full screen. The game runs at 4 frames per second, so it runs at 800 by 600 resolution which is a smartphone resolution from 12 years ago.
There is too much lag, the laptop follows after like two to four seconds when you move your hand across the trackpad.
At $500 we get the Lenovo V15 G2 laptop.
The actual machine itself is quite different from the $70 laptop. The webcam has moved from slightly laggy pretty grainy 720p image on the coda to a slightly higher quality but still 720p webcam but it does have a light that shows you when a program is accessing it. It has a manual shutter that you can use to physically cover it during your private moments.
There are more ports on the sides including a full-on ethernet port, a Kensington Lockport which lets you physically restrain your laptop to your table. A USB 3.2 Port, which is faster that USB 2.0.
The track pad is made of a smoother material with more refined click sounds as compared with the coda. it is a 7/10.
The keys are also smoother, very cushioned and there is no flexing of the body when you hit them. Can get a 6/10.
Both laptops have bottom firing speakers. There are low power speakers on the coder but the ones on the Lenovo, much better though they lack a bit of sharpness.
The screen has gone from an 11.6 inch to a 15.6 inch which is about two times the area. The contrast on the Lenovo is slightly worse and the viewing angles not great too because it has the TN panel.
The biggest basic improvement on the $500 laptop is performance. Everything takes so long to happen on the coda, but on the Lenovo, it happens faster enough that it doesn’t feel like burden.
The storage has gone up from 64GB TO 250GB of fast M2 SSD.
There is a Wi-Fi chip and a better antenna which makes a big difference, we were stuck at 40 MBPS with the coda but the Lenovo clocks 200MBPS with the same distance from the same network. The benefit of being compatible with Wi-Fi 6
The processor has been upgraded from 1.1GHz dual-core to 2.2 6Ghz AMD Ryzen 3 quad-core with eight threads. This means the Lenovo can handle more workflows leading to astronomical CPU bump on Cinebench from 308 points to 4942 points.
The Lenovo has upgraded chips which has upgraded graphics. GTA 5 is much better on it. It looks like a proper PC game. The game runs 30 frames per second which is smooth enough.
The MSI Katana GF76 goes for $1200.
The New Katana GF76 is built with the same exquisite craftsmanship used to forge a blade. It is much bigger with so much space for your hands to rest on it. The build quality is about the same.
The track pad is smaller but of a good quality. You have to use some amount of force to click it.
The Keyboard is quite enjoyable, it is backlit thus usable in bed at night. The keys are soft but does not have a huge amount of travel which less fun for typing bt you can be more responsive when you are gamming. It an 8/10.
The MSI Katana GF76 is also t more leaning to gamming specific features. The MSI suit lets you do any kind of fiddling you could possibly think of. Its gamming mode, Wi-Fi analysis, Hardware diagnosis are better.
You get high-res audio coming from two downward firing speakers which has two watts of power each.
The general browsing around the internet is way quicker. Same connection to the same network and it has faster download speed at 280mbps.
the latency goes all the way from 102ms to 27ms. The biggest improvement.
The screen is 17.3 inches which is about 25% more screen area. It has an IPS panel which is brighter than the TN panel, has more poppy colors, better contrast and a 144Hz refresh rate versus 60Hz.
The MSI Katana has a 12th gen intel core i7 CPU, 14 cores and 20 threads. If run the Cinebench benchmark we get 14754 points which a 3 times improvement.
The laptop has RTX 3060 graphics card which is the single biggest jump. This graphics card puts the laptop in the top 5% of the general population of laptops.
The machine is powerful enough that it doesn’t just run GTA, it runs GTA + ENB series which adds additional effects.
$7,000 MSI Titan GT77HX.
The laptop comes packing a little dragon, a pretty cool 128GB USB stick Which has separate ends for both USB-C AND USB a and a proper mouse.
It has every cutting-edge feature that a laptop could possibly offer. Its keyboard is mechanical with LED lighting. The keys feel extra bit crispy and purposeful. You can control how each individual of the keys reacts to being pressed. As far as laptop keyboards go, this is a 10/10.
The MSI titan comes with a quad speaker system with two separate woofers.
The screen has the same 144Hz refresh rate as the MSI Katana but instead of being a full HD IPS panel it is an Ultra HD mini-LED panel. It has a similar LCD Tech but instead of having one main backlight, it has thousands of tiny LEDs that give extreme levels of color fidelity and contrast. It is two times the brightness and four times the resolution.
The Wi-Fi is extreme to the point where your router is going to be the bottleneck. The USB ports are faster that whatever you are transferring from will be the limiting factor.
It has a proper cooling system with four fans, six exhausts and eight pipes.
The MSI Titan GT77HX runs Intel core i9-13980HX processor. This means 24 Cores, 32 threads, a technical Max of 5.6 GHz without even overclocking and 29604 points on Cinebench which doubles the high ceiling of the MSI Katana.
The RTX 1490 Graphics card is a bigger jump. It can take the GTA to a whole other level. It runs 11 separate graphics modes at the same time, probably the most advanced graphics on a video game.
The webcam is super quality.
Conclusion.
Does expensive necessarily mean better. That’s a plain YES.
