Want to buy laptop for KSP around €1000

[Konry13]

Hey KSP mates! I want buy a Macbook Air 2020 i7, 16gb. I am playing KSP for a 2 months.. but not on my own PC. So can I with this hardware for example build colony on the mun, solar orbit or etc. with thousends of single parts? I don’t think I will start single ship with more then 500 parts... just will putting this space ships together, via assembly using.
 

Macbook is my dream, also for work but if it is not good for KSP (or run KSP 2 in near future) like building monster colony or iss... I am leave this dream. Then can you recommend laptop around €1000 to catch my KSP wishes, please?

Wishing god speed to your Kerbals!

Edited June 22, 2020 by Konry13
Gramatic mistakes... I am from Czech

[SingABrightSong]

First things first, this is probably the wrong category to ask this question, so I expect a moderator will move it elsewhere. 

To actually answer your question though. a MacBook Air is likely not going to be sufficient for your use case, even with the i7 model. The chassis is designed to be lightweight, so you'll run into thermal throttling rapidly. That said, due to the nature of KSP's code, a ship with that many parts won't run well on most any system, thermal throttling or not. In any case, if your heart is set on a Mac, I'd recommend the 16" Macbook Pro, though this of course is likely to run twice your budget. 

[swjr-swis]

If running KSP well is important enough to you to drop the Macbook requirement, I would recommend looking for a non-Apple product. What you save on the brand can be spent on better specifications.

Watch also for the trap called 'gaming laptop'. Just naming it that way tends to add several $100 to the price of a laptop, for what often amounts to just some visual enhancements instead of actual performance (special case with 'beefy' appearance, glowing logos, etc). If you're ok with a more run of the mill duller look, you can often find the same specs in a regular laptop for considerably less money, or better specs for a similar price than a 'gaming' version.

Specs-wise, at least make sure there's a discrete graphics card in the laptop. KSP is not the type of game that taxes graphics much, but letting a dedicated chip handle the graphics still gives the main CPU some extra margin to deal with the intensive calculations that KSP does use, and some of the physics code can even be offloaded to it. Look for the mention of either NVIDIA or AMD graphics chip - with their current performance levels, almost any of them will do for KSP.

As for the main CPU, Intel pretty much wins at the moment performance-wise, while AMD is cheaper. An i7 of almost any current type will offer a good base, but your budget is somewhat limited, so you may need to consider a compromise. A higher end i5 with good clock speed should still perform well with high part loads in KSP.

16GB of ram is a good target, I would not go below that if you can.

An SSD can speed up the initial load of KSP considerably, which should only really bother you if you run your game heavily modded. Once within a game session its influence is negligible. So consider the trade off, since SSDs tend to add a good bit to the price. That said, for all other use of the laptop, the SSD will of course also speed up load times.

 

I know this is very generic advice and doesn't really give you a specific recommendation, but if you're willing to let go of specific brand or model requirements and focus on the components, you can get very nice performance out of a 'regular' laptop. With a limited budget, some compromising is probably going to be required, so you'll have to consider what aspects are more important to you.

[jimmymcgoochie]

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