MSI Bravo 15 A4DDR Gaming & Design CPU : AMD Ryzen 7 4800H 2.9GHz (16 CPUs) Ram : 16GB DDR4 3200 MHz Hardisk : M.2 512GB Nvme SSD VGA 1 : AMD Radeon™ Graphics UpTo 8GB VGA 2 : AMD Radeon RX 5500M UpTo 12GB
Honestly build quality matters more than specs if you’re not gaming in my opinion, that’s why old thinkpads are so popular
I personally got burned by a shitty modern laptop because I only looked at the specs and nothing else
I’m talking about things like:
- chassis sturdiness
- laptop foot grippiness
- hinge quality
- touchpad quality/has trackpoint
- battery longevity (very important)
- display colour accuracy/viewing angles
- keyboard tactility/travel/flex
These things are harder to research but they’re imo way more important than specs
Yeah I’ve fallen into this trap before as well. When I shop for a desktop, I tend to go as high-end as I can afford and then sit on the same machine for 7-10 years until it becomes unusable/support begins to wain. That desktop sits under my desk and doesn’t move that whole time, it is in a very controlled environment.
You cannot shop that way for a laptop that will be moved and handled and charged and stowed and scratched and bumped and bent and twisted. Even if you take excellent care of it.
Then you gotta go framework. The ports are all swappable. When you break a port like hdmi you’re basically fucked on a standard laptop. And laptops falling off places is basically guaranteed
I bought a modern MSI gaming laptop with awesome on-paper specs and they did something fucky such that the keyboard doesn’t work until about kernel v6.7. The keyboard. Wtf.
This is important. In sturdiness, hinges and so, MSI usually scores very low. Mine is now a desktop laptop because if I move it is hangs and wont let you boot it again for an hour or so. Strange behavior. Lousy wuality computer.
I haven’t worked on this particular model, but gaming laptop build quality is generally very bad.
Msi build quality is also generally pretty bad.
With that said, most people don’t need build quality because they don’t actually take their computers anywhere.
I have an MSI Bravo 17 for work since this month,
quite happy about it so far.My experience with MSI is best price/value for hardware specs, but with shitty build quality.
However this one feels quite sturdy compared to earlier MSI laptops.
It can get loud under heavy duty,
but it goes quiet again under low workload,
for now at least, my previous MSI laptop sounded like a jet engine whenever it was powered on.The one you posted seems particularly suited to run Linux upon, since it’s an all AMD machine, and their Linux support is great.
Oh cool, I’ll get it then hopefully it didn’t sole out because at that price it’s a steal in my country, for comparison they still selling shitty dell laptops with 7-8 gen CPU for 400$+
The CPU is a pretty good one, the GPU is on the weaker side. You can run plenty of games on it, but AAA games wont run very well. This thing isnt very old and AMD GPUs are well supported by linux drivers so there shouldnt be an issue there.
I heard the GPU is comparable to RTX 30series laptop which is 3X the price of this laptop and also nice to have good driver supporting :D
comparable to RTX 30series
That sadly doesnt mean anything. That would range from 3050 to 3090 so its meaningless.
According to userbenchmarks, the more powerful desktop version of the RX 5500 is still weaker than a Nvidia 3050. https://gpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Nvidia-RTX-3050-vs-AMD-RX-5500/4127vs4059
So its pretty weak, comparable to a Nvidia 1060 roughly. Which is still fine for 2D games and most 3D games at low settings.
I’m not really sure, but wasn’t userbenchmark biased in favor of nvidia gpu?
In any case, I agree that an rx5500 is on the weaker side, so don’t expect much, but it shouldn’t be a lot worse than an rtx3050 (i’m not an expert tho)
Yeah there was something there but its still in the right league at least. It might change the ranking slightly but it wont change that its at the low end.
Yup, no doubts there.
Anyway, OP, if I were you I’d buy that laptop (not for gaming tho, or at least not if you’re looking for something more than “good enough”)
My husband has had an MSI bravo for a few years. Uses it constantly, and it’s great. No issues outta it whatsoever. However, he does not use Linux on it. He prefers to dual boot and the SSD is a little small for that (if you also want to install games).
I have the b5dd model (with the 5600h processor) and linux support is good. Just find out what is the make and model of the wifi card. B55D came with a mediatek card which had problems with older kernels.
Build quality is average at best and it is fairly heavy but when you are going for a budget laptop, you have to sacrifice something. As another commenter said, if you are not gaming or video editing, you could go for different model with a smaller footprint, and better build.
Lemmys will see this and say hell yeah
It’s about right for the price.
If they have $380 and what a $380 computer it will serve.
If it’s a steal, buy it and try it. Worst case, you could turn a small profit by reselling it.
If you can do Intel WiFi you’ll have a nicer time, check it
My friend had an older MSI gaming laptop and it was built like SHIT. He didn’t use it a whole lot until he started working at our company and it lasted maybe 4 years of reasonable daily use. Physically it was fine because he never actually touched the laptop. But that thing was so incredibly unstable and eventually ended with it’s M.2 and it’s internal sata slots being unusable, and making the machine take 5 minutes to boot.
I also bought two MSI “business” laptops and those things were absolute junk too. The touch panel came from the factory broken. Thankfully nobody wants to use that shit so we just disabled. But my co worker dropped one the other day and we need to replace the whole display assembly but I can’t for the life of me find parts for the machine. After about two weeks of searching my only options were A. a whole ass laptop for $500 (thankfully they depreciate lick a rock) or B. A complete display assembly for $375. No thanks, we’re replacing those pieces of shit.
Unless you want to game on it save yourself the suffering and just get a used thinkpad. The T14 gen 1 goes for $200 easily and it’s quadcore CPU is sufficient, and you can find it with the 6 core. I bought a T14 s gen 2 AMD for $300 and it’s 6 core blows that T14 out of the water and gets far better battery life, plus it’s iGPU ain’t no slouch. (All prices USD, can will probably be higher)
Side note are there any good hardware swap communities on lemmy? I have a number of old machines I need to get rid of.
I have a 2020-2021 MSI Alpha and quality is horrendous. It has great components inside a lousy case that is almost completely through. Wouldn’t go MSI again at all.
Even a potato can run Linux so regardless of a distro it should be all fine.
May i see the output of neofetch?
Even a potato can run Linux so regardless of a distro it should be all fine.
A potato with a GPU only compatible with deprecated Nvidia drivers would still be just that and a hard pass for Linux.
Luckily this notebook is AMD-based, so should be fine. Maybe the WiFi card could cause trouble.
Hopefully it not because I don’t use Ethernet
Most WiFi modules are fairly easy to change out for one that Linux is happy with.
yeah, but hardware support and buggyness is still a question
