Gaming laptops are a waste of money. You could buy a high end gaming pc for the same money that could do a lot more than a laptop thats the same price.

Benchmarks wrote Gaming laptops are a waste of money. You could buy a high end gaming pc for the same money that could do a lot more than a laptop thats the same price.

correct but you build your desktop that way its cheaper and has the parts you want

well im posting this just because if someone was looking for a laptop to buy this is a great laptop its cheap and its not 100% for gaming.

Benchmarks wrote Gaming laptops are a waste of money. You could buy a high end gaming pc for the same money that could do a lot more than a laptop thats the same price.

Could you pay enough to make it small enough to put in a bag and take anywhere?

Didn't think so.

inuyasha555 wrote

Benchmarks wrote Gaming laptops are a waste of money. You could buy a high end gaming pc for the same money that could do a lot more than a laptop thats the same price.

Could you pay enough to make it small enough to put in a bag and take anywhere?

Didn't think so.

Yes, you can. lol

FreeToPlayOnPC wrote

inuyasha555 wrote

Benchmarks wrote Gaming laptops are a waste of money. You could buy a high end gaming pc for the same money that could do a lot more than a laptop thats the same price.

Could you pay enough to make it small enough to put in a bag and take anywhere?

Didn't think so.

Yes, you can. lol

I'll be awaiting your proof. Every part and the constructed build. It must come with a screen, speakers and the actual tower. It cannot use any sort of mobile graphics either and must fit in a 17" bag.

I'll be waiting.

THERE IS A RAGING debate between me and the rest of the world over gaming laptops. Most people think they are the hottest thing since sliced bread, I think they are about as dumb as you can get. It begs the question, if all of your friends said enemas were cool, would you get one?
The concept is a good one, in theory, but falls flat in reality. The promise is to have a portable machine that plays games as well as it does all the things you want a laptop for. All the machines to date fail on both accounts, with only a nod to portability.
Let's look at the pros of the current crop of gaming laptops. They are, in no particular order:
1) More portable than a desktop
2) Fanbois think you are cool
Now let's look at the down sides, again in no particular order:
1) Very expensive
2) Proprietary hardware that is unfixable if it breaks
3) Proprietary hardware that is unupgradable
4) Slow CPUs
5) Slow buses
6) Slow memory
7) Slow HDs
8) GPU makers lie about the capabilities of mobile GPUs (the 5000M is every bit as good as a 5000, really)
9) They are heavier than a normal laptop
10) They are as portable as a phone book
11) Battery life measured in hummingbird wingflaps
12) Screen responses measured in glacial movement units
13) Keyboards and mice that pale in response to a Logitech G5/G15
14) Lots of expensive crap bolted on you will never use
Let's look at these in detail, shall we? The initial count says two wins for 14 losses, but the devil is in the details. First the pros, portability and cool factor. Portability is a given, it is a laptop, and you can ostensibly game on it. Some are relatively light, but none of those are what I would consider gaming laptops. The gaming ones, with multiple video cards and big high rez screens are all 17 inches or larger and weigh as much as a mid-sized sedan.
Portability is hindered by the fact that to get anything not outright laughable for battery life, you need to add in a car battery. A good keyboard and mouse are a must for any real gamer, and with the power brick and other widgets, you suddenly aren't all that portable. A good ATX case with two PCIe 16x slots isn't far behind, especially with nicely designed carrying straps or handles.
Then there is the coolness factor. You know, when you pull it out and all your friends go 'aaaah'. There is no denying that, but six months and three revisions down the line, you are still owing 93 per cent of the value in payments, that wears thin. Cool is very short lived in computers.
Still, they are more portable, and people will swoon over the shiny finish of the moment. As a friend told me when I got a Camaro in high school, "You can pick up chicks in that". I bluntly looked at him and said, "Do I want the chicks I can pick up with a Camaro?" The same holds true for laptops, if you want that attention, fine by me, but I won't go there, it isn't worth it.
That brings us to the negatives, and boy are there a lot. As I alluded to, they are shatteringly expensive. For the exact same performance, expect to pay at least twice what you pay for a desktop, and the premium only goes up from there. Why is it good to drop an extra $1500 or so on a beast that gets eaten alive by a mid-level desktop in it's main function?
Then there is the proprietary hardware bit. If you push over your desktop monitor, you go out and by a new one. If it is more than six months later, you will get a better one for less money, likely with more features. You will feel stupid, but you will still have better hardware.
Crack the screen on your laptop, and you are in hell. If it is six months old, expect to get merely screwed by the replacement costs. As it gets older, if it is possibly to replace at all, it is almost never worth it, the price of a screen quickly becomes more than the price of a new faster laptop. The chances of you being able to buy a replacement part off the shelf? Do you believe in fairies?
The same is true for upgradability. NV is pimping their MXM 'technology', ATI their Axiom, and neither ever amounted to anything much. If you are lucky enough to find a manufacturer that allows you to buy one, you will basically be stuck with what is out there when you buy the notebook. The next version of the 'standard' won't work with the current one. I looked for years and found all of no manufacturers offering an upgrade on even the next generation of GPUs. They may exist, but I will take my chances with fairies.
The same is true for just about any other part other than RAM. You may find a bigger faster part, but as soon as you plug it in, if it works, watch the temperatures, and more importantly, watch that battery life. HDs occasionally work faster, but pale in comparison to the most average of desktop parts on a good day. You usually overload the PSU before you get any decent speed increases.
That brings us to the quality of the hardware itself, specifically the CPUs. You can make a CPU that is optimized for speed or for power use, but not both. The fundamental tradeoff in transistors is that speed brings leakage and more power use. More efficient transistors mean slower but less leaky parts. Expect to give up half a GHz or so if you want anything more than fractions of an hour of battery life.
Then there is bus speed, or lack thereof. Almost every mobile part out there hamstrings the bus for power. Currently, Intel is 533MHz behind on its mobile parts, AMD is sucking down battery life as the tradeoff. Neither is a good thing. Every bit you push out across a wire costs power, and the faster you do it, the more additional overhead you pay.
Then there is the memory. Most laptops are capped at DDR2/800 with bog standard or worse timings, but faster is coming. This is OK for a business desktop, but on a gaming rig, especially a 'high end' gaming rig, well, prepare to be laughed at if I see you at a lan party.
They are at about a 50% raw speed deficit to real gaming memory, tend to have laughable timings, and cost even more of a premium than the normally expensive premium desktop parts. Densities are a joke, and even if you could find a huge fast stick, your mobile chipset probably would not support it.
In the end, there are some manufacturers that make good gaming laptop memory, OCZ, Corsair and Kingston come to mind. If you can find appropriate memory, and if your machine takes advantage of it, and if if you can tweak your BIOS appropriately, you stand a good chance of overheating the memory. Trust me, transient and heat based memory problems are a true joy to debug, especially if they only happen in the heat of battle when you are getting shot at. Grins all around there.
Then there are HDs, another area where laptops really stink. There are 7200rpm S-ATA drives, and I would expect all decent gaming laptops to have one or more of them, but many will try and pass off 5400rpm parts. If you look at other factors such as seek time and areal density, laptop drives, well, blow.
Any average desktop drive will eat a similar RPM laptop drive for lunch. If you are a serious gamer, you will have a 10K WD Raptor or three anyway, and those destroy the best laptop parts without breaking a sweat. While others are playing, you are watching the load bar, that is a great thing for you to show off your shiny toy with.
That brings us to the heart of any gaming laptop, the GPU, and possibly the greatest scam in laptops, mobile GPUs. This deserves a rant of it's own, but the condensed version centers around three things, specs, power and drivers.
First power, a good high end desktop GPU takes 150W or so, a mobile one on the order of a quarter that. Most mobile power saving techniques center around idling the CPU when it is not under full load. GPUs do this as well, shutting off units and even downclocking massively.
The problem? When you are gaming, you are never under low load, it is almost a certainty that you will be pushing the GPU to it's max, so no downclocking. Your laptop will melt with 150W, so NV and ATI can work miracles and bend the laws of physics, or they can give you a 50W part.
Guess what they do? They give you castrated mobile parts. The scam of it all? They use the same numbering schemes as the desktop parts hoping you are dumb enough to not look closely. If you bought a gaming laptop, you were that dumb.
You end up with a mere shadow of the part you thought you were getting, but you have a sticker that fanbois will ogle over. This satisfies pro 2) but rarely satisfies the purchaser. It is a scam.
Then you have drivers, or rarely do you have drivers. The situation is improving, but they are still hard to find if they exist. You usually end up with a vendor supplied driver that from last November that contains bugs exorcised a year before in the desktop parts. Enjoy the screen corruption people.
The screens themselves are another bit of happiness. Response times are typically achieved through newer technologies or overdriving the screens. Overdriving costs power, and power costs battery life. Not good for laptops.
Any sane person will stop calling anything bigger than 17-inch a laptop, but 1920 * 1200 screens are starting to crop up in the 17-inch world now. While I applaud greater resolution, if you squint at the same rez on a 24-inch screen, imagine it on about 75 per cent the size. The increased dot pitch is not necessarily a plus if you can't read the text on the screen.
So, you end up with slow and blurry but still making you squint, or squinty and battery draining. Have you ever seen a laptop screen that is better than a high end desktop LCD? I mean that in a measurable, testable sense, not in fanboi "Oooooh.... shiny" mode.
All of the tech in a modern laptop is skewed toward battery life, and impressive gains have been made. Fractions of a watt a fought over by Intel, AMD and chipset vendors to give you that extra 15 minutes of battery life and to shave off that last few mg of weight. Vista is 17 steps backward in this regard, but if you are dumb enough, you deserve what you get.
Gaming laptop give those laudable goals the one finger salute, they are there for gaming not intercontinental flight marathons, right? Well, yes and no. The added power draw means added battery mass so they don't get laughed out the door. Strike one.
The added heat dissipation means you need bigger heavier copper HSFs and heat pipes. These also take up space, and copper is not cheap or light. You also need bigger fans to move that heat off the end of the heat pipe, and those suck more power and generate more heat. Strikes two and three.
More importantly the side of the laptop will put out enough heat to wilt the mightiest of oaks and remove that wetland problem those pesky environmentalists are always carping about. You end up with a massive brick that puts a phone book to shame in both volume and mass. But your friends will go "ooooh". For six months. Then it is just heavy, unwieldy and slow.
Then there is the problem of controllers. Laptops have come a long way, some are even offering exceptionally good feeling and almost full sized keyboards. Track pads have gone from jokes to quite nice over the years, probably due to Synaptics more than anything else.
For a real gamer though, a higher standard is needed, the keys that are downsized tend to be the ones you need for gaming, arrow keys, numpad, function keys and others. A high DPI mouse also is needed. You can get p0wned repeatedly or you can use the right equipment. This brings us back to portability, but you get the point by now.
That brings us to the added stuff that manufacturers feel compelled to toss in to their machines. Webcams are one big one, the thrill there wears off in days, if you are still impressed in a month you need to go outside more. The various readers, widgets, lighting schemes and buzzers all are cute, but they add cost and weight. Once the sale is made, they are superfluous if not an outright negative.
In the end, you have a class of laptops that is barely fit for their intended purpose, reaching mid-range speed on a good day. If you are really lucky, they can drive the fixed rez of the screen you have on a modern game with most features turned on. In a few months, that won't be the case, and you are stuck. In a year, you will be cursing your wonderbox.
On the other hand, an SFF machine like a Shuttle or the late Monarch Hornet, even a generic ATX case, will do everything you need. You can pick out a board with 2 16x PCIe slots, 4 DIMMs, quad core support, and everything else you need. If you want more, there are slots. Want to upgrade? You can, easily!!!!
They may not be 100% future proof, but they are infinitely better than any laptop ever made. Get one with a decent handle or carry straps and you don't give away much in portability, and only a little in weight.
In the end, you can buy a faster gaming rig and a laptop for less than what you can get an uber-gaming laptop for. There is no reason other than vanity and stupidity to buy one of these, but strangely people do. While they are waiting in line for the high colonic, I will be gaming in the comfort of my house, at high frame rates.

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FlakezGamingTactics wrote Hey guys I want to share some news with you on a nice laptop I own. It is a nice laptop very underrated computers run nicely and come for under 1000$ dollars!


Memory:
RAM 4 GB
Speed 1066 MHz

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Graphics Processor Intel HD Graphics 3000

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Great for:
Gamers
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Sounds great for gamers.... :|

lol its great for a lot