Verdict: A Gaming Laptop is a dedicated powerful device but it’s pricey. I would recommend you to buy a Gaming laptop if you game often or if you are serious about it. It’s definitely worth it over a PC built from scratch.
- NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 8GB GDDR6 with ROG Boost up to 1345MHz at 80W (100W with Dynamic Boost 2.0)
- AMD Ryzen 9 5900HS processor (16M Cache, up to 4.5GHz)
- 15.6” 165Hz IPS-Type Quad HD (2560 x 1440) display with adaptive sync
We live in the times of Razer Blades, Alienware, and the Republic of Gamers. Yet there is an enormous market for pre-built gaming PCs and Consoles (PS-5, Xbox, Nintendo, etc). Gone is the era of bulky-looking gaming laptops. Credit to the recent developments in technology and embedded design that have made packing processing power into compact devices possible.
Yet, there are no definite answers to this question. It is a Yes and No! While individual requirements and preferences come into play, that doesn’t give you the entire picture. Several factors come into play before we take sides. We’ll look into that.
It’s also essential to remind you of the recent price surge in gaming devices, driven by the increased demand for raw materials, and supply related issues. Which strongly pushes us to ask the question. Are gaming laptops worth it? The question holds as much weight as it held a few years back.
Is A Gaming Laptop Worth It?
As we are still wondering about the big question, I went through the major deciding factors. I presumed it would be easier to break the question we have in our hands into smaller parts. Find some answers and put the pieces together. We might get there quickly. We’ll either have our answers or at least be closer to it.
Ask yourself these questions!
1. How do you play games?
Observe your affinity for gaming. What games do you play? How long do your gaming sessions last? Where are you comfortable playing games? In your bed or the table or your sofa or a mix of all these.
What drives you towards gaming? Is it because you’re bored or you could find nothing better? Do you play games when you need a diversion or when you are anxious, or when you need to sharpen your focus? Observe yourself consciously for some time, and you’ll notice when you document those finer details, you’ll have better clarity.
2. How often do you play games?
Do you play during the weekends? Do you have gaming marathons? Or Do you play during the weekdays? Right before or after Lunch/Dinner? Do you play before you go to bed to take your mind off something? Or Just wake up only to start gaming. Your answer lies in all these finer details.
3. Purpose/Driving Force?
Are you a professional gamer or plan on becoming one? Are you a content creator and gaming enthusiast? Do you plan to/already monetize your gaming? Or Is it just a diversion, a time pass? Do you plan to become a professional gamer or a game developer or a tester?
If you are wondering why am I talking about this here? You’ve to understand it’s ultimately you who is going to be using the device. Considering all the aspects will only make it easier to figure out whether the gaming laptop is worth your investment or not. Now let’s get to the nitty-gritty.
4. Gaming Laptops, but why?
For gaming, we are not limited to a single type of device. We have multiple options, but each of them has its advantages and disadvantages. Let’s see what those are and where they stand out.
Desktops/PC
A desktop offers adequate processing power for gaming, and handles heavy tasks like 3D modeling, editing, and graphics design. The pool of games available for PCs way exceeds the number of games for other gaming consoles and platforms.
But with a gaming desktop, you are stuck to a location. You will not be taking it along with you unless you shift places.
Gaming consoles
The gaming consoles are primed to offer a quality gaming experience at a lesser cost while sustaining long hours of gaming. The life cycle of a console easily outlives your laptops and desktops with minimal loss in the quality of experience. It takes out the necessity to do frequent updates as well. But the collection of games is limited compared to PCs, and a console is not portable.
Generic Laptops
The most generic laptops from Dell and HP can support gaming, and offer a better price to performance value. No way you will play AAA-rated games like God of War, or Read dead redemption and sustain their performance levels. They have their advantages, but a hardcore gamer wouldn’t find value in it.
Mobile & Hand-held devices
While the mobile & hand-held devices can support gaming up to an extent while being portable, and most affordable, the quality of experience can be a little underwhelming for hardcore gamers.
A gaming laptop puts the most attractive features of several devices together in a single device. They offer a sweet combination of all the ecosystems available. You can play games, edit videos/photos, create designs, and can carry them wherever you go. That makes them one of the coveted devices and a prized possession. We’ll see that in the next section.
5. Why are they worthy?
Gaming laptops has come a long way in their capability, design, and performance. We can measure their value in terms of some critical attributes mentioned below. If your reasoning is solid, there is hardly a reason to question their value otherwise.
Gaming laptops are more portable than desktops and consoles
The modern globalized world is hyper-connected. While there is a sizable chunk of the population who like the comfort of their home and offices to perform tasks and be productive, connectivity has been balancing the scale on the opposite spectrum. In short, people move a lot, explore unknown places, and experience new cultures, food, people, etc.
But nobody likes to leave themselves behind. With a gaming laptop, you carry yourself with you. Your work, hobbies, and interests go with you. A generic laptop does that too. Only that the gaming laptops do it a lot better. With desktops and gaming consoles, you might have to leave them behind.
A gaming laptop gives you the power to be yourself as much as you can, irrespective of the location. Nothing stops you from enjoying your favorite games. You can constantly travel, play your favorite games, connect to people, and live life on the move.
Even if you are not a hardcore traveler, the flexibility can apply to you on a different level. Play in your room, on the balcony, on your sofa, or on your bed. You shouldn’t have to limit yourself to a table or the console in the living room. You can carry the gaming laptop along while you visit your friends and family, and share the moments of playing games together.
People bond over shared experiences. And gaming is something that a good chunk of the populace enjoys and shares in recent times. The freedom and flexibility of the gaming laptop enable you to do it better.
6. Gaming laptops are versatile and powerful, how?
If you are a photographer/videographer with heavy processing and editing, not every generic laptop will handle it in a prolonged manner and keep the levels of performance up. With access to internet scaling up, you can live in the beach town or a mountain and enjoy doing the things you have always done when you have a gaming laptop.
If you are an avid gamer, but also a content creator, a gaming laptop can perform like a desktop. But if you solely rely on a desktop, you’d have to leave the interests behind with the setup when you set out to explore. But you never know when creativity strikes.
A gaming laptop brings you power and versatility. It travels with you. It can accompany you in the moments and allow you to make the most of the highlighting moments of life. Invest in an excellent device, you can be sorted for years to come. You don’t have to carry different machines for diverse processing needs.
7. Access to more games
With a PS5 or Xbox, there might be a lot of games for you to indulge in, but what about the vintage classics you like to revisit every once in a while? The collection of games available for PC beats the number of games available for gaming consoles. It is essential to mention a few games remain exclusive to console platforms.
But if you have a Xbox or Play station, you are limited to their ecosystems. A gaming laptop gives access to the world of PC games, the PC version of console games, and your vintage games.
8. Quality
While the quality of the gaming experience remains commendable in gaming consoles, it doesn’t compete with desktops or gaming laptops. While PCs can run games at higher display quality and frame rates, gaming on consoles is limited to medium-graphic settings.
Access to better GPUs, RAM, and storage for PCs is far superior to what the gaming consoles have on offer. The gaming experience of high-end games like Dragon Age, The Witcher, Red Dead Redemption, and CyberPunk can vary across devices.
For a few high-end games, the gaming console settings are locked on to low-medium levels to sustain the performance levels, but the desktop gives you the freedom to customize the settings to get a superior gaming experience. A gaming laptop cannot replicate the levels of a desktop, but they offer the middle ground.
You get the flexibility to customize the settings and play at a higher quality than the consoles. The recent releases of GPU like RTX 3080/3080Ti in gaming laptops will allow you to access ULTRA level graphics performance most hardcore gamers desire to experience.
- NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 8GB GDDR6 with ROG Boost up to 1345MHz at 80W (100W with Dynamic Boost 2.0)
- AMD Ryzen 9 5900HS processor (16M Cache, up to 4.5GHz)
- 15.6” 165Hz IPS-Type Quad HD (2560 x 1440) display with adaptive sync
Reasons Gaming Laptops Are Not Worth It
Gaming laptops offer a lot of advantages, but they are not perfect. They come with caveats that every gamer needs to know before deciding. Weigh in all the factors before you see it as a worthy investment. We’ll see some factors that could affect your decisions.
1. Price
The processing power, versatility, and portability come at a cost. The gaming laptops, akin to their high-end experience, are priced at a premium. A desktop can offer a similar gaming experience or even superior at a lesser price.
If you are working with budget constraints, you might have to cut a few corners or stretch your budget according to your preferences and requirements. A 3080 GPU on a desktop will not cost you as much as a laptop with its previous version GPU.
2. Heat Management & Reliability
To achieve portability, gaming laptops pack a lot of processing power in a small chassis. Multi-core CPUs and powerful GPUs are packed so tight, they can generate a lot of heat when you overclock them for prolonged periods.
Poor design and poor heat management make them vulnerable to defects, repairs, and performance failures. You are treading thin lines here. In comparison, desktops and consoles are better equipped to handle this issue. The desktops are well-ventilated.
3. Battery Life
In a gaming laptop, your gaming experience, the freedom, the flexibility, relies on the quality of the battery. Gaming activities push the limits of the battery. Prolonged gaming reduces battery life.
Battery storage has improved largely but hasn’t caught up with development in processing power. The onus is on the user to manage their expectations, usage, and the life of the battery. Meanwhile, desktops and gaming consoles don’t have to worry about battery life, as they run on external power.
4. Upgrade-ability
Desktops are upgradable by parts. Something that’s difficult to achieve in gaming laptops. The key hardware components of the gaming laptops, being molded onto the board, make it really difficult. While some of them allow you to upgrade RAM, storage, and replace GPUs, that comes with an even higher premium, which further pushes the price-to-performance ratio down.
5. Repair-ability
As much as it is hard to upgrade, it is hard to repair too. The reason is the components being molded to the motherboard. Being tightly packed with other components makes one part vulnerable to other defective parts and gets harder to be replaced.
On a bad day, a small water or coffee spill can turn your gaming laptop into an expensive brick or premium paperweight. A gaming desktop can be repaired easily. Even in the worst cases, the parts can be salvaged and reused.
6. Lifetime
A combination of these multiple factors mentioned above makes its lifetime vulnerable, despite the heavy price. Despite being cheaper, desktops and gaming consoles are reliable, repairable, and survive longer than gaming laptops.
All these factors have to be factored in before you press the button.
- NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 8GB GDDR6 with ROG Boost up to 1345MHz at 80W (100W with Dynamic Boost 2.0)
- AMD Ryzen 9 5900HS processor (16M Cache, up to 4.5GHz)
- 15.6” 165Hz IPS-Type Quad HD (2560 x 1440) display with adaptive sync
So Is a Gaming Laptop Worth it?
Gaming laptops are a testament to rapidly developing technology and advancements in VLSI and embedded design. They are highly powerful systems with a few caveats. It comes down to your preferences, requirements, and the value you perceive in the investment.
Taking the budget out of the equation, I could hardly imagine anybody saying “No” to a gaming laptop, including me; given a lot of due diligence, has gone into choosing the right product.
It’d be a pretty unsavory end without mention of some of the best gaming laptops we have ever seen. The ASUS ROG Zephyrus G15 is probably one of the best gaming laptops that offers an impressive combination of features at a very competitive price. Despite missing the webcam, the gaming laptop punches over its weight with its performance, battery life, design, and portability. It still costs north of $2000.
If you are looking for a gaming laptop under $1000, it’s hard to beat the value offered by Acer Nitro 5. Powered by Acer’s latest cooling technology, and an RTX3050 GPU, the laptop can double up as a gaming machine and a workhorse. Don’t let its bulky appearance and a back-lit keyboard make you believe otherwise.
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Last update on 2023-06-04 / Affiliate links / Images from Amazon Product Advertising API
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