Gaming Laptop, £1500-2500

[oblique ermine]

Hi all, looking for some advice with regards to specs for a new gaming laptop. My budget is around £1500-2500 (the lower the better!) for 1440p resolution. Would love to go up to 4K, but not necessary.

I'll primarily be using it for gaming, but will also be lugging it around for work. Games I usually play are Total War, Paradox games, NBA 2K, Arma, so would preferably want a laptop that could handle its newest entries (Total War: Pharaoh, Arma Reforger, 2K 24). Am also trying to get into the DCS and IL-2 flight sims, which I know can be quite graphically intensive.

My two main requirements is for a 17" or 17.3" inch screen, along with at least 4TB storage which I need for work.

I'm upgrading from a Lenovo Legion 5 17.3" with Intel Core i7-10750H CPU, NVIDIA RTX 2060, 16 GB RAM, so anything better than that would be fantastic! Thank you so much for your advice 😊

[gilded sierra]

https://www.pcspecialist.co.uk/saved-configurations/recoil-VIII-17/YRprrAZGdg/ pops the max budget a hair, but it is a mobile 4080 beast, and you can optionally get a liquid cooler to go with it.
it does get the 4TB storage, with a separate drive for windows.

I wouldn't make it do 4k gaming, but should be very comfortable with 1440p

https://www.pcspecialist.co.uk/saved-configurations/elimina-vi-17/3GJsXf!S4t/
on the budget end, we have this, DDR4, and an older CPU with less cores overall, and "only" 6 p-cores, as well as "only" a mobile 4070, should still do well enough on 1440p regardless, but will become obsolete sooner due to the lower end parts.

the CPU for gaming perfectly fine, but maybe not so hot for work, depending on the work itself, basic office work is no problem, but CPU intensive work will make it sweat

https://www.pcspecialist.co.uk/saved-configurations/defiance-16/yjqpgz7Eav/

if you don't mind flexing a little on the size, this would have a more up to date CPU, still "only" a 4070, but it's still solid enough for 1440p

https://www.pcspecialist.co.uk/saved-configurations/recoil-II-16/PZxptuG3Xs/

again if you're willing to flex on the size, still a 4080 and 14900HX CPU as the slightly larger 17" Recoil model, but does come in below the 2500 mark, and still keeps the option for the add on liquid cooler

from laptop reviews I've seen lately, 16" apparently is the sweet spot, having mostly similar screen size to 17", but without being quite as large

[oblique ermine]

this is fantastic advice, thank you so much!

now that you've said that, 16" does make more sense, especially if I need to carry it around

out of curiosity, what would be the difference between getting 2 drives of 2TB each, in comparison with a 512GB and 4TB split?

[gilded sierra]

There are a few advantages,
Windows doesn't like to share, the more full an OS drive gets, the slower it becomes, so a smaller fast drive is ideal.

If either the OS drive dies or windows needs to be reinstalled, all data is lost, so the second drive will keep things safe

It also saves money, generally 2 equal fast drives would cost more