No hate, but I've never understood gaming laptops. They are noisy, hot, almost always with severely nerfed performance compared to their equivalent non-mobile components.
They are heavy and bulky with poor battery life. They are often garish, which makes them less suitable for a professional environment if you're in a workplace where that matters.
It just seems like the vast majority of gaming laptops give you the worst of all worlds. Worse performance than a desktop rig, and none of the good things about a laptop, like portability, long battery life, etc.
To me, there are a few exceptions though:
- Gaming notebooks. You sacrifice a bunch of performance, but you at least gain back some of the benefits of a normal laptop like slimness, portability, battery life, etc. As long as you don't play super hardcore games, the thermal issue isn't a huge problem.
- Your work has a ton of travel and you are allowed to do it on your personal laptop. You can work and game on the same device. If you are traveling like every month flying everywhere for work, that makes sense to have a single device to do it all on.
Again, no hate, just my $0.02
One advantage is you get a lot of performance in a laptop form factor for much cheaper than an equivalent ultrabook
That's why I said one of the exceptions was gaming notebooks, something like the smaller Razer Blade laptops.
High end gaming laptops are a curse. It's a package that cannot be performant, you simply don't have a good space to cool it and keep it portable. Focus on it has made a big part of development in good hardware to be restricted to space and heat efficiency in a non optimal package.
Desktop is the way to go for gaming, you get much more affordable power and bang for your buck. If you want a machine for gaming you want a space where you can chill out and be confortable, desktop on a table with a good chair and nice monitors are the way to go and cheaper than the laptop counterpart.
Laptop is pretty handy for taking it to wherever you need it. But you cannot enjoy that high end performance on a comparatively tiny screen. If you are just carrying you laptop from desk with monitors and keyboard to another, you're just using a less effective and expensive desktop in two spots.
Even for working, it's handy to have a way to take your stuff elsewhere, but the way workstations work you'd much more benefit from having a cheaper desktop at you office and/or home and have a notebook to stream the content you need.
All the while all the money and research spent on high end laptops and graphs cards that live in them is being used to fuel a worse product that will invariably overheat and not work at full capacity.
Historically - desktops.
However - for the past ~3 years I’ve been on a laptop.
- Less power draw - if I need to run on solar.
- Data caps - run to a library if some game needs a 100gb update - this has partially been alleviated with Starlink.
- Work trips - ~2 hours of gaming on the hotel bed is needed after a day of meetings.
Gaming PCs by far.
Since some computer games require the mouse, I'd rather use a PC mouse than the touchpad or a mouse plugged to the laptop.
No particular reason, it's just more pleasing to the eye.
Assuming that by "PC" you mean desktop computers, that's what I prefer for gaming.
I prefer laptops, because they are mobile and doesn’t take up much space.
From a logical standpoint, desktops are better. However, I prefer laptops in case I ever have to be somewhere far, fast. Either way both will probably end up as e-waste in the future. But at least with a desktop you can keep the case and PSU.
Desktops. Don't have to worry about batteries and easier to swap out parts.
I'm also in the desktop camp. But I just purchased a Framework 16. The upgradable dGPU (assuming they release new ones) might make laptops more viable for gaming.
Both. I like the customizability and power of a desktop, but I like the portability of a laptop. If you can afford both, why not have both. I often have my laptop set up next to my desktop for browsing/chatting while gaming and I also often just take my laptop to game when I go to friends' places. Also, they're both PCs.
You need to spend a lot of money for a gaming laptop to be good. The are really a compromise if you absolutely cannot have a PC where you are. Especially now with the steam deck.
I really don't want to own multiple machines and certainly don't want to lwn a clunky desktop. I was quite happy with Stadia, but need to look at external GPUs through oculink as that would provide me with the best of two worlds.
Currently, my gaming is very light with rather si lle graphics.
