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Let's talk gaming laptops...

StreetsofBeige

Gold Member

Just bought this for my son. It showed up and DL Cyberpunk right away to test. Just to test, hes not allowed to play it lol. With everything at Ultra with pycho raytracing (no pathtracing) DLSS on (balanced) it averaged 50 fps at 1080p! Pretty damn good. Ran it again at medium with only RT shadows DLSS on, and it was 144fps(screen is 144max).

Yes the CPU and Ram will eventually hinder AAA games at even medium settings but I think he'll get a few years of AAA at med/high 60-100 fps so were happy. He mostly plays AA games and doesnt mind 1080p anyways. So we good for alooooong time.

As for the design, its well built , nice rgb and the fans so far have been very quite.
I copied you and just ordered it today (last day of sale), along with a modest gaming mouse on sale too. MSI must have some concrete pricing in place because every place that sells it has the exact same $2100 —> $1800 sale price.

I took the plunge as my current laptop has some keys not working anymore all in the same region of the keyboard. Lol. It’s been hit and miss all month, took the keys apart, it worked but lately they don’t at all. Even when I take out the entire key and plastic bits and press the raw membrane now all the keys don’t work in that part of the keyboard. I tried YT all kinds of fixes and nada. I never spilled anything either. No more $1000 Dell laptops going forward for me.

I was thinking about connecting a small usb keyboard grabbing one from work from IT dept. But just said fuck it and pulled the trigger. Made some decent money on activision stock I sold last week.
 
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Sleepwalker

Member
Bumping this as I'm looking to upgrade, currently looking at:

Asus strix G15 advantage edition from 2021

16gb DDR4 ram
Ryzen 9 5900hx
RX 6800m 12GB vram

for around 1k usd on a deal, the only other laptops I can find around that same price are 6gb 3060 gpus, can stretch to a 4060-4070 but those are also 8GB so not too sure, anyone got experience with current gen laptops?
 

Ozrimandias

Member
Just get a steam deck.

Gaming laptop is an oxymoron because the reduced battery life means you are going to have it plugged in all the time. Plus it'll run hot with loud fan noise.

Also mobile GPUs perform worse than their desktop counterparts. A laptop 3060 is not the same as a desktop 3060.

I am in that doubt, whether or not to buy a Steam deck just to play PC games (relatively older ones) and end up buying a mac for office work. Your opinion would help me a lot. The main use I would give the Steam Deck would be in Docked mode. I don't mind a 1080p graphics for certain games or that it renders similar to a Switch (I have one and I don't mind if it looks "worse" on switch) my doubt is that the only modern AAA game I'm interest now on PC it's Starfield. For other AAA games i have a ps5.
 

NahaNago

Member
I copied you and just ordered it today (last day of sale), along with a modest gaming mouse on sale too. MSI must have some concrete pricing in place because every place that sells it has the exact same $2100 —> $1800 sale price.

I took the plunge as my current laptop has some keys not working anymore all in the same region of the keyboard. Lol. It’s been hit and miss all month, took the keys apart, it worked but lately they don’t at all. Even when I take out the entire key and plastic bits and press the raw membrane now all the keys don’t work in that part of the keyboard. I tried YT all kinds of fixes and nada. I never spilled anything either. No more $1000 Dell laptops going forward for me.

I was thinking about connecting a small usb keyboard grabbing one from work from IT dept. But just said fuck it and pulled the trigger. Made some decent money on activision stock I sold last week.
I have issues with my keys as well some time and was also thinking about connecting a small usb keyboard since the laptop for the most part is okay. I still will upgrade next year for the next ffxiv expansion.

I'll probably max out the ram option if it is available when purchasing since I hate the idea that I could upgrade it at anytime. I was already looking at the option of upgrading the ram on my current laptop before the keyboard started acting up. I'm probably going to go with 32 gb of ram though.
 
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clarky

Gold Member
You sure about that ??

$2700

I can actually get a similar model about $50 cheaper with a 2GB SSD straight from Lenovo but it would take a month to arrive and I don't think my impulse buy impulse can wait that long.
 

clarky

Gold Member
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This is slightly better than the B&H one. Main difference is it has a 2GB compared to 1GB from B&H. Have to stack multiple discounts though. If I use BENGEXTRA6 and my education discount it goes down to about 2678.99. So actually about $20 instead of $50 cheaper. And if I buy using Rakuten, I get 8% cash back. That 1 month wait is kiling my desire to impulse buy though. But then again, the fact that it's constantly switching from being sold out to being available in short supply is teasing me lmao.
 

Hoppa

Member
I had one a couple years back and when it was running games it sounded like I was vacuuming it was so bloody loud. Got pretty hot too.
 

clarky

Gold Member
For laptop?

I wonder how much that would cost

Looking at 3070
I have a 3070ti and its shat the bed with starfield. Forza next month also. If your gaming at 1080p maybe you'll be fine for a while yet?

My rule of thumb is buy the latest greatest of whats in your budget. If your looking at a 3070 my advice would see if your budget would stretch to a 40 series then at theast you'll have the option of frame gen should you need it. Although i've not looked into the 4070 personally.

Also you'll need to consider the wattage of your graphics card, they are not all created equallly.

To be honest I need a thin and light gaming laptop due to my situation, but unless your away from home alot i'd find it hard pressed to recommend going the laptop route. For me though its my only option and a god send.
 
With a form factor like that it's kind of expected. I'm used to the noise at this point. I would also highly recommend a gamepad cause yeah, those suckers can get hot.

I have a 3070ti and its shat the bed with starfield. Forza next month also. If your gaming at 1080p maybe you'll be fine for a while yet?

My rule of thumb is buy the latest greatest of whats in your budget. If your looking at a 3070 my advice would see if your budget would stretch to a 40 series then at theast you'll have the option of frame gen should you need it. Although i've not looked into the 4070 personally.

Also you'll need to consider the wattage of your graphics card, they are not all created equallly.

To be honest I need a thin and light gaming laptop due to my situation, but unless your away from home alot i'd find it hard pressed to recommend going the laptop route. For me though its my only option and a god send.
3070ti here too. I wouldn't say Starfield is unplayable. But it does feel very console-y playing at 40 FPS.
 
I have a 3070ti and its shat the bed with starfield. Forza next month also. If your gaming at 1080p maybe you'll be fine for a while yet?

My rule of thumb is buy the latest greatest of whats in your budget. If your looking at a 3070 my advice would see if your budget would stretch to a 40 series then at theast you'll have the option of frame gen should you need it. Although i've not looked into the 4070 personally.

Also you'll need to consider the wattage of your graphics card, they are not all created equallly.

To be honest I need a thin and light gaming laptop due to my situation, but unless your away from home alot i'd find it hard pressed to recommend going the laptop route. For me though its my only option and a god send.

Does DLSS help?

Sticking to 1080p for another 5 to 10 years
 
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clarky

Gold Member
Does DLSS help?

Sticking to 1080p for another 5 to 10 years
Massively yes. Other good features to look out for are advanced optimus and gsync.

Laptops generally are a gen behind desktops so a 3070 should perform like a desktop 2070 (ish) as a general rule if thumb.

price vs performance they are not great value.
 

BlackTron

Member
I always loved laptops, but always hated the idea of gaming models and avoided them like the plague.

But the tech finally reached a point where I decided I could combine my need for a new laptop and gaming machine in one unit without horrific compromises. I got a gaming laptop instead of new desktop parts for the first time ever last year and it's pretty glorious.

Asus TUF Dash F15, 12 gen i7, 3070, I paid 1k.

A lot of it has already been covered, the fan is noisier than a console, you gotta be mindful of the battery and such...but I have to say they (Nvidia) seem to have pulled off some voodoo with this mobile 3070, I'm sure its not quite the desktop card but I'm just not feeling the horrors of throttling. It just seems to plow through everything I throw at it. I don't really have any other modern hw to compare it to running the same games except Series X but it does get higher frames in Halo with (seemingly) similar settings. By higher I mean over the 120 XSX gives you. Which might not seem a lot to 240hz FPS game pros but for a 1k thin laptop with it's own screen that seems like a pretty good deal to me. And there are other options today, I saw one with a better screen with improved color accuracy for $1200, and the 4070 version for 1500 lately, all at Best Buy. Damn. (Though without research the 3070 might be a better fit for the laptop for power balance reasons anyway, which is another thing to be mindful of, research the shit out of what you buy first)
 

PeteBull

Member
I had one a couple years back and when it was running games it sounded like I was vacuuming it was so bloody loud. Got pretty hot too.
That is a feature all top gaming laptops have, laptop is really small form factor, so u cant really cheat physics, it can perform better than most desktops( ofc not as good as top of the top desktops but bis lappy can be comparable to highend desktop) but it then generates tons of heat/noise to cool it off ;D
 

Matt_Fox

Member
OP here.

I did indeed buy a gaming laptop last month, and I've been using it essentially as a console replacement (HDMI to the big 4K TV and playing with an Xbox controller).

It's an MSI i9 RTX4080 and I've added some extra RAM into the empty slot to make it 40GB.

I definitely recommend it. I've tried it out on a few games I'm familiar with noticed a definite and worthwhile 'bump' in performance from console gaming, and I've been really enjoying Starfield which runs very smoothly. It's quiet too and doesn't seem to get overly hot.

One small caveat. I ran it unplugged one time and the performance dropped off a cliff. Seems gaming laptops really need to be plugged in to perform.
 

Cyberpunkd

Member
Unfortunately with a gaming laptop you get the worst out of both world:
It’s way more expensive than a desktop PC for what you get + heavy + you don’t want to try gaming on a battery

I had Razer in 2018 (I think it was 2499€ then), I wouldn’t bother again.
 

Eliciel

Member

I own this one and it is one of the greatest I had so far in terms of keyboard/touchpad + screen resolution and gaming performance / heat: Lenovo Legion 5 Pro 16IAH7H Storm Grey, Core i7-12700H, 32GB RAM, 1TB SSD, GeForce RTX 3070 Ti, DE

and btw. no one plays game via Battery on a gaming laptop...shouldn't be something you look for tbh..
 
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FunkMiller

Member
My ROG Zephyrus G15 with 3070 and Ryzen 9 5900 is just about able to handle Starfield at 1440. But that's on turbo, and requiring headphones to ignore the fan noise. It'll handle it on silent mode, but only at 1080.

Although, I'm playing the game on Series X, as the performance feels smoother and more stable. I'd be more or less happy with the laptop version if I was traveling though.

I've been thinking about an upgrade to a 4080 laptop and getting rid of my Series X and current ASUS, but not sure it's the right move.
 

Kenpachii

Member
So how are cpu's these days when it comes to desktop variants. I wanna do heavy RTS on a laptop, but what performance higher or equal towards 9900k, which is already a bit older of a cpu now.
 

RoboFu

One of the green rats
Unfortunately with a gaming laptop you get the worst out of both world:
It’s way more expensive than a desktop PC for what you get + heavy + you don’t want to try gaming on a battery

I had Razer in 2018 (I think it was 2499€ then), I wouldn’t bother again.

This is my experience also. Is a much worse gaming machine than a desktop and much worse portable laptop than one made to be energy efficient.
 

Kenpachii

Member
So i went from my PC: 3080 rtx, 9900k 8/16, 3440x1440 ultra wide. To a steam deck last year. And stick with it for now. Steam deck does 90% of what i want.

However i want some more performance so RT is usable again and stream a bit again and have something i can carry with me to my girlfriends place.

After checking around a bit, i want something with framegen as i am missing out on this with my 3080, but also something that's potent enough without it but isn't to big.

So 4000 gpu basically. The 4050 and 4060 are same priced, 4060 is faster and features more v-ram so no point going for 4050, 4070 is faster then 4060 by a tiny amount but costs 400 bucks more and still has the same 8gb memory pool as the 4060.
Above this u got 4080 which is twice the price of 4060 from 1200 > 2400, and 4090 which is 3000 euro laptops.
So after doing some research on 4060 laptops which is the most logical option, i encountered this one.

Asus TUF Gaming A15 FA507NV-LP066W ( 2023 )

-16gb of 4800 DRR5 memory
- 8gb 4060 RTX
- 7735HS 8/16 cores/threads zen 4.
- 512 SSD.
1149 euro's.

Honestly pretty impressed by this thing, runs practically anything without trouble besides obviously starfield which hovers around the ~40 fps. But framegen could help here.

Path tracing and 60 fps at 1080p ultra is pretty impressive not going to lie, disabling RT s, hits about 90 with just RT on no pathtracing and 120 with no RT. Yea i am sold lol.



Saw some company has them for sale here in the netherlands, probably going to pick one up, if i won't like it i can still return it 30 days after.

I was also looking at a more faster model with a 4080, but 2x the price is hard to validate to be honest. I rather just buy another 1200 laptop 2 years down the road when 5000 series launches.

My only questions really are.


TO what speed can the ram be upgraded towards and what SSD's would be solid for this thing. Need atleast 4 tb space so 2x 2tb would do, and 32gb of memory would be nice to have.
 
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Kenpachii

Member
Went full retard and spend way to much but oh well.

Bought:
The laptop for 1150.
4tb 4800/4000 mbps SSD gen 4 for storage for 200.
140 for 980 pro SSD from samsung 2tb 7000 read whatever write.
Some USB hub 15 bucks
And 64gb of ddr5 4800. for 175.

All with all, 530 extra on top of the 1150 laptop so yea kinda a lot. but 6tb of ssd space is godly as i will be using it as my main solution from now on forwards. 64gb allows me for godly amounts of chrome tabs open the dream.

Why 64, its 50 bucks more then 32, and saves me upgrading if games every wanted to go above the 32, but i also have lots of shit on the background open and running. So it basically eliminates ram requirements entirely for the future.


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I gave in and got the Legion with the 4090. I'm filled with both buyer's remorse and extreme impatience for it to get here. I'm going to stop playing Starfield until this comes along. And now I'm doubly excited for the CP2077 expansion. I can't wait to see what RT overdrive looks like.
 

Dorfdad

Gold Member
There isn't one that run quiet for the 4090's. I bought three diffetn ones and returned them all. Just not able to so AAA without jet engines. I WILL not go back to loud systems its my "CHALKBOARD" I refuse to do it anymore.
 
There isn't one that run quiet for the 4090's. I bought three diffetn ones and returned them all. Just not able to so AAA without jet engines. I WILL not go back to loud systems its my "CHALKBOARD" I refuse to do it anymore.
Understandable, all gaming laptops are loud. I've personally found it comforting now. Kinda like how the complete silence of a rural setting bothers me at night when I'm so used to the sounds of a city.
 

Kenpachii

Member
I gave in and got the Legion with the 4090. I'm filled with both buyer's remorse and extreme impatience for it to get here. I'm going to stop playing Starfield until this comes along. And now I'm doubly excited for the CP2077 expansion. I can't wait to see what RT overdrive looks like.

Show some benches for cp everything maxed out, would love to see it. Congratz man. How much did it set you back?

There isn't one that run quiet for the 4090's. I bought three diffetn ones and returned them all. Just not able to so AAA without jet engines. I WILL not go back to loud systems its my "CHALKBOARD" I refuse to do it anymore.

Jup mine is loud as fuck at turbo mode and it has a 4060 in it. However laptop is small and u can always put i ton silent mode and lose like 20% performance.

However if u do want to blast, just connect noise cancelling headphones and the sound is completely gone, i use hyper x cloud 2 headphones, so no isseu there.

Anyway, have my laptop now for a few days, got the 2tb 980 pro nvme installed, and 64gb of memory ( total overkill ), 4tb is on the way.

Reinstalled windows clean, because lots of shit that comes with the laptop on the OS already installed that bogs everything down.

I must say, i am massively impressed by the performance of this thing. Framegen is no joke, only stuff i tested so far was 3d mark where i can DLSS test benchmark at 1440p instead of the 1080p screen this laptop has, and without dlss+framgen its 30 with 100 fps. Tested the witcher 3 out on the hardest to render location which always destroys framerate, everything maxed out hairworks 8x and ultra raytracing dlss quality, ultra settings i got 74 fps at the lowest spot.

kinda shit picture made it with my mobile lol

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As i have my laptop connected towards a 4k at times, 1080p works great for that, and my god DLSS quality cleans all the shimmering and pixel mess up in witcher 3 game. Honestly impressed by this laptop. Currently downloading 2tb worth of games to see how they all perform. but anything i throw it, it just chunks through it.
Super happy for far with the laptop, it eats everything.

Oh hell yea

adXV9DB.jpg


Space for days
 
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Kenpachii

Member
Returning the laptop as the screen randomly flashes.

The size of the laptop is great, the performance is fantastic nothing to complain about. However the 8gb of v-ram does get me worried on that 4060. The 4070 laptops aren't doing better and the 4080 are expensive as fuck aka doulbe the price of the 4060.

I did found this option when i was looking for another laptop.


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1750 euro's 4080. 600 bucks more and a bit uglier looking. But 4080 12gb over a 4060 8gb is a big difference. So probably going to order one of those.
 
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