If you plan to install a lot of games or software, or save a lot of photos or video, that will quickly eat up space. If you store everything in the cloud or are looking at Chromebooks, you might be able to get by with less, but it's good to have the space if you ever need it. The minimum amount of space we recommend is 256 gigabytes. This gives you the best of both worlds: speed where you need it, but still budget-friendly. Sometimes you'll find laptops with an SSD with NVMe to run the operating system but an older SATA drive to store files. SSDs are faster, especially if they use an NVMe connection, which moves data in and out of the hard drive much quicker than the older standard, known as SATA. Go for an SSD drive if you can afford it, with at least 256 gigabytes. (A 2000-level card will be more powerful but may have worse battery life.) The Max-Q cards are generally about 15 to 25 percent less powerful than the desktop versions but are still plenty powerful for gaming and video editing. They are usually labeled with the card name, then Max-Q: for example, the GeForce GTX 1080 Max-Q. Most Intel-based laptops will be paired with an Nvidia graphics card in the GeForce line, usually one of the Max-Q cards, which is the power-efficient, laptop-friendly spin-off of Nvidia's desktop cards. AMD and Nvidia make most of the graphics cards you'll find in laptops. If you're a gamer or do a lot of video editing, you'll want a laptop with a discrete graphics card-a separate and much more powerful graphics card. You'll be able to watch HD movies and even play casual games without issue. This approach, known as "integrated graphics" is fine for most users. The i7 chip is always more powerful than the i5, and the difference is greater than the difference between any two chips in the same chip line.Īll laptops technically have graphics cards (also called “discrete” graphics and GPU), but most are bundled into the motherboard with the processor. The Intel Core i5-12510U is slightly more powerful than the Intel Core i5-12210U, but much less powerful than the Intel Core i7-12350U. This is only true within that chip line, though. The higher these numbers are, the more powerful the chip is. The next two or three numbers ("510") are related to performance. The i5-11510U would be a 11th-generation chip, or one that's probably a year or so older. The first numbers ("12") refer to the generation in this case it's a 12th-generation chip. Intel Core i5-12510U is how a laptop manufacturer's websites might list the type of processor. (Here's Intel's guide to its model naming.) Learning to decipher it will help you make better buying decisions. Within each of these chip lines, Intel uses cryptic strings of numbers and letters that give you more information about that chip's capabilities and when it came out.