Hi!

I want to buy a laptop for work but also be able to use it for gaming.
Will an i5 7300, 8 gb ram, 128 + 1tb, nvidia 1050 4 gb, be good enough for current games? I mostly play old games but I'd love to be able to play new games too, something like gears 5 with my xbox friends.

Any feedback is welcome.

Thanks in advance

No. There is simply no way to pack that much into a small space. You could play games 5+ years older probably with not so much for issues, but not newer games or current games. Don't expect to get better performance than say the Xbox360 from a laptop.

There's gaming rigs that are thousands of dollars and large with Titans to play current gen games at the graphic settings better than the XBone and PS4. However, you won't find that in a laptop.

Maybe you should consider streaming... Have a main system render it and forward it graphically to somewhere on a wireless or local LAN connection. But at that point it removes any advantage of getting a laptop.

I recently bought a laptop with an 8th Gen I7 8750H, 8GB RAM and a 4GB Nvidia GTX 1050. It plays most games I have fairly well. It's not spectacular but it does the job. Some more recent games it does struggle on higher graphics settings.

The specs you described would meet the recommended requirements for Gears 5.

i've heard the 1050 GPU are bad choice to buy for gaming

Which i5-7300? There's at least two and they're quite different. Either way, it's not a particularly high end CPU. I have 8 GB of RAM on my old laptop and I keep running out of RAM regularly. Mind you it's not only gaming that I use it for. Sounds ok. Sounds weak, YMMV. It sounds ok for old games, not so great for current games. Maybe it's bearable if you don't mind turning down the resolution, settings, and playing at a less than steady 60 fps.

Probably. As i said, don't expect better than looking/acting like a Xbox 360.

But if you drop to lower polygon counts, lighter textures, and not going for realistic lighting or the like, then a large number of games would perform rather well. Not sure about newer games, i have to assume newer is akin to FPS games, and anything breaking the 60GB game size because if it doesn't have 4k textures, realistic lighting and shadows, physics, and an open world then the stigma of it not being worth looking at.

At least that's how it feels.

Here's a machine that should do the job fairly well.

Cultivate an interest in LucasArts Point and Click Adventures and Indie titles, no expensive hardware needed.

I hope your deaf, because "The Acer Helios 700 is really LOUD, 60 decibels with the fans on while doing just about anything..."

I mean, it can handle pretty much any game you can throw at it without breaking a sweat though.

It all depends on what you're expecting. My only computer is a laptop, and it's not a super-powerful gamer either - a Ryzen 2500u / Vega 8 based laptop. I've played some modern-ish games on it: Witcher 3, Dirt 4, Kingdom Come. I've got to lower the resolution, and scale back the graphic settings, but they've been perfectly playable.

I suspect if you've got a gaming desktop that you can compare the visuals to, you'll be disappointed. For me, I'm happily ignorant about how much better games could look with a more powerful computer.

Well if it meets your needs...

I know my current gaming rig i had running Skyrim with nearly all settings on, HD... and the video card (Gtx 1050 Ti) wasn't hardly turning it's fans on. Running cool all the time.

Unlike the Sapphire video card which was very loud when it was chugging... So i'd usually play games that weren't quite as graphically intensive (though Ori and the Blind Forrest and Lichdom Battlemage were the only two to make it chug)

For the most part, Ditto. I'm still happy to play the old SNES titles like Megaman X :)

Whatever machine you decide on, try it out before you buy. Gaming laptops pack a lot of power into a tiny space and can get hot. You need a machine that can cool itself adequately under load. You would think the engineers account for this but that's not always the case. Great specs are meaningless if you are constantly being throttled to avoid overheating.

500usd should be enough to play modern games if you don't mind to low the settings a bit. check the 1050ti 4gb since 2gb isn't enough in most modern games and will struggle. On the other hand, 1050 isn't a bad GPU at all compared to the previous ones (for example, 960m). Are you going to buy brand new or used?. Used laptops are always "bang for the buck" IMO :).

I prefer 'Refurbished' which are more or less tested and will have a new warranty on it. Some of them may even be new but was returned a week after being opened.