Super Thin and High Res Powerful gaming notebooks next year?

How will laptops with Skylake and Pascal compare to the top end laptops of today?

Since no one really cares about Broadwell, even though it allows less power, heat and thinner laptops, Skylake is the next awesome thing. Skylake is ''supposed'' to have a HUGE performance increase. So smaller die shrink, less power and more performance and features. Then Pascal will have a smaller die shrink, use less power like Maxwell, and huge bandwidth increases along with more GPU performance. High dpi screens are getting more popular and power efficiency and bandwidth speed is going up.

Does that mean that thinner laptops with 3k and 4k screens with a lot of horsepower will be popping up? Right now for the most part, we have to horsepower and battery life to get a thin laptop. If we want a crazy performance laptop, they are usually heavy and thick compared to most laptops people use.

Will we finally get thin and sleek high performance laptops with high dpi screens and not have to sacrifice all the bells and whistles once Pascal and Skylake come out?

Will laptop performance get closer to desktop performance?

What are your predictions for the next generation of gaming laptops?

 

I'm of the opinion that until we come up with a NEW technology (either in battery, cooling, or something along those lines) we're still far away from a super-thin laptop that performs the same as a chunky notebook of today (in terms of raw power, heat and noise). Have a look at the Razer Blade. Sure, its performance is pretty good given its size/weight, but in order to achieve that, it runs loud, fairly hot, and most of its components (even RAM) are soldered.

Currently, all we're doing is improving upon existing designs. So long as you require traditional heatsinks and fans, there's only so much you can do in terms of cooling and noise.

 

I think pascal might have to be modular mxm still, or the msi implementations will have to be among other manufacturers as msi has promised upgrade paths for the gt80 and gt72, pascal may still be mxm and good, although skylake and any intel products will almost certainly be bga turds for laptops. Thankfully, intel performance increases between architectures and generations has slowed down now so we wont be missing out on too much if we dont jump on the bga intel bandwagon just yet.

 

GTX 970m/980m are already close to desktop performance. The 980m is basically a desktop 970. Like @Ramzay states, cooling and power technology need to improve/change drastically. One thing that may help though is elimination of 2.5" SATA ports. You can offer 2-3 M.2 drives in less space than a 2.5" SSD bay, which may help reduce overall thickness. But cooling continues to be thick and heavy copper heatpipes. For good reason, they're efficient and inexpensive. But to improve on that you will need to eliminate those and go with some sort of efficient thermoelectric cooling or some other new/different tech altogether.

In any case, as newer tech is pushed out the door, boutique laptop makers like Clevo will continue to put the most powerful components in a case, so will continue to lead the pack, and be thicker and heavier. The real question is where do we get to where there are diminishing returns? Can we make a 15mm thick laptop that can achieve 60FPS minimums at 4k, where anything faster (and hotter/noisier) will just improve on that.

 

Well, thin and light laptops will always run hotter and louder than bulkier ones. That is of course until a technology that defies our day-to-day classical physics is mass produced *koff*quantumcomputing*koff*.

 

Not really, just have alternate methods to move air other than a fan. There was some tech a couple years ago that was supposed to cool low TDP parts by vibrating open and closed and it sat right on top of the CPU. Not sure what ever happened to that though.

 

Probably caused too many failures. Vibration is not a good thing if the design isn't perfectly made to support it. Since we can't even get inductor coil whine vibration under cobtrol, yeah... No thanks. I'll keep with old school heatsink and fan tech...

 

They could use internal water cooling to kill the huge temperature delta between chip and heat sink, which DIY people have already tried with limited success. Leaking might be a concern.

And obviously, devote more space to cooling. The space saved from removing ODD and using small form factor SSDs could help.

 

Liquid cooling just doesn't make sense for a typical consumer laptop. It kind of defeats the purpose of a thin and light machine if you have to put a radiator in it somewhere. The mods I've seen have been rather large. At that point you have a semi portable desktop, not a laptop.

 

I'd say removing the ODD and 2.5 bays should become more common. The extra space left by those can be used in creative ways.

I don't think liquid cooling is something made for portable devices though.

All in all, I hope that even if thin and powerful laptops come out, we still get robust, thick laptops with good cooling as an option haha

 

Here's the tech I was referring to earlier: http://www.dailytech.com/Engineers+...Traditional+Coolers+to+Shame/article11158.htm

And discussed here at NBR: http://forum.notebookreview.com/thr...out-moving-parts-yes-solid-state-fans.683747/

Of course that article was in 2008. And there was a video demonstrating the concept, but I can't find that.