About to take the plunge on a 13...

Sold my beast AW17 and built a nice desktop, and now need a portable machine for productivity that can also run a game when I need it to.

After much research and comparison, I have settled on getting the AW13. The model I am looking at is a refurb, QHD touch-screen, 860m, i5 4210, 16 gig ram, and a 250 SSD. Anyone have any final thoughts before I dive into it?

My only real concern is the qhd screen, a touch screen seems great, but am I going to run into issues have a screen with such crazy high resolution? I plan to just drop my game settings to 1080p, I am not a hardcore numbers gamer who is crazy about FPS and max performance, just want to have fun.

So, any experienced AW13 owners have any advice/warnings before I take the plunge on this?

 

I really would go for the I7 version. The I5 is just too much of a bottleneck in my opinion. THe reason why I didnt buy the older AW13 models as an extra machine.

 

According to benchmarks, there is very little difference between the i5 and i7 in these machines, not enough to justify the extra cost for very minor gain. That has been the result of my findings at least.

 

Well, the difference between the i5-5200u and the i7-5500u isn't that much (I think about 7%). However, the difference between the i5-4210u and the i7-5500u is about 20%.
I don't recommend getting a 13 with the 4210u. At least the 5200u. Or you could wait for the Skylake refresh of the 13. Could be coming in a month or two, if you're willing to wait.

 

i've got a i7 QHD (not QHD+ though) and if it wasn't for the touchscreen part, I'd have thrown this damn thing against the wall a few times by now.
The QHD touchscreen capable screen has some quirks (especially for remote desktop to servers if you do that kind of thing), but it's worth it for one more alternate interface over that da*n clickpad.

The Clickpad randomly lags out for a couple seconds, it can't recognize my thumb vs finger even with it's "dedicated button zone" BS, it's constantly rattling when I tap it...just argh.
Mountain out of mole hills perhaps, but It's amazing how losing dedicated buttons makes the clickpad such crap.

So yes, while windows can't really scale things well, and Photoshop (CS5.5 at least) and Remote desktop have some TINY buttons. You can always bump resolution of the screen down a notch and turn off scaling, then you'll still have the touchscreen.

You'll like the touch capability...Honestly, I'm finding myself reach up to touch my desktop monitors so I don't have to waste time hunting for the mouse across the multi-screens.

I have been using mine ~5days a week for the last few months without any super blocking issues. Sometimes I've had to pull the thing up close to the face, but there's always Ctrl + -/+ to change text size in browsers also, so I wouldn't worry about the micro resolution text too much.

As for the i5 vs i7 thing, it's not like these are "real" i7 quad cores, so you won't see that much difference, that you can leave up to the budget & expected usage. No one except Cosby has ever said they've had too much horsepower, but for casual gaming I haven't heard any problems with it.

Good luck with your choice, but invest in a good portable mouse...
Cheers,