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Portable Gaming Laptop
Hey all, I'll be travelling a lot over the next year and beyond. I've been doing some preliminary research on portable laptops and wanted to come here to ask the experts their opinion. I've never had a gaming laptop before, only desktops. I'm currently using a beafy Talon from Falcon Northwest. Alienware for me is a no go. They have the worst customer srvcs in the world. Anyway, and thoughts and opinions are welcome. Also, I'd like to spend less that 1500. Ideally around 1k would be great. Thanks!
Comments
What is your definition of "portable"? Size? Weight? Battery life?
And how much of a "gaming" laptop does it need to be? Best gaming performance you can possibly get? Or is just running games smoothly at moderate settings good enough?
If portability is important, than getting something based on AMD's Llano APU and using the integrated graphics in that is probably your only serious option. If you want a discrete card with much higher gaming performance, then you're looking at something big, heavy, hot, and expensive.
Def looking for a 15inch screen. Battery life is not a problem, I'll have access to sockets. Not sure about weight, never had to think about that. I like to play my games on high settings. In terms of gaming, it needs to play mmo's, Skyrim and ME3. The main thing is I'll be lugging it along with my work laptop.I'm a total noob about laptops. Never owned one lol. So this is a really new experience for me.
if you travel alot, i'd definately stick with a decked out Llano. cpu upgrade, 1080p display upgrade, memory upgrade, and SSD upgrade are a must. optional upgrades are bettery and another power brick. if you intend to game alot, definately pick up a nice gaming mouse to go with that package. the best part, all that fit within your budget of $1500
you can go with a discrete card setup, it'll cost more and you'll end up hating it after awhile. you wont game much at high setting on a laptop reguardless of what you get. your keyboard will be hot to the touch after awhile and your left palm will get hot and sweaty from resting on the laptop. it's really not a good idea to game on a laptop except if you dont intend to game much at all. and if you dont intend to game much, there is no reason to buy a kick arse laptop anyway. anyway, to set up a proper discrete laptop, you are looking at maybe $2k budget...
PS, the beauty of the llano choics is you'll likely be using that as your work laptop also. so you dont have to lug around 2 laptops where ever you travel to. (unless you have to use work laptop for security reasons)
Here is one for you at $1,500.00 --> ASUS G73SW-WS1B
Processor
Intel® Core i7-2630QM, 2.0-2.9GHz, 6MB, 45W
Memory
16gb DDR3 1333mhz (4gbx4)
Hard Drive
1140GB 7200rpm Hybrid XT SSD 2.5" SATA (500GB XT 7200rpm + 640gb 5400rpm )
Video Graphics
NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 460M, with 1.5GB GDDR5 VRAM
Display
17.3" 1920x1080 FHD LED Backlit 1080P
Optical Drive
Blu-Ray Reader / DVDRW Super Multi
Operating System
Windows 7 PROFESSIONAL 64 bit with hidden recovery partition
Manufacturer Warranty
3 Year Warranty Global with 30days ZBD (zero bright dot), 1yr accidental damage warranty, 2-way Free shipping for warranty service, Technical Support: 24/7 (except holidays), Hotline: +1-888-678-3688, 1 year battery warranty
In the box:
3rd year warranty card and registration, drivers, power supply, battery, manual
Camera
2.0 Mega Pixel web camera
Chipset
Intel® HM65 Express Chipset (Sandy Bridge)
Card Reader
5-in-1 (MMC, SD, MS/MS-Pro, XD)
Fax/Modem/LAN/WLAN
Integrated Intel® 10/100/1000 Ethernet
Built-in Bluetooth™ V2.1+EDR
WiFi Link 1000 A/B/G/N
Interface
1 x Microphone-in jack
1 x Headphone-out jack (with S/PDIF)
1 x VGA port/Mini D-sub 15-pin for external monitor
1 x USB 3.0 ports
3 x USB 2.0 ports
1 x RJ45 LAN Jack for LAN insert
1 x HDMI 1.4 widi ready
Audio
Built-in speakers and microphone
2watt Subwoofer
EAX Advanced HD 5.0
THX TruStudio
Battery Pack & Life
8 cells: 5200 mAh
AC Adapter
Output: 19 V DC, 4.74 A, 150W
Input: 100~240 V AC, 50/60 Hz universal
Dimensions
8.9 lbs with battery
16.5" x 12.3" x 1.2-1.75" IN
I donno about that choice in hard drives and vid card
Your options depend a lot on specifics.
There are different machines that will balance gaming power, heat output battery life, portability, and screen size/resolution differently. There is also something to be said for shopping with a good brand that has good reliability, but that's again something that might come at the cost of other things.
For instance, you could get an HP DV6t:
That takes about $1000 to configure decently with a 720p screen, or just a hair under $1200 to configure with a 1080P screen (which is well worth it, in my opinion), which is pretty decent for a Sandy Bridge i7 and a Radeon HD 6770M. It even advertises about 5 hours of battery life (and I'd pay the $14 to get the slightly better 6-cell battery). They also throw in a free blu-ray drive if you want to get into that at all (having it double as a portable BRD player is not a bad thing on the go).
The downside is that unless they've changed, and who knows, maybe they have, HP is notorious for absurdy bad reliability.
As for HP's customer service, well, um, this about sums it up.
Another option would be something like this Asus G53SX
For $1200, that machine offers the same Sandy Bridge i7 as the last, but replaced the GPU with a more powerful Geforce GTX 560M, which is about 40% faster according to Notebookcheck's tests here and here. This GPU tradeoff comes at a price, however. The laptop is somewhat heavy, somewhere in the range of 8lbs (call it a pound and change heavier than the last), and it is somewhat beefy, and the battery life will only probably be 2.5-3 hours. It's also unlikely that the 2GB of video memory was necessary, and that exacerbates the battery life problem. It does come with the 1080P screen.
On the flip side, this is one of Asus' ROG (Republic of Gamers) notebooks, their high-end line. Outside of military-grade laptops, you WILL NOT find a better-built laptop, ever, period. It will dissipate heat well, perform reliably, and last you longer than you need it to.
In addition to the standard 2-year warranty, Asus backs up these machine with 1-year Accidental Damage Warrany (basically an "I dropped it in a pool" warranty), where even if you kill the machine yourself though misuse, they'll still replace it.
I'm sure there's a lot of other options. If you were willing to stretch your budget a little further, you might be able to get something with a mobile 6990, which is massively more powerful than either of the above two GPU options. You could also go in the other direction, get something with an AMD A8, and save quite a bit of money. These were just a couple of examples.
One thing I will stress though, as someone who has killed notebooks with gaming, is that you absolutely should not underestimate the importance of reliability in a gaming notebook. Gaming on a laptop, especially one "designed" for it, means putting a lot of high-powered components into a tiny space that was never designed for them, and then running as much juice through them as they'll possibly take. That puts ENORMOUS heat stress on those components. I've seen GPUs and CPU alike both approach 100C in gaming notebooks, and this is simply something you don't want. A company with a good reputation for reliability, especially in gaming, is one who makes notebooks that protect that reputation, including during stressful use, and you can tell by how confidently they'll back those machines with good free warranties (2-3 year, or something like Asus ADW).
Companies like HP, Dell, Gateway, Toshiba (who actually DO rate pretty well for reliability), and other similar companies outsource machines to the lowest bidder, usually Compal, and while they may care if your machine lives past the typical 1-year warranties they provide, they also may not. HP's history, which includes more than a few class-action lawsuits for extraordinarily bad construction leading to universal early hardware failures (like the power jacks on their early 2000s machines), shows that they almost certainly do NOT care.
You'll pay for getting something better constructed, but that will also pay itself off. My Asus N61JQ, which I game with daily, has lasted longer than my last two HP computers did, combined, and I used them much less frequently and less stressfully, and didn't travel with them as much as this Asus, which is constantly being bounced and bumped around every day on campus.
another thing to consider is just how much traveling are you going to be doing? you can build a machine pretty small these days (micro atx or even itx form factor) here is an example of just how small a SERIOUS gaming machine can be. you wont be overclocking much on that box, but it can be built with serious components (i5 2500 and a full sized vid card for example). if you want to, you can even mount a H80 for cpu cooling.(tho it will cost you the stock 180mm air penetrator fan that comes with the case) it wont be the fastest, but it'll be the fastest you can get at that size. when you do travel, you'll have to lug around a big 1080p monitor to go with that machine tho:p
the plus side to the ITX build is you WILL be able to go max setting on any game you intend to play within the expected lifetime of the machine. (as long as you stay with just 1 monitor:D)
I have to agree on the ASUS ROG laptop. Those things are very nice, one of my friends has one.
The HP he pointed out is pretty good too, though not in the same league with the ASUS.
Pretty soon you wont need to answer these questions on portable game laptops or best game laptops, because the future isn't about how powerful your laptop is. Currently Microsoft and other partners are gearing for the best thing since the internet arrived, with CLOUD. Cloud will be able to use any notebook, laptop, or ipad type of devices and allow you to play any game you want with any level of graphical detail. The system works by you playing the games through a server that does all the graphics and cpu processing. I think it will be the future of gaming. Currently they can play some pretty high end games with no lose in quality on these devices. So we might see this in a year or two with any luck.
you are either seriously overestimating the capability of what cloud can deliver or seriously underestimating the bandwidth requirements of cloud gaming:)
Neither, it was explained by Microsoft. They have the capability to do it and do it well. You would think you would need incredible bandwidth but everyone now days has broadband, and they said it would not be a problem. They already have some games that work, this is called Technology man, it changes, things get better. If you can't believe what Microsoft says then you are under your own false pretenses.
To say nothing for the latency inherent to cloud gaming.
I don't know about anyone else, but I frankly don't like having 100ms of latency tacked onto my control of a game.
It also takes a lot of bandwidth, as has been mentioned, Getting even a lousy 720P image takes 3mbps, so what does it take to get a decent one, or a decent 1080P image? I'd have to beef up my internet considerably to get decent image quality, and by that point, I'm paying the cost of a gaming machine every year. Further, I could forget using it at any place but home.
Of course, let's not forget game selection. 100 games (Onlive's selection) sounds nice, but what if I want to play more? That means more licensing from the cloud-based company which means more $$$ per customer/month. Even then, you'll never have access to all games. Netflix has a HUUUGE selection of streaming movies and shows, but does it even come close to being everything? I don't want all my friends getting into a game, only to say "sorry guys, Onlive doesn't have it". Right now, Onlive really has a pretty lousy selection. Want to play Battlefield BC2? CoD 6? Starcraft II? WoW? Rift? Left 4 Dead 1/2? Ruse? World of Tanks? Sorry, not luck for you.
If they do want to add all that in, again, that's more money for licensing, so the cost will hike rapidly, so they'd either have to start changing per game per month ($$$), hike the overall monthly fee ($$$), or just keep it to a small selection. I'm not sure which would be less objectionable.
Right, because NO COMPANY EVER makes false predictions that overestimate their capabilities, or anything. Like when Intel predicted 10ghz CPUs by 2011. I mean, they're Intel, so they TOTALLY can't be wrong, amirite?
Everyone has broadband... hmm...
http://www.venustel.com/DSL.htm
Thats the ONLY internet provider I can get, besides satellite. Sorry I phased out for a minute there, you were saying?
Because if there's anything that you can count on in life, it's that marketing hype will always pan out, without any defects that the marketing ignored. Microsoft itself has a glorious past in this, with Windows ME (aka, the Mistake Edition), Clippy, and Bob. [/sarcasm]
The cloud is great for some purposes that aren't that sensitive to latency or bandwidth. You can do a lot more over a LAN, and if Microsoft or some other company wanted to make it possible to play games over a LAN with the rendering done by some desktop somewhere, but you play from a laptop, they could probably make it work pretty well. But there's an enormous difference between 1 Gbps ethernet and using 0.01 Gbps over the Internet. There's also an enormous difference between 2 ms ping times over a LAN and 100 ms ping times over the Internet.
And before you tell me that you've got a 50 Mbps Internet connection or some such:
http://www.lukesurl.com/archives/1216
"Getting even a lousy 720P image takes 3mbps, so what does it take to get a decent one, or a decent 1080P image?"
Doing 1080p at 60 frames per second and 32-bit color properly takes about 10 Gbps. You can compress the image somewhat and get by with only slightly worse image quality. But if you try to compress that by >99.9%, bad things happen.
Not to mention that some games are only marginally playable at 720p, even if you had flawless image quality.
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For the original poster: why do you want a gaming laptop in the first place? If you have ideas about it being just like a desktop, except that you can take it with you, then you're doing it all wrong. It takes some huge sacrifices to fit a laptop form factor. Even if you need both a gaming machine and also a laptop, it doesn't follow that a gaming laptop makes a bit of sense for you. Most people in that situation would be far better off with both a gamign desktop and a cheap, portable laptop.
Now, if you travel a lot and want to play games on the laptop in hotel rooms, then a gaming laptop makes more sense. But that's very much a niche market.
microsoft "claim" alot of things:) like it only takes 1 gig of ram to run vista (512 meg if you run home basic) or 4 megs of ram to run windows 95
microsoft marketing department "explained" alot of things. whether they are what you want to use is a whole different thing:)
Thats exactly it. I'll be using it in hotel rooms. I have another work laptop, which is just for work. For security reasons I cant load unapproved software on it. But, when Im done with the days work, and I wanna lay down on my bed and kill things with my sword, I def want a good gaming laptop for that. I have a feeling that what I'm looking for is going to cost me more than I thought. Having a reliable and fairly powerful rig, which is easy to travel with, is a tough find im sure.
If size is the big part of "portability" to you, while battery life is irrelevant and weight is unimportant, then for a high end gaming laptop, have a look at Clevo's P150HM. That's rebranded and resold by a bunch of different places, and you can find a variety of them on Google. It will push over your intended budget, however.
Sager is probably the best known reseller of it:
http://www.sagernotebook.com/index.php?page=product_customed&model_name=NP8150
Swap out the video card for a Radeon HD 6990M and it's $1645 with no other upgrades.
But there are a lot of other upgrades that would be nice. It would be nice to have a Core i7-2760QM processor rather than the low bin -2630QM. It would be nice to have a better quality monitor, a good SSD, and a Bigfoot Wireless-N 1103 network adapter. But that will push you past $2000.
If you want to spring for the upgrades, then AVA Direct charges a higher base price, but doesn't gouge you on upgrades:
http://www.avadirect.com/gaming-laptop-configurator.asp?PRID=19610
That comes to $2069.21 with a matte 95% gamut monitor, Core i7-2760QM, Radeon HD 6990M, 8 GB of Mushkin 1333 MHz memory, a 128 GB Crucial M4 SSD, and a Bigfoot Wireless-N 1103.
That's basically what I'd recommend on a larger budget. But it's out of your stated budget. There are cheaper options available, but they aren't as good.
hum... actually you wont be using your "gaming" laptop on the bed cuz your comforter might catch on fire from the amount of heat put out by your laptop:D
earlier i asked about your work computer and refered to "security", what i mean is are you able to use your own laptop for work and just not even bring the work laptop with you? IF there are some specialized software/encryption for your work laptop, then thats one thing. but if you are only using stuff like microsoft office or some "normal" software like putty or something that isnt proprietary to your company, you can easily use your own machine and just bring 1 laptop for your travels. it's alot easier to bring 1 laptop then 2 when you travel alot.
Llano laptops actually has enough battery power to be used as a work machine even tho it has enough power to play games as well. that would be something to consider if you are able to use your own machine instead of bringing your work machine.
To say nothing for the latency inherent to cloud gaming.
I don't know about anyone else, but I frankly don't like having 100ms of latency tacked onto my control of a game.
It also takes a lot of bandwidth, as has been mentioned, Getting even a lousy 720P image takes 3mbps, so what does it take to get a decent one, or a decent 1080P image? I'd have to beef up my internet considerably to get decent image quality, and by that point, I'm paying the cost of a gaming machine every year. Further, I could forget using it at any place but home.
Of course, let's not forget game selection. 100 games (Onlive's selection) sounds nice, but what if I want to play more? That means more licensing from the cloud-based company which means more $$$ per customer/month. Even then, you'll never have access to all games. Netflix has a HUUUGE selection of streaming movies and shows, but does it even come close to being everything? I don't want all my friends getting into a game, only to say "sorry guys, Onlive doesn't have it". Right now, Onlive really has a pretty lousy selection. Want to play Battlefield BC2? CoD 6? Starcraft II? WoW? Rift? Left 4 Dead 1/2? Ruse? World of Tanks? Sorry, not luck for you.
If they do want to add all that in, again, that's more money for licensing, so the cost will hike rapidly, so they'd either have to start changing per game per month ($$$), hike the overall monthly fee ($$$), or just keep it to a small selection. I'm not sure which would be less objectionable.
You guys are all trying to show why it would not work. All I am saying is what MS has said on an interview. I never said that everyone would have the capability of using it I said it's the future of gaming. MS has figured a way in it's testing stages to manipulate things to allow the user to pre cache or whatever certain things to speed the process up.
I don't claim to have the answers, I was merely stating what I seen and then commented on how it will be the future. Just like when HDTV was new, it was the future of TV even though not everyone has a HDTV and HD service. You guys think way to pessimistically, and what I said about technology, it is true it moves so fast so you can say what you want now about this but in the end they find ways, they build upon it till it works. Just like what happened with every other piece of technology, they stated the ideas, launched test beds, and started the process and tweak it out over years.
So think what you want.
Pre-caching streamed video for cloud gaming would require time travel. I don't see that happening soon, in spite of the recent claims that certain neutrinos travel faster than the speed of light.
This isn't even remotely similar to HDTV. It's entirely plausible that we'll see more bumps in monitor resolutions, frame rates, and things of that sort. But simple physics dictates that there are some huge advantages to only having to send signals back and forth a few feet within a desktop computer as opposed to having to send them hundreds of miles over the Internet, especially if bandwidth and latency matter. I don't see those advantages disappearing anytime soon.
Now, what you can do with services like OnLive will improve as time passes. But what you can do locally with simple integrated graphics will likewise improve as time passes. Right now, even integrated graphics in a budget gaming laptop are way, way ahead of what OnLive can do. And there is good reason to believe that that gap will only widen in the foreseeable future. Even if you could make cloud gaming more or less work, why would you, if you could get better results by rendering the game locally instead?
I think that sums it up nicely.
No one is claiming that cloud gaming couldn't or wouldn't work, just that there's no reason to make it work, when rendering something locally gives you the same thing, only better. Taking a simple system and replacing it with something convoluted doesn't get one anything.
We COULD probably make cell phone calls that travel to the moon and back work, but that doesn't mean there's any reason to expect that something so utterly silly will replace cell towers anytime soon.
Get the Asus G74Sx, but not the one from BestBuy. It has a lower quality screen among other things. It has a 560M and runs pretty much every game I've played on the highest settings with great FPS.
hum... actually you wont be using your "gaming" laptop on the bed cuz your comforter might catch on fire from the amount of heat put out by your laptop:D
earlier i asked about your work computer and refered to "security", what i mean is are you able to use your own laptop for work and just not even bring the work laptop with you? IF there are some specialized software/encryption for your work laptop, then thats one thing. but if you are only using stuff like microsoft office or some "normal" software like putty or something that isnt proprietary to your company, you can easily use your own machine and just bring 1 laptop for your travels. it's alot easier to bring 1 laptop then 2 when you travel alot.
Llano laptops actually has enough battery power to be used as a work machine even tho it has enough power to play games as well. that would be something to consider if you are able to use your own machine instead of bringing your work machine.
Unfortunately I will need 2 laptops. My work laptop has special software, data, and other things. It's also specially encrypted for my work. Yea I don't plan on actually using it on my comforter. There are usually desks in hotel rooms. I appreciate all the advice. I really do. Def got lots of info to continue my research for this laptop.