Should I trade my Gateway p-7804 for an Envy 14 beats edition?

Ok guys I鈥檓 about to change my laptop in a few months as I鈥?m going to college this September and my 17鈥欌€?Gateway is way too bulky for me to carry it around every day.

I was thinking about buying a refurbished Envy 14 beats edition (yeah, for the looks) on ebay, for about 1100$. Its specs seem pretty good for the price, as I want to run on very high all the big games coming out this holiday: Battlefield 3, TES Skyrim, SW: The Old Republic, Mass Effect 3, Diablo 3, Deus Ex HR, Guild Wars 2鈥?



Specs: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-720QM Quad Core processor (1.6GHz, 6MB L3 Cache) with Turbo Boost up to 2.8 GHz, 8gb Ram, 1GB ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5650 DDR3 [HDMI], 1366x768 resolution



I currently own a Gateway P-7804, that I plan to sell on Craigslist/Facebook. I鈥檝e had it for two years, and bought it refurbished on ebay for 900$, never failed me. Plays many recent games real well, such as Crysis, Bioshock 1 %26amp; 2, Starcraft 2, Bad Company 2, Spore 鈥?br>
Specs: Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU P8400 @ 2.26GHz, 4gb RAM, 1gb Nvidia Geforce 9800M GTS, 1900x 1940 resolution



So my questions are:

1. When is the best time to buy my laptop 鈥?are the prices lower towards the end of summer?

2. How much can I get if I sell my Gateway? 500$?

3. Will the Envy run all the upcoming big games on max, especially Skyrim? Is it worth the 600$ investment?



Thanks a lot!Should I trade my Gateway p-7804 for an Envy 14 beats edition?
There is no such resolution as 1900 x 1940. Even if you had that set in windows that way, your screen was not even close to that. You are just stressing out your GPU for no reason.



1. Yes. Everything goes on sell just before college fall season starts. Laptops will be one of the main items that will be discounted during college season rush.



2. It is a decent laptop, but it is also now 3 hand and has some years on it. If the buyer doesn't know better you may be able to get $400 for it



3. Hell no. However take that with a grain of salt because I am a PC gamer. What I consider maxed is not what you consider maxed. While I am sure it will give you payable frame rate on medium, AA will most definitely need to be turned off. AF may be able to get away with x2 or x4.



Lets get into it shall we. With $1100, you could build a nice desktop to play your games. Or you could build a upper mid-ranged desktop for around $750 and buy a nice light weight laptop for class around $375. Even if you have a budget desktop around $750, you will come out with more power than any laptop will give you.



The Envy 14 is a very nice laptop with decent power for its size, but you will not be playing any upcoming games on max, even at that low a resolution.



To give you some perspective of on what I meant about my max and yours. I play BFBC2 at 1920 x 1080, all settings on High, HBAO set to ON, 8x Anti-aliasing and 16x Anisotropic Filtering, and VSync. I get 58 FPS average, and 49 FPS minimum. And my rig would only be $900 to rebuild.