Recently I've got a new gaming laptop, well I've actually had it for some months now but anyway... Now I can finally PLAY ALL THE GAMES again, while my previous system was in a so horribly unreliable state that made me cry every day...

Now, if GOG.com could just stop giving me free games: I hate the very concept of backlog, and you are making me a huge one :-D

i bought a very decent asus rog laptop in the spring of 2016 (i7, gtx 970m, 16 gb ram). easily one of the best computers i've had, though these days it spends much of its time parked under the livingroom tv, mostly so my 3 year old can play lego batman 2. i'd almost say that i'd like to upgrade but it still runs most games quite well; i don't really play the newest games though.

whenever i upgrade i consider a desktop, but i quite like the portability of a large-ish laptop. :D

i like your blog by the way!

Nice Laptop, I like the color choice. Forgive me for asking, but why not consider a desktop since you already have a monitor and keyboard (I won't even ask about the mouse as my laptop's trackpad is always disabled). I of course understand if it's for portability reasons, but you got me wondering :-)

You have a very nice blog, clean and professional.

Thanks, the blog has been recently updated too. My original plans were indeed for a desktop PC build, in the end I went the laptop way again for several reasons. When my life will be stable enough, I'll spoil myself with a no-compromise desktop build and Ultra HD gaming goodness :-P

"Gaming laptop"
Already failed. Such a thing is not reliable.
Good gaming machines generate too much heat to be viable in a reliable portable gaming system. The Switch is a good gaming machine developed to remedy this and may be the first actually viable legit gaming system, and it isn't PC standard.

Why do people try to make gaming laptops?I genuinely want to know because the concept is a joke.

I'm on the PC all day, but I usually stress it very little because I write on Word, browse the Web and do other minor stuff. As for games, I've finished Portal a couple of times, played Diablo III for some nights per week, for a couple of months, I played the first DOOM missions again and again (right now I'm just amazed about how well the thing runs). And when I'm bored I fire up MAME and play some KOF '97, Ghosts'n Goblins, Labyrinth Runner and other stuff for half an hour or so.

No issues whatsoever thus far, the laptop DOES NOT overheat and it's pretty reliable. Even after hours of play, even in Summer. So your opinion is wrong, in my case :-P

well, my joke has worked just fine for almost two years. i'll probably pick up another joke in the spring 2019. in fact, i've been all about jokes since 2008 when it dawned on me that as a parent, being stationary is nearly impossible.

as a pc i use for work AND play in equal measure, for me, it can't be beat. i'll take the ability to move around over 4k and 120 fps any day.

I have only used laptops since 2001. no complaints so far, and not going back to desktops. Really enjoying Fallout 4, at the moment, in the evenings on the sofa with a coup of tea, my better half next to me and with some silly TV on. Life is good.

Sorry. Wasn't trying to be offensive.... I tend to do that more these days. : (

Any how.... I just really don't get gaming laptops when I can run my rig with my sound system and love everything. Guess it's just personal preference and mine will never be laptops.

Gaming laptops (or any high powered machine really) mostly have two issues. First one is battery life, since running everything on a battery usually means it dies in ~15 minutes, and second is heat dissipation. If you don't really care about the weight and size of a laptop, you can actually make a small form desktop with a small battery in it (mostly so you can finish what you're doing if the electricity goes off) and use desktop components on it. And with standard connections now, you can have a dock for your laptop with your 7.1 sound system, your 144 Hz UHD monitor, your gaming keyboard and mouse, while still having a machine that you can take with you to the next room or for that few days trip upstate. It will not be a machine you can carry with you to work (or game) on the go, but it will be easier to move than a full tower.
So it basically boils down to how much you value each of portability and the ability to add more stuff. It may take a while to be able to find a computer fitting your needs, and the price may not be what you'd expect, but the days of small form limiting the power of a machine seems to have (mostly) gone by.

Nice unit - hope it works well for you. Reliability isn't the problem it used to be, but upgradeability has yet to be solved in a widespread manner. Over the last three gaming-esque laptops, mine lasted an average of 4-5 years, including all the travel abuse that they went through. Plenty reliable, easily lasting long enough to the point that they start to choke on the newer games with the older hardware. Now that I think about it, the weak spot of the last two laptops was the screen, not heat problems inside the main portion of the chassis.

My current rig is a true game-centric laptop (the previous ones were not), running a GTX 1070 with no problems. 14 months and counting, without any external cooling solutions.

For the connection problem, it isn't much of a problem these days. An HDMI connection will take care of much of that.

Basically, they've come a long way since the first days of jamming a discrete GPU into a standard chassis. Early on, yeah, there were problems. Nowadays, the manufacturers have done a good job working with powerful components in the confined space. I think part of that comes from forgoing optical drives and moving to smaller HDD form factors like NVMe and SSD - that really frees up a lot of space inside.

I want to get a gaming laptop mostly for heavyish Visual Studio development. It's probably the cheapest way to get a powerful machine that is mostly portable. Battery life is not critical to me, but I want serious multithreading, decent memory size, large storage and decent cooling. I always up-scaled the video card on any machine I had, it always made a big difference for machine longevity, games or no.

If it can play some recent games on it, hey I won't complain.

"Good" is so relative. You're from the camp where a powerful desktop with high end component is good and everything else is crap?

The volume of a slim PS4 is about 2700 cubic centimeters. I just checked the dimensions of a 17.3" gaming laptop (not the smallest, nor the largest), and it comes to about 3900 cubic centimeters. Sure, it has a keyboard, touchpad, screen, and battery, speakers, and connectors which the PS4 don't have. On the other hand, it lacks an optical drive. It's a tight fit, but it's entirely possible to build a system with fair thermals and better performance than a PS4 in such a space. And the fit isn't omgwtf optimized like it is with smartphones; there's *plenty* of headroom to build a tighter package if someone cared.

These things tend to be much louder than I like though.

Meanwhile, I'm playing games with a 14" thinkpad with intel graphics (obviously not a gaming laptop), and laughing at all the people saying that it's not possible to play games with intel graphics.

EDIT: If you observe clock speed - performance - power/tdp charts, one thing you should notice is that past a certain point, performance does not scale linearly (and indeed does not improve much at all) as you increase tdp (heat output). In other words, desktop gamers going for the highest end components tend to buy a little bit performance for a crazy increase in power consumption & heat output. At extreme, overclockers may buy 5% in clock speed for 50%-100% in power. Going the other way, you can reduce the performance of a system slightly and make it much easier to handle the thermals.

This is also why server CPUs generally run at lower clock rates. That's where the performance per watt sweet spot lies.

You know, it's strange that there are still people thinking that "gaming laptops" are worth nothing, or that they aren't capable of serious gaming stuff at all... When users are purchasing way more (gaming) laptops than brand-new desktops these days.

Maybe gaming on the go was impractical years ago, but today things are much better and even a somewhat "serious" gamer like me can be satisfied with a portable computer. As I said in my post, a desktop build would have been better but this time I preferred a portable solution.

Hopefully, four years from now my next PC will be a desktop with an octa-core CPU and a GeForce 1280Ti inside :-P

Amen, brother. Starting out as a desktop gamer and then moving to laptops over a decade ago, I can think of only two major downsides these days (and both are understandable, given the size/portability factor):

- cost for the performance you get. Figure 1.5x - 2x the cost compared to a similar desktop performance.
- upgrades are typically limited to internal storage and RAM, with a few models out there with an actual somewhat-easy upgrade path for the CPU and GPU.

Beyond that - as your setup shows - it can be very close to a desktop experience, and heat-diminished reliability isn't near the problem it used to be when the chassis and internals are designed well.