Discussions

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.