There can be little doubt that wide-screen, or even projected screen PC gaming has always been much more fun than laptop gaming. There are lots of reasons for this but when it all comes down to it the problem has always come down to size. PCs have always been roomier inside the case and components like high-capacity hard drives, several card slots and large graphics cards have just not been possible until recently for laptops.
Moore’s Law applies to not only power and speed; it applies to size as well. We have seen cell phones shrink in size from the size of an Army field radio to some phones as small as a credit card, while at the same time increasing in power and speed. New paradigms in hard drive and CPU manufacture have made them smaller and more powerful also.
Laptops today even have cooling systems for some of the more powerful systems on the market. The fact is that today’s laptops are every bit as powerful as most PCs on the consumer market and are capable of storing nearly as much data.
The good news is that gamer’s laptops are not really any more expensive than gamers PCs, The bad news is that both are still expensive when compared to a standard computer. But, like most technology, the prices are always going down.
When the terabyte hard drive was first introduced the least expensive was about $800 per terabyte. Shoppers today however can find a two terabyte laptop hard drive less than $200. The same applies to most of a computer’s internal components. The first laptops were priced at nearly $3000 but today many students are using machines purchased new for less than $400 that has many times the speed and power of those old machines.
High-end Gaming Laptops
Razor Blade Ultra-thin Gaming Laptop
This razor thin laptop might only weigh 4.1 lbs but it is packed with power. The heart of the Razer is the Intel Core i7-4702MQ 2.2 GHz, Nvidia’s Geforce OTX 765M and 8GB DDR3L SDRAM.
There are a number of great laptop buys on the market and careful shoppers can find real bargains. If you want to go a top of the range laptop, one of the best on the market today is the Razor Blade, selling at $1,750 for the 14″ modal.
Low-end Gaming Laptops
Lenovo IdeaPad Y570 Gaming Laptop
On the other end of the scale is the which will keep everyone but the pickiest gamer happy with a Core i5 processor and an Nvidia Geforce GT 520.
The GeForce GT 520 has been criticized on a number of forums for not being a gamers CPU but for the money it is perfectly capable of handling most games quite well on medium – high settings perfectly fine.
What about heat output?
Finally, when you increase the amount of power that your laptop is using you naturally increase the heat output. Long hours of hard gaming will wear expensive laptop components out quickly if they are not kept cool.
New laptop cooling systems on the market today are extremely versatile and, like other components have come down in price. The new systems come complete with multiple USB ports and connectors and USB storage as well.
