Gaming laptops are a complete joke - I think NBR needs to edumacate this person

What do you guys think about this, fresh off of theinquirer's site.

I think we need to have our say.
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Gaming laptops are a complete joke
from theinquirer.net

Charlie's Rant A fool and his money

By Charlie Demerjian: Tuesday 17 July 2007, 09:50

THERE IS A RAGING debate between me and the rest of the world over gaming laptops. Most people think they are the hottest thing since sliced bread, I think they are about as dumb as you can get. It begs the question, if all of your friends said enemas were cool, would you get one?

The concept is a good one, in theory, but falls flat in reality. The promise is to have a portable machine that plays games as well as it does all the things you want a laptop for. All the machines to date fail on both accounts, with only a nod to portability.

Let's look at the pros of the current crop of gaming laptops. They are, in no particular order:
1) More portable than a desktop
2) Fanbois think you are cool

Now lets look at the down sides, again in no particular order:
1) Very expensive
2) Proprietary hardware that is unfixable if it breaks
3) Proprietary hardware that is unupgradable
4) Slow CPUs
5) Slow busses
6) Slow memory
7) Slow HDs
8) GPU makers lie about the capabilities of mobile GPUs (the 5000M is every bit as good as a 5000, really)
9) They are heavier than a normal laptop
10) They are as portable as a phone book
11) Battery life measured in hummingbird wingflaps
12) Screen responses measured in glacial movement units
13) Keyboards and mice that pale in response to a Logitech G5/G15
14) Lots of expensive crap bolted on you will never use

Let's look at these in detail, shall we? The initial count says two wins for 14 losses, but the devil is in the details. First the pros, portability and cool factor. Portability is a given, it is a laptop, and you can ostensibly game on it. Some are relatively light, but none of those are what I would consider gaming laptops. The gaming ones, with multiple video cards and big high rez screens are all 17 inches or larger and weigh as much as a mid-sized sedan.

Portability is hindered by the fact that to get anything not outright laughable for battery life, you need to add in a car battery. A good keyboard and mouse are a must for any real gamer, and with the power brick and other widgets, you suddenly aren't all that portable. A good µATX case with two PCIe 16x slots isn't far behind, especially with nicely designed carrying straps or handles.

Then there is the coolness factor. You know, when you pull it out and all your friends go 'aaaah'. There is no denying that, but six months and three revisions down the line, you are still owing 93 per cent of the value in payments, that wears thin. Cool is very short lived in computers.

Still, they are more portable, and people will swoon over the shiny finish of the moment. As a friend told me when I got a Camaro in high school, "You can pick up chicks in that". I bluntly looked at him and said, "Do I want the chicks I can pick up with a Camaro?" The same holds true for laptops, if you want that attention, fine by me, but I won't go there, it isn't worth it.

That brings us to the negatives, and boy are there a lot. As I alluded to, they are shatteringly expensive. For the exact same performance, expect to pay at least twice what you pay for a desktop, and the premium only goes up from there. Why is it good to drop an extra $1500 or so on a beast that gets eaten alive by a mid-level desktop in it's main function?

Then there is the proprietary hardware bit. If you push over your desktop monitor, you go out and by a new one. If it is more than six months later, you will get a better one for less money, likely with more features. You will feel stupid, but you will still have better hardware.

Crack the screen on your laptop, and you are in hell. If it is six months old, expect to get merely screwed by the replacement costs. As it gets older, if it is possibly to replace at all, it is almost never worth it, the price of a screen quickly becomes more than the price of a new faster laptop. The chances of you being able to buy a replacement part off the shelf? Do you believe in fairies?

The same is true for upgradability. NV is pimping their MXM 'technology', ATI their Axiom, and neither ever amounted to anything much. If you are lucky enough to find a manufacturer that allows you to buy one, you will basically be stuck with what is out there when you buy the notebook. The next version of the 'standard' won't work with the current one. I looked for years and found all of no manufacturers offering an upgrade on even the next generation of GPUs. They may exist, but I will take my chances with fairies.

The same is true for just about any other part other than RAM. You may find a bigger faster part, but as soon as you plug it in, if it works, watch the temperatures, and more importantly, watch that battery life. HDs occasionally work faster, but pale in comparison to the most average of desktop parts on a good day. You usually overload the PSU before you get any decent speed increases.

That brings us to the quality of the hardware itself, specifically the CPUs. You can make a CPU that is optimized for speed or for power use, but not both. The fundamental tradeoff in transistors is that speed brings leakage and more power use. More efficient transistors mean slower but less leaky parts. Expect to give up half a GHz or so if you want anything more than fractions of an hour of battery life.

Then there is bus speed, or lack thereof. Almost every mobile part out there hamstrings the bus for power. Currently, Intel is 533MHz behind on its mobile parts, AMD is sucking down battery life as the tradeoff. Neither is a good thing. Every bit you push out across a wire costs power, and the faster you do it, the more additional overhead you pay.

Then there is the memory. Most laptops are capped at DDR2/800 with bog standard or worse timings, but faster is coming. This is OK for a business desktop, but on a gaming rig, especially a 'high end' gaming rig, well, prepare to be laughed at if I see you at a lan party.

They are at about a 50% raw speed deficit to real gaming memory, tend to have laughable timings, and cost even more of a premium than the normally expensive premium desktop parts. Densities are a joke, and even if you could find a huge fast stick, your mobile chipset probably would not support it.

In the end, there are some manufacturers that make good gaming laptop memory, OCZ, Corsair and Kingston come to mind. If you can find appropriate memory, and if your machine takes advantage of it, and if if you can tweak your BIOS appropriately, you stand a good chance of overheating the memory. Trust me, transient and heat based memory problems are a true joy to debug, especially if they only happen in the heat of battle when you are getting shot at. Grins all around there.

Then there are HDs, another area where laptops really stink. There are 7200rpm S-ATA drives, and I would expect all decent gaming laptops to have one or more of them, but many will try and pass off 5400rpm parts. If you look at other factors such as seek time and areal density, laptop drives, well, blow.

Any average desktop drive will eat a similar RPM laptop drive for lunch. If you are a serious gamer, you will have a 10K WD Raptor or three anyway, and those destroy the best laptop parts without breaking a sweat. While others are playing, you are watching the load bar, that is a great thing for you to show off your shiny toy with.

That brings us to the heart of any gaming laptop, the GPU, and possibly the greatest scam in laptops, mobile GPUs. This deserves a rant of it's own, but the condensed version centers around three things, specs, power and drivers.

First power, a good high end desktop GPU takes 150W or so, a mobile one on the order of a quarter that. Most mobile power saving techniques center around idling the CPU when it is not under full load. GPUs do this as well, shutting off units and even downclocking massively.

The problem? When you are gaming, you are never under low load, it is almost a certainty that you will be pushing the GPU to it's max, so no downclocking. Your laptop will melt with 150W, so NV and ATI can work miracles and bend the laws of physics, or they can give you a 50W part.

Guess what they do? They give you castrated mobile parts. The scam of it all? They use the same numbering schemes as the desktop parts hoping you are dumb enough to not look closely. If you bought a gaming laptop, you were that dumb.

You end up with a mere shadow of the part you thought you were getting, but you have a sticker that fanbois will ogle over. This satisfies pro 2) but rarely satisfies the purchaser. It is a scam.

Then you have drivers, or rarely do you have drivers. The situation is improving, but they are still hard to find if they exist. You usually end up with a vendor supplied driver that from last November that contains bugs exorcised a year before in the desktop parts. Enjoy the screen corruption people.

The screens themselves are another bit of happiness. Response times are typically achieved through newer technologies or overdriving the screens. Overdriving costs power, and power costs battery life. Not good for laptops.

Any sane person will stop calling anything bigger than 17-inch a laptop, but 1920 * 1200 screens are starting to crop up in the 17-inch world now. While I applaud greater resolution, if you squint at the same rez on a 24-inch screen, imagine it on about 75 per cent the size. The increased dot pitch is not necessarily a plus if you can't read the text on the screen.

So, you end up with slow and blurry but still making you squint, or squinty and battery draining. Have you ever seen a laptop screen that is better than a high end desktop LCD? I mean that in a measurable, testable sense, not in fanboi "Oooooh.... shiny" mode.

All of the tech in a modern laptop is skewed toward battery life, and impressive gains have been made. Fractions of a watt a fought over by Intel, AMD and chipset vendors to give you that extra 15 minutes of battery life and to shave off that last few mg of weight. Vista is 17 steps backward in this regard, but if you are dumb enough, you deserve what you get.

Gaming laptop give those laudable goals the one finger salute, they are there for gaming not intercontinental flight marathons, right? Well, yes and no. The added power draw means added battery mass so they don't get laughed out the door. Strike one.

The added heat dissipation means you need bigger heavier copper HSFs and heat pipes. These also take up space, and copper is not cheap or light. You also need bigger fans to move that heat off the end of the heat pipe, and those suck more power and generate more heat. Strikes two and three.

More importantly the side of the laptop will put out enough heat to wilt the mightiest of oaks and remove that wetland problem those pesky environmentalists are always carping about. You end up with a massive brick that puts a phone book to shame in both volume and mass. But your friends will go "ooooh". For six months. Then it is just heavy, unwieldy and slow.

Then there is the problem of controllers. Laptops have come a long way, some are even offering exceptionally good feeling and almost full sized keyboards. Track pads have gone from jokes to quite nice over the years, probably due to Synaptics more than anything else.

For a real gamer though, a higher standard is needed, the keys that are downsized tend to be the ones you need for gaming, arrow keys, numpad, function keys and others. A high DPI mouse also is needed. You can get p0wned repeatedly or you can use the right equipment. This brings us back to portability, but you get the point by now.

That brings us to the added stuff that manufacturers feel compelled to toss in to their machines. Webcams are one big one, the thrill there wears off in days, if you are still impressed in a month you need to go outside more. The various readers, widgets, lighting schemes and buzzers all are cute, but they add cost and weight. Once the sale is made, they are superfluous if not an outright negative.

In the end, you have a class of laptops that is barely fit for their intended purpose, reaching mid-range speed on a good day. If you are really lucky, they can drive the fixed rez of the screen you have on a modern game with most features turned on. In a few months, that won't be the case, and you are stuck. In a year, you will be cursing your wonderbox.

On the other hand, an SFF machine like a Shuttle or the late Monarch Hornet, even a generic µATX case, will do everything you need. You can pick out a board with 2 16x PCIe slots, 4 DIMMs, quad core support, and everything else you need. If you want more, there are slots. Want to upgrade? You can, easily!!!!

They may not be 100% future proof, but they are infinitely better than any laptop ever made. Get one with a decent handle or carry straps and you don't give away much in portability, and only a little in weight.

In the end, you can buy a faster gaming rig and a laptop for less than what you can get an uber-gaming laptop for. There is no reason other than vanity and stupidity to buy one of these, but strangely people do. While they are waiting in line for the high colonic, I will be gaming in the comfort of my house, at high frame rates. µ

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My take:

I do not disagree with everything that was said, nor do I agree with everything.

Gaming notebooks are still gaining ground for its mobile power and performance...as well as entertainment purposes for those [like myself] that like to game on the go.

And I do not find a desktop practical for me since I do not stay home most of the day.... as well as needing something that I can game on.

What do you guys think?

-Gophn

 

I couldn't really be bothered to read all that..i've heard it all before.

I would never buy a laptop with a main purpose of gaming...I see gaming on laptops as a bonus.

Take the newest generation santa rosa laptops...like the xps m1330 a lot of us have bought.

It's from a gaming line of laptop but no one who knows anything would buy it to cheifly play games. However, the idea that where ever I may go i can play CSS and BF2 with fairly decent settings is a good thing. The battery will still last over 4 hours surfing, 2.5 - 3 for a DVD.. and it fits in my back pack.

Perfect.

 

The author somehow forgot that there are people who travel a lot and spend more time on the go than at home. Show me a non-notebook system which I can take with my on the train or airplan without being the laughing stock.
That's why I stick with notebooks...

 

What do I think?

1. Edit your post to just include a few key points - people can read the whole thing at L'Inq.

2. Charlie does have a valid point or few. This year's mobile GPUs may be faster than last year's and therefore give a better gaming experience (subjuct to the programs not being more demanding), but desktop hardware will always have the potential to be faster because it doesn't have the same power and thermal constraints.

3. However, desktop computers are inherently less portable and can also serve as good room heaters. That's fine in the winter but they can make unpleasant company during the summer.

My conclusion: Perhaps we should highlight more often that people can get more for their money by separating gaming and portability. Perhaps we should keep the link to Charlie's rant in a sticky where it is easy to find.

John

 

Bleah! 10 lines were enough...

 

To me, all of this seems to predicate upon the idea that in order to game, one must want to game everything at maximum settings, incredibly high resolutions, and must want to play the latest, most-demanding thing out for the next x years.

Of course if you want to do that you pay a lot of money for a suitable laptop, or you get a desktop. And although a desktop that can do this sort of thing is cheaper than a roughly comparable laptop, it's still not cheap. It's kind of a rage against nothing, IMO, or one for a very small minority of computer/laptop buyers. Those who want to play at the top of the range, and don't understand laptops enough to know that they will not compete with a desktop at the top of the range.

My laptop plays current games at very high settings, and will definitely play any game I want for the next couple of years. AFAIC that makes it a gaming laptop. And what use is a desktop if you want to play a game away from the power socket at your desk at home - whilst waiting for class, in that boring conference talk, on the plane...?

 

Wow. That's one hell of a rant.

It doesn't change the fact that if we wanted we could play counterstrike source (or WoW) on a 17" screen IN BED.

Try doing that with your shuttle XPC. Harumph.

 

I like switching to "ooooh... shiny" mode - makes the world seem like a better place...

The Go 7950GTX, isn't as good as the 7950GTX, but is exactly the same as the 7950GT - a potent card. I think a response time of 25ms is alright, its good for a laptop... How did the author forget to mention all the screen problems.. i.e. laptop screens are horribly dark.

I bought my Alienware in EU because I can smuggle a laptop across customs and not have to pay 45% import tax (Philippines) - lol don't try this at home.

 

I'll have to agree with MrWhereIsItat on that one

 

Oh, and I'minsulted for that man calling my Alienware a joke

 

Yeah, I am sure that guy has some experience on that factor. He breaks his own screen on purpose and obviously tests to see if it would get replaced. This guy is retarded. He forgets the part that more then 50% of laptops are meant for traveling. I mean, what if you're on a plane and you're bored as hell and you wan't to play some games to burn time? The part where he says they are expensive, is where I think to get a JOB considering he is just jealous that people who have gaming rigs work for a living and he is just sitting there in his low paying job imagining himself playing on an Alienware.

 

You don't need a Geforce 7950GTX nor a Radeon 1950XTX or the popular Geforce 8800GTX to play games. A Geforce 8600M GT is more than enough for games. Sure, you can't play them at insanely high resolutions with everything turned on at screaming frame rates. But you can still play them at fairly high settings and good FPS. I'm using a Geforce Go 6600 on my laptop and I'm quite happy playing games like Command and Conquer 3 at WSXGA+ resolution and mostly high settings and Battlefield 2 at 1280x960 resolution at fairly high settings -- and the framerates are excellent too, CnC3 is capped at 30 FPS though but my BF2 averages 50 FPS. What more a Geforce Go 7700, an MR X1700 and a Geforce 8600M GT? Gaming computers don't necessarily have to be able to play games at their maximum settings. And for a fraction of the weight a "gaming" laptop weighs compared to their ATX counterparts, they're miraculous.

 

The article doesn't seem so controversial to me. If you seriously want to game, then you can either buy a:
- Desktop, which is cheap and a good performer (and can be upgraded). It also has a good monitor and a good keyboard and mouse. Downsides: It needs power. And it can't be easily carried around.
- A laptop, which is expensive, a less good performer, can not be upgraded, comes with an inferior monitor, inferior keyboard, and inferior mouse. Advantage: It can run without power... for maybe 45 minutes. (We're talking about "real" serious gaming laptops here). And it is portable... Sort of, except it weighs close to 4KG and is huge, for a laptop.

So yes, if you just want a high-end gaming machine, buying a laptop is ridiculously stupid. That's just how it is.

It sounds like a few of you have missed the fact that the article talks about high end gaming laptops only. Some of you say "yeah, but I can bring it with me on the plane" or stuff like that. Except you can't. Not with a machine that's so big it would annoy the guy on the neighboring seat, and which would run out of power before the plane has taken off.

Smaller, more portable laptops, yes. Those are clearly superior to desktops when it comes to, well, portability. And they can still be fairly good at gaming. The article doesn't say that *they* are a waste of money. Only the gargantuan ones that drain power at a desktop-like rate.

Read the article before you say "Yeah, but my 15" with a 7600GT can run games just fine, and I can bring it on the plane". Because your 15" with a 7600GT is not what the article is talking about. That's more the 19" with 8800 SLI and 20 minutes battery life -kind.

 

There are plenty of 15" laptops marketed as gaming laptops. And 17-19" behemoth laptops are still easier to carry than mid-ATX casings. Well, if you're a cheapskate then the desktop gaming rig and an ordinary laptop is great. But those behemoth gaming laptops are a luxury commidity and no doubt those guys also have a gaming rig at home and a smaller laptop.

 

Phritz your from FE right?

 

its true, there isn't much practical portability behind the 17" gaming laptops.

still, if you just want to get it from point A to point B, in a car or something, you will be much more inclined to suffer through closing a lid than you would taking apart all the wiring involved in your micro ATX case, grabbing your monitor, keyboard, (mice are small, no issue to transport)

i mean, honestly, you aren't bringing your microATX desktop to your friends house to go play counter strike on a weekend. if you can carry all your stuff in a small backpack or case and you wont have to rewire everything together when you get there... you could do it.

THAT is the portability of the 17" machines. the battery isn't absolutely necessary in my mind, but at least it will keep your machine up if the power snaps out for a second. battery backup is pretty sweet- even for only 40 minutes or so. if you are working, that is plenty of time to get to a stopping point, save your work, close up shop, and power down correctly.

im never going back to a desktop now, i cant. in my mind, computers are already more powerful than are my REAL needs. if i just wanted to play games i would buy a console. maybe my job will require physics simulation or something. maybe i could still benefit from more powerful laptops in the future.

my macbook pro screen quality surpasses my desktop lcd in brightness, has no blurring in fast motion, the battery lasts 5 hours of non-gaming (in osx only), the keyboard is quiet and EXCELLENT, and the GPU beats the x800 that i was using in my desktop, which i was more than happy with. i think my t7700 is a beast of a processor, also. it might not beat out your e6800 overclocked powerplant, or your quad-core street-wide blackout processor. but its at a fraction of the wattage for a mild decrease in power. i think that also holds true for the desktop to laptop gpu's. they are definitely not as powerful, but they are a FRACTION of the wattage.

mobility is a great thing, and it comes at a price. its not for everyone, and its definitely not for this guy.

 

Yeah. That's why they call those behemoth laptops "desktop replacements", aside from also being called gaming laptops. <.<

 

ok, desktops are better than laptops for gaming. You are very smart, sir, we didn't know that.

As a student who travels internationally at least 3 - 4 times a year for lengthy periods of time (anything ranging from a week to 9 months and travels within my travels, etc) I find that carrying a desktop around is just retarded. Gaming Laptop users only pay large amounts of money for the ability to play high end games with high, though limited quality and performance precisely because they can't for X or Y reason keep gaming desktop. I'm willing to down 4k for good portable performance over a span of 2 years. Plus, when it comes down to what is portable and what isn't is just a matter of opinion. I personally find 17" to be very portable. I've been carrying one for 3 years now, no complaints. Not to mention that if you're going to get a laptop (or anything for that matter) you'd do well to take care of it.. =/

Thank you captain obvious for the article, very informative etc. I swear, the inquirer is just... =/

 

The author just reminds me of the scientist who refuses to acknowledge that the world is round.

I believe technology/Era/time is changing, i too used to lecture my friends about "LAPTOPs are not gaming rigs!" but i have come to accept changes/admit things are changing. That laptops can be use for gaming.

And im actually getting a m1330 to game & work with.

 

Yeah... lemme guess... Avalon? lol....

The article has its points... but they're taken to an extreme... I need to move from place to place a lot, and my VAIO just wasn't giving me enough grunt so I got a new lappy

I think the author fails to realize that people who buy mobile gaming rigs aren't stupid. We've thought long and hard about what we wan't to buy, wether it be the Clevo M570RU, the Clevo D901C or the Alienware 9750, we've laid down a lot of cash for these machines and we didn't go into these purchases blindly, chances are that a gamer is smart enough to know what he's doing

 

I see laptop gaming as a bonus - imagine my pleasant surprise when I stumbled upon this site and found the GPU chart sticky written by <strike>some serial spammer</strike> the glorious Chaz. X1600 allows for medium-high settings?! Get in!

Of course, nothing beats a tricked out desktop or a console. Its nice I can game on my laptop but it doesn't quite fill the void, hence my desire to buy a Wii

 

Oh and about the heating issues:

This is on an Alienware m9750 with two 7950GTXs in SLi and Core 2 Duo T7600

 

As many others, I couldn't understand the sheer stupidity past line 5.

One of my friends at school is just like this. He's a fanboi for hating notebooks.

 

in my personal opinion i do believe 17" laptops are too big (from the perspective of a student). I am on the move with my laptop for at least 3-4 hours a day and can honestly say 9+ pounds would be too much for me, I am wishing I had a 14.1" at this point even.

But the gaming power I can get in this form factor I will gladly sacrifice over a desktop. But the writer of the article (*cough rant cough*) was referring to 17" desktop replacements only. I got to say I agree with him on that part. A good 17" laptop with dual 7950gtx in SLi will run you about $3000+. You can get a core 2 duo desktop setup with 7950gx2, core 2 duo 2.2ghz, 2gb ram, 160gb HD, 17" monitor (similar to what the $3000+ 17" laptop will run you) for ~$1300 (if that). So comparing the cost-to-performance ratio the desktop is definitely the way to go if the 17" laptop buyer was going to sacrifice most portability in the first place.

 

I have just read the post

I actually agree with most of what was written. Devil is indeed in the details. Mobile gaming is possible, but you do end up compromising one way or the other - but hey, (some degree of) portability is king and I am sure each and every gaming laptop buyer weighs up the options and decide that the positives outweigh the negatives

Devil's advocate

 

He needs to chill. My 14 inch Thinkpad currently games better than my Desktop(it's 3 years old once I got in to Notebooks I never thought about Desktops again).

Having a Notebook with Dual core processors, multi video cards, multi drives, and huge screens while still being able to carry around is amazing. He should look at it from that point. You couldn't do that 5 years ago. Just around 8 years ago you could only play games like Solitare and StarCraft on a laptop.

Having bleeding edge tech on your lap is just nice.

 

Just added the link to:
Flame the Author (provided by TheInquirer.net)

Just write to him (use fake email or use your "current nick"@NBR.com) and tell him about your thoughts, and he's welcome to come to NBR forums to have it out with us "stupid" gaming notebooks owners.

They are expecting replies to the "rant"... lets give them some.

 

it either comes down to how badly you want to play upcoming games. The laptops with these 8000 series video cards are great for playing 1-2+ year old games and they won't play any of the future games like crysis, or bioshock, or call of duty 4 well. Some people are being way to optimistic about what their 8600gt will be able to play a year or two from now forgetting that they are using a laptop and not a desktop that does everything better and faster. That's what I think is a joke.

 

OK.........I read your stuff..........it maybe true, maybe not....the point is....as far as Im making the most of my A8Js, its all good. I enjoy playin WoW in the foodcourt of my university. Can you do that with a desktop.

In class, I fake that Im typing on my laptop and pump some in Doom 3.
Now a desktop cant do that?
Ofcourse you compromise on quality of gaming, but that aint the factor. I enjoy gaming on my rig while Im in and out.

We go out to a cafe to smoke sheesha with friends, everybody pumps up their rigs and do some serious in Warcraft 3 Dota. Or sometimes maybe Dark Crusade.

I wanna use the internet, I aint gonna pay 10 AED (Arab Emirate Dehram) in an internet cafe to use internet. I'd rather go to Starbucks, order coffee and use the net while smokin.

So chuck all the stuff that you said, its helping me in day to day life, and thats all that matters.

 

I hope he comes here. I invited him over here to NBR, only after I gave him what I thought about his article. XD

 

Heres the thing. I dont disagree with everything he says but I think his notion that gaming laptops are a joke is quite...funny? i guess thats how i should say it...

The point of a gaming laptop is to be able to game while on the go... could you imagine carrying around a shuttle, monitor, power source with you where ever you go...like a plane? I hated even carrying around a shuttle to a friends lan party. With a gaming laptop all that stuff is combined into a small package that is all wrapped nicely for you.

now its more heavy/less portable than a regular laptop but...every thing is a trade off. If you are willing to carry around a few more pounds for battery, etc etc.

the 8600...well I think it will run games fine. but definately not in the highest settings...leave that to the desktops to have that luxury.

price wise I think that if you get away from the boutiques that over charge like crazy (alienware, voodoo, falcon northwest, etc.) I think the prices are quite fair to very competitive with a non gaming class laptop.

 

I also welcomed him to NBR to join our "discussion"

 

i took the liberty of flaming the author. repeated here:

First off, let me say that I totally appreciate your rant *cough* article.

If all your friends have ipods, and all your friends get enemas, would you rather have an ipod or an enema?

So you can't bust out Half Life 2 in 1920x1200 on your dual 7950gtx's while you are on the plane. But when you get to the hotel, its a very real possibility. Are you seriously going to bring your SFF PC with you on the plane?

Thought not.

No GPU maker has ever called me up to convince me that the portable version of a chip is as good as the desktop version. I don't know why they would. Functionally, they have the same internals and a moderately lower clock. Its the price you pay for portability and battery life. Such is life, I say.

I had some ghosting on my very first LCD monitor several years ago. That is no longer the case and I am surprised you have such issue with it. I would be hard pressed to believe that any NEW lcd screen would have screen response issues.

Keyboard quality depends on the manufacturer (thank God for Apple) - and I would not recommend gaming on a trackpad.

As far as i know, laptops don't yet come with removeable mice. You usually straight up buy a mouse, so if your laptop has a crappy mouse, thats your crappy fault for picking it. You could have bought whatever you want.

I feel as though if I had a dual 7950gtx system, it could serve a purpose that no desktop pc could, no matter how S an FF it had. its that degree of portability beyond a desktop. its about closing a lid instead of rewiring a tangled mess behind a desk.

its about just having one cable for power. Nothing else. Maybe for a mouse if you aren't savvy enough to deal with a logitech G7. Its about a spur of the moment "toss it in the car and go to a friends house" instead of planning a day in advance.

And having a 30 minute battery life can be a LIFE SAVER. Sure- you are plugged into the wall nearly 100% of the time. But that one time the power surge hits, instead of your computer rebooting, you just keep on going.

And damned if the power straight up goes OUT. you can finish what you were doing or come to a stopping point, save your ****, pack up shop, shut down properly, and thank GOD you had a 30 minute battery instead of corrupted files on your hdd.

good thing there are people like you though, to point out that even though you don't have hdd corruption and have to reinstall windows, you don't get quite as many rpm's as a desktop would!

The only time I ever broke a laptop screen I did have a really bad experience. I will give you that. I was on the empire state building, leaning over the edge while checking my email, and ill be damned i dropped it. only the screen broke though, and it was going to cost almost $1000 to replace just the screen! i could get a whole new laptop for that!

seriously, if you actually had a desktop or a laptop and you decided to push the it (or just the monitor with a desktop) off of the edge of the table while you were sitting down typing, i don't even know what to tell you. "you are an idiot" would probably suffice. if you did that and you weren't an idiot, you should at least know not to tell anybody about it.

personally, i play darts as a hobby. i like to have my laptop opened and facing me, as near the target as possible. that way, i can see whats going on with my computer while i am playing, in case i get an instant message or something.

actually, im a rock climber, and i like to put my laptop in its own harness and I like to belay for it while i am climbing myself, so that i can shop for climbing gear at a discount on ebay while im training at the same time.

point is: portability. you missed the value of the portability (even though it doesn't match a smaller laptop) over a SFF pc. its not for everyone, especially considering the price. and its DEFINITELY not for you.

that said, i wouldn't ever buy one of those laptops. for me, its not worth it either.

im happy to report that my new macbook pro has a battery life of over 1.4 million hummingbird wing flaps (at the standard 80 flaps/second), thanks to a new firmware update. At 5 pounds, I think it has a very high value / weight index, compared to the phone book. The last time I cared about bus speed was in 5th grade when i was ready to get home and go play tag. Now that I am older and wiser, bus speeds don't bother me anymore. I just want to know that I am going to make it home in comfort. Similarly, running games smoothly is more important to me than the bus speed, memory bandwidth, frequency notch, or rotational whoozit with which my computer does its stuff.

i can play all the games that matter in native resolution, and i expect to be able to play crysis and ut3 in native resolution also, with only minimal overclockling, driver tweaking, and .ini "fixing" at most.

at the same time, i can take it to class, and the screen is brighter and more usable than any desktop 1440x900 LCD screen i have come across to date.

there is something to be said for the midrange gpu laptop machine, that can also game. i hope you would agree, but i have a feeling that you might not like the fact that you scroll with two fingers on the trackpad instead of using your middle finger to operate a mouse whell. any excuse to use that middle finger is points for you...

 

http://www.intel.com/personal/gaming/teams/team-3d-story.htm?iid=personal+ipc_gaming_teams_menu

watch this vid and the dudes playin on their xps1710's and thats an example why gaming laptops make sense, even though most of us dont get paid for playing games

 

Jeez, isn't this getting a bit out of control now? This guy has a rant about gaming laptops, and we all disagree. That's what forums are for. Now we're starting to FLAME him? Calm down, mate.

 

agreed.

i just HAD to fight him a little.

 

As an owner of one of those "Gaming Laptops" (see Alienware in sig below), I have to say this guy just doesn't understand the proper usage of one.

Sure it was expensive at the time, but it was really using top of the line parts. A desktop processor of the era (woo, go P4), a very new X800m GPU, 2GB of 667 memory (I have yet to see this improved upon in laptops), etc, etc.

You know what my battery life is running performance at full tilt? 30 minutes, yeah that is pretty bad. Battery life on power saver mode was more like 1 hour and 30 minutes. The point is, you don't go and buy a gaming machine (this one is more than 12 pounds, what a pathetic whimp if he wines about 8 pound gamer laptops) to play with it on your lap on the train ride to work. That's one way to fry any future children you might have had (unless you are really special and happen to be female, in which case, game away!). I can set that Alienware up virtually anywhere in my house that has a table or flat surface, plug one power cord and one mouse in, and I'm set to play games or utilize the power of an (almost) desktop level computer.

In addition, travel with a gaming laptop doesn't involve gaming while on the go, it means that while I'm going on a 2 or 3 week vacation, I can EASILY stash this in a carry-on and pull it out in my hotel room. There, plug one power cord in, one mouse (optional), and once again I have almost desktop level power right in front of me! COME ON, this guy has no idea how a gaming laptop is used. Yeah, its a niche market, but some people don't want to carry a shuttle or fragbox on the plane with their monitor, keyboard, mouse, etc lest they are accosted by security for bringing something called a "FragBox" on the airplane.

Anyway, for real mobility (I.E. college usage, etc.), 15.4" or below is the limit anyway. As MasterChef mentioned, its possible to get a sweet ride at 5 pounds and less than 1 inch of thickness, hence the yet-to-arrive MBP in my sig below.

 

FYI: TheInquirer.net articles welcome people to click on the Flame Author link on the bottom of every one of their articles.

Any publicity is good publicity to them.

 

I was polite the whole response I wrote to him, but I just HAD to put a kicker in because I despise 'The Inquirer' . Anyways here it was:

"It is a niche market but it exists because there is a need for it. I thought most people found it obvious that a profitable market was not a "joke" but clearly some are misinformed"

 

Well put.

Very elegant as well as forward.

 

Edumacate? Did you play Baldur's Gate 2, Gophn?

Fantastic game by the way

 

Someone has issues! Thank them for trying to save us from our own stupidity. Any other suggestions from that guy like which soap to use or where to eat, or in general how to live my life, tell him to let me know. I think someone close to him must of been killed by a falling notebook? Or just give him the money to buy a nice notebook!

 

It's doubtful I would buy a gaming laptop myself since I'm not a heavy gamer anyways, but I have no problem with them being available. Obviously some people want them and as long as it suites their needs, that's great for them. For the rest of us, people buying those high-profit margin systems help make things cheaper for the rest of us, and the effort put into high-end mobile GPUs eventually filters back to the rest of us too.

 

I was not thinking Baldur's Gate initially, I was just thinking of a dumb American way to say educating.... like Ralph Wiggum would say "I'm leanrding"... or someone else saying "you need to get edumacated".

I forgot about Baldur's Gate... good game series.

 

How can anyone forget this thread?

 

Gee, thanks for reminding me!

 

just to add my 2c,
I normally enjoy Charlie's articles, its a great website, but he is way off the mark here.

I moved from a desktop to a notebook for at least two reasons,
I may not have the most powerful GPU in the world but I can play HL2 and the like, I would of course love to have more power as I did with my desktop.

The reasons for buying a laptop were
1: Being able to transport my whole machine to a friends house or anywhere else like playing games in the hotel while on a course in a particulalry boring town. Dragging my desktop to my friends house in the past often caused dings and scratches and a whole heap of time gathering the bits together and unwiring them from the desk.

2: (now this is the biggie), I dont know about anyone else, but my wife tends to have a dislike for chunks of technology taking up valuable space in our UK home. So back when we had 2 desktops on a worktop against the whole side of the dining room, she was less than pleased (espeically with my record decks there too)
Now there are just the record decks, and cupboards instead of desk style space.
the whole family uses wireless laptops which has allowed me to take out those lan cables I wired the house up with......(she hated them too!)
So I am now down to a 1 wire complaint , thats the phone line for the adsl on a big extension!

so in summary
portability, even if its lugging is better than taking a desktop
and pleasing the wife while saving space and reducing wires!

well worth the extra cost!!!

 

Well said BOFH1971.

I have a desktop specifically for gaming. I have a laptop for general PC use, plus its a great portable game machine. I used to have a Shuttle XPC, but its limitations were almost as bad as a laptop anyways. Yes you could upgrade the CPU and video card, but that was quite limited as well. It made portability better for the occasional LAN meet, but you still had a PC, cables, speakers, monitor, etc to lug around. Now it's just my laptop and the need for a single power outlet.

 

my laptop (sony SZ3xwp) plays games fine

 

I'm not going to disagree about the stuff in the article. It is true. You are a fool if you think that a laptop will be as good as a desktop. But the real fool is the one who buys a laptop for extreme highend gaming.
There. I wrote his article in 3 lines. I think the author just likes to hear himself talk.