School laptop for medium-light gaming and good battery life

Question

I'm going to be entering as a freshman Computer Engineering major next school year and am beginning to shop around for laptops to replace my Asus F510UA laptop which has been getting me through high school.

I plan on using my new laptop for computer programming, CAD, and schoolwork (likely with VMs), medium-light gaming (e.g. CS:GO, World of Warships), and note-taking in school lectures once I get to my campus. I'm not on a tight budget, but also don't want to be spending any more than $1500 USD.

Something I've been missing in my ~$500 ASUS high school laptop is battery life; it's rare I have more than 1.5-2 hrs away from the wall at medium brightness and a normal workload before I have to charge. I'm in the market for something which can last a fair bit longer than this.

I've recently been looking into possibly getting the ASUS TUF 505DU-MB74 laptop because of its nice-looking mix of performance and price with an R7 3750H, 1660 Ti, 16 GB RAM, and 512 GB PCIe SSD for $1099 USD on Amazon, but I have no idea what its battery life would be like, especially because there's no iGPU to fall back onto for increased battery life.

If there's any other information that would be useful in a recommendation that I've omitted, please let me know and I'll try to fill in the gaps. Thanks!

Answer 1

One alternative well suited for "CAD and computer programming, and schoolwork (likely with VMs), medium-light gaming (e.g. CS:GO, World of Warships), and lecture note-taking", would be a ThinkPad P73 which NewEgg advertised at $1,399 FOB US Destination in one configuration. The 17.3" FHD (1920 x 1080) IPS, anti-glare, 300 nits screen is well suited for CAD, as is the NVIDIA® Quadro® P620 4GB display adapter and the 9th generation i7 CPU to drive it.

---

And, to answer your battery life question regarding the FX505DU:

"Overall battery life for the FX505DU is pretty mediocre, which is to be expected since this is a machine that’s primarily made for gaming. On our WiFi connected YouTube test where we just autoplay YouTube with screen brightness at 50% and sound at 50%, the FX505DU ran for 5 hours before it completely tapped out." - https://www.unbox.ph/gadget/asus-tuf-fx505du-review-tuf-gets-tougher/

"When subjected to the usual Battery Eater testing tool, which gauges the minimum battery life of a given notebook PC, the ASUS TUF FX505 lasted for 1 hours and 45 minutes. This isn’t particularly great but it’s not too far from the norm for gaming laptops." - https://www.pcworld.idg.com.au/review/asus/tuf-fx505/669010/

"Gaming laptops rarely impress when it comes to battery life —after all, the powerful gaming components inside need a lot of juice, which reduces battery runtime before you plug it in. With a smaller screen size and low-powered CPU and GPU, we hoped that the Asus TUF Gaming TUF505DU-EB74 would be better in this regard. Sadly, it fails to pin better battery life yielding around 4 hours 31 minutes. We are not surprised, though, as we have reviewed more expensive laptops with worse battery scores." - https://www.digitweek.com/asus-tuf505du-eb74-2019-gaming-laptop-review/

Another reviewer found 4 hrs, 48 min of YouTube viewing and 1 hr, 9 min of gaming per https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fNVoLFldxlA starting at 5:40 into the video.