What will you be using this gear for? Is there a potential career change on the horizon? Don’t just buy what you need right now, but instead think of what you might need it for further down the line. Whenever you’re investing your money into a piece of tech, you need to think long-term. That last part was a joke, but you get the point. You’ll either have a laptop that’s not performing as well as it should, but it’ll be quiet and relatively cool, or you’ll have a laptop that’s performing as advertised but will make you deaf in a couple of years. As a rule of thumb, you can’t have a strong gaming laptop that’s also quiet. On the other, laptops tend to sound like an airplane taking off, with some of them going way above 50 decibels. Slap on a couple of coolers, maybe get a bit of top-tier thermal paste, find the right enclosure (that has enough room for positive airflow), and you’ll be good to game for hours on end without ever noticing any dip in performance.Įven better, gaming PCs - when cooled adequately - can be bafflingly quiet during gaming. Furthermore, it’s much easier to cool your hardware, no matter how beastly it might be. Gaming PCs, however, are a pretty straightforward deal - you get what you pay for and what’s written on the spec sheet. Watch as many reviews of that one specific model you’re after because performance varies on a model-to-model basis. You’ll have to do a lot of research before buying a gaming laptop. Sometimes you’ll find a manufacturer (like, say, Razer or Lenovo) that’s offering a wide variety of products - but not all of them will perform up to expectations, even though they might be similar (or the same) on paper. Some will throttle beyond reason, whereas others will perform quite well even during intense workloads. You’re paying more for name value rather than performance.Įven worse, not all gaming laptops are cooled equally well. This means it’ll perform worse than a regular 1070, and yet you’ll pay a lot more money for the RTX branding. To make matters even worse, you might want to get a laptop with a beastly RTX 2070 graphics card, but most such laptops have the Max-Q variant. Laptops, on the other hand, are packed with hardware, and they’re limited in cooling, which means that even if they reach their advertised clock speeds, they won’t be able to sustain them for long, especially not during gaming.
You can also optimize your PC by purchasing additional coolers (to help guide hot air out of the enclosure) and optimize your airflow. Now, this is something that happens with all computers, but because these components are confined to fairly thin chassis, there’s only so much cooling potential to help them out.Ĭonversely, the most power-hungry components in a gaming PC can be cooled using large coolers that consist of beefy heat sinks and multiple heat pipes. Once they reach a certain point, they’ll reduce their clock speed (i.e., diminish in performance) to stabilize temperature-wise. The longer they’re stressed, the higher their temperatures will go. Your processor and graphics card, in particular, will generate the most heat out of all.
All computer components generate heat (some more than others). Thermal throttling is what happens when your hardware reaches a certain temperature. With that out of the way, let’s get started! Instead, we’ll focus on the philosophy behind it all, the thought-process, the pros and cons of each set-up, and whether it suits your own needs.
There’s a ton of good footage on YouTube from folks who get a kick out of benchmarking the most popular games at a wide variety of hardware, so make sure to do a bit of digging. If you’re looking for game-specific (or laptop-specific) benchmarks, you’d be wise to look elsewhere. What’s the better way to game in 2020 - a gaming PC or a gaming laptop? A gaming PC wins by a landslide almost by default, but there’s a discussion to be had, especially with today’s laptops being so darn attractive and powerful.įinally, this article won’t be dealing with the nitty-gritty. Still, the days of underpowered laptops (not to mention badly designed ones) are long gone, so it’s fair to pose the question. Simply put, it was never the most optimal way to game. Gaming on laptops was always frowned upon, and there’s a good reason why. By Petar Vukobrat in General | Sep, 5th 2020