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What's wrong with gaming notebooks today: Why haven't you bought one?
Posted by niero gonzalez in Gamer PC | Dec. 02, 2008 4:00 PM
This week I thought I'd do something a little different. My previous articles have touched on innovation in the industry, wishful thinking, and asking gamers to discuss the building blocks that would make up their dream gaming notebooks. Today I'd like to pull us back to reality and question your instinct as a consumer for the products readily available on the shelf today. My question is simple: Why haven't you bought a gaming notebook yet?
There are countless companies engineering new gaming notebooks each day, but it seems that only a handful of us own proper rigs. I was curious as to what the leading factors were and put the Destructoid community task: an open poll which solicited over 200 comments which contained a surprisingly narrow number of key reasons. Some comments cited various, so I awarded three points for the top reason, two for the second, and one for every additional complaint cited. Destructoid's readership is made up of 97% males between the ages of 18-35, so if you fall into that bracket then I have a pretty good shot of what you might say. I won't quit my day job for fortune telling but let's see how well I do:
You haven't bought one because they're too expensive.
I'll be the first to admit that my question is flawed from the get-go: It's like asking the average college kid why he isn't driving a BMW. Who doesn't want a blazing fast gaming computer on the go? Then again, I'm not to blame for the products on the shelf. Nobody would say "Buying a BMW is stupid because you can only drive it on new roads for two years." You'd have to be an idiot or swimming in disposable income to put your money into a machine like that. Nevertheless, that's how some people view gaming notebooks. The average shelf life of a desktop is unquestionably longer.
Thus, over a quarter of our readers said there was no way they'd choose a gaming notebook over a desktop because the value just isn't there. The argument has always been that the cost of manufacturing a notebook will always remain higher due to the compact nature of the system, but only a small portion of the readers barked at the size, weight, and durability. That either means that (as hefty as they may be) gaming notebooks have arrived at an ideal size or the industry puts too much stock into the weight of gaming notebooks. They're heavy. We'll live with it -- just make them cheaper.
One of the more candid responses challenged their existence: "Since you have to run from outlet to outlet to play games on notebooks, doesn't that defeat the point?" Touche. The closest thing by design that comes to mind is Dell's beefy M2010 concept PC, which featured a 20" monitor with a PC-like base and a full-sized keyboard. It was 18 pounds and received mixed reviews. Obviously, the solution is not so simple.
You also haven't bought one because they're obsolete too fast.
I fall into this category. Across from me is a Sony Vaio which, two years ago, was great for gaming. Today, it struggles. Somewhere in my closet I have a Dell notebook that weighs more than my television and can't play anything faster than Quake 3 on medium detail. These machines are still quite capable of running Windows and checking my email. They all have beautiful displays, large hard drives, DVD-writers, keyboards, touchpads, so on and so forth. Yet, I'm buying all of those things over and over each time I buy a gaming notebook. It makes no sense. My survey shows that 1/4th of would-be buyers are staying away because we're sick of buying laptops with the frequency of gaming consoles.
This leads me to the conclusion that gamers are demanding some sort of missing link between power and price: The ultimate Frankencomputer of gaming notebooks. May it be fat, may it be heavy, but may it let us plug-in as many cheap or expensive user-swappable parts as we can afford at the time of sale. Built-to-order is so 1990. We are demanding built-to-last.
Did I guess your top two reasons correctly? Please contribute by sharing your reasons for not buying a gaming notebook in the comments below.
Laptops are great and all but they are really just to small for me to game on. I would always choose a desktop over laptop in gaming terms. Laptops just seem like they are mainly used for mobile work.
I haven't bought one because of the crappy battery life, the battery has to have a good life, 2 to 3 hours isnt going to cut it, when I game its along the lines of 8+ hours, there is no such thing as a light gamer, only hard-core gamers... they call it a suck zone for a reason, because we are addicted to it and nothing else matter when we're in the "Suck Zone"
They cost to much.
I havnt bought one because they are just tooooo Expensive =[
Hi this is Moshe
Pleas look at my post.
Comments will be appreciated.
http://www.wepc.com/vote/view/dream/7362/William_Gibson_Cyberspace_Machine
Okay I have a background in IT and have been gaming for many years and I too keep upgrading my laptops and I hate it. First, here is what I consider to be a great rig for gaming today.
4GB ram
Intel Core 2 duo 2.4-2.5
Nvidia 9000 no less than 9000 for example 9600 series
250gb of HD space, thats all you really need, this rig should keep you gaming for the next 3 years. What kills most gamers is when they try to purchase a laptop with a intel or AMD 2.0ghz CPU this right here is the single most fault of gamers. A 2.0 GHZ is the bottlekneck...seriously you need a 2.4 or above and a good VID card. On Dell Inspirons you can upgrade the CPU and GPU you just need to know what you are doing...the laptop gaming market is stale right now I hate it.
What we need is a decent skeleton/frame with a nice display but easier upgrade ability. Like snap together models. A faster cpu comes out. Buy it and snap it into place and toss your old one. a design with the ease of changing out the parts like putting together 2 Lego bricks. A laptop any one could upgrade.
The component of a gaming laptop which will become obsolete most rapidly is the GPU. Please remove the gaming GPU from the laptop entirely, leave behind an embedded, basic productivity GPU and place the gaming GPU in an external housing. Use regular desktop video cards and make it upgradeable. Connect the device to a 16x PCIe slot somehow. Add an additional 12V connection to the power supply brick to power the external device. Surely this strategy will reduce the cost of the notebook itself due to lower demands for cooling, miniaturisation and layout et cetera while effectively combating the non-perennial scourge of obsolescence. What do you think of external GPU soloutions? How would you feel about carrying around another hefty, external device?
Asus has made some good hardware decisions with their gaming laptops lately, and has me interested... but seems to struggle with the details.
Using the G50vt as an example... why would I want LED lights on the side of the laptop with no back-lit keyboard? Why on earth would anyone want orange trim? Why have a feature that OCs the CPU when it isn't even the bottleneck? And finally, why 2 HDs instead of a 9 cell battery?
My assessment of gaming laptops, is that they are generally poorly configured, circus clown looking machines, that end up overpriced do to features gamers don't need. Until its possible to swap GPUs, I'd prefer a company just tries to keep it simple, keep it cheap, and drop in the best GPU their thermal solution can handle.
Fellow Dtoider here, and a IT guy, before i start a few questions. I'll make my assumptions, you can correct me if i'm worng.
Price range?
How often would you assume you would need to buy another gaming laptop?
I do buy gaming laptops about every 2 years, but more because i'm never home and need to feed my habit heh. That being said i think gaming laptops have come along, they have gotten smaller, cheaper and easier to fix. Though you do have to be more technologically inclined to fix them. My last one i have had for 2 1/2 years and paid 1800 for, its still chugging along, only now reaching wall with the new crop of games that are hitting the market. When i bought it the laptop had a 7800GTX and a core 2 Duo processor, the biggest issue with it now being it cant go beyond 3.5gb of memory due to motherboard limitations.
In the 1500-2000 price range it seems there are some gaming laptops that are very sustainable throughout that 2+ year stretch. Above that i think you are wasting your money, just as you would be buying a bleeding edge desktop. I realize that the price nearly doubles and i have made my peace with that, but that ablity to put a top end video card in just about anything means you will be able to have a good preforming laptop. Especially if you factor in how scalable game engines have become it terms appealing to a wide variety of hardware, even on the low end. Mine is able to run crysis reasonably well.
I don't think the issue is very much sustainability as it is cost of entry. The new crops of laptops have replaceable cpu's, gpus, hard drives and ram. Althought the gpu ports are not standardized which needs to be fixed. Most desktop buyers, buy a reasonable pc and upgrade it as necessary, or stretch out the purchasing of the parts themselves. A Gaming laptop is just a very large upfront cost in comparison to a desktop or a prorated part purchase plan.
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