@Charlatan, did you buy the Acer? I’m also in the market for a gaming laptop, and as my desktop is a phenom with a 750ti, pretty much anything is going to be a huge upgrade.
Have been looking at laptops with 1050ti or better GPU and trying to stick to under $1500, which isn’t hard to do, but there are a lot of them out there. I know the Dell has gotten some knocks on its display being washed out, and the Asus ROG Strix has some MB issues, but haven’t heard as much about the Gigabyte and Acer models.
Sorry to miss this @Banzai: no, I never did pull the trigger. I periodically feel really guilty about playing games in the basement while my wife sits upstairs, so when that happens I research a gaming laptop to buy. Then I guess I feel a bit less guilty and I don’t buy it (it sort of sucks that I purchased a good gaming rig last fall when my prior computer died, so I have very little need for a new gaming machine).
If you purchase this, be sure to let me know how it works! :D
Why not pick up a steam link? Then you can play on any TV in your house.
Alternatively if you have an old craptop lying around, you can install Steam on it and do in-home streaming that way. It works pretty well, depending on the quality of your network.
If you really want the laptop form-factor but don’t already have a craptop, you can pick up a Dell refurb from their outlet with a 15" screen for around $200. The computer’s speed really doesn’t matter as all it’s doing is streaming games from your desktop. I found an Inspiron 15 3552 model with a celeron, 4GB RAM, a 500GB drive, and a 15" 720p screen (screen size matters here) for $200 after a 10% off coupon. Add a mouse and you’re good to game.
If you were talking to me, @stusser, a steam link wouldn’t work because my wife and I are watching the TV and so it’s not available for use. As for Steam streaming, I did do that for a while, mainly streaming Path of Exile, and it worked great 95% of the time. Problem was the other 5% of the time POE would randomly freeze up and and the stream would freeze. The downstairs computer would look fine but if you tried to do anything on it it would hard freeze, requiring a reset. I could never figure out what was going on. My gaming rig is fairly new so it definitely had the power to do the streaming, so I’m sort of puzzled as to why I had issues.
The only weird part about my setup is that POE is installed outside of Steam and I just put a link to Steam so I could use it for the streaming. I have also never tried it with any other game, so it’s possible just that one set up was flaky. But I never had any technical issues sitting at the machine and playing games on it.
My ‘craptop’ is a 2009 MacBook Pro with a 17 inch screen. I love that screen, but I may finally have to bid goodbye to the computer because it is feeling very creaky these days.
Nevertheless, your suggestion above is interesting. And that’s cheap enough that it might be worth an impulse purchase.
Pulled the trigger on an ASUS ROG GL502VS-DS71, core i7 7700 with GTX 1070 8g, 16g ram, 128ssd and 1t hdd, with room for another stick of ram and easy to change the ssd and hdd. Display is 1080, but at 15", I dont think i need any more.
It’ll be the most cutting edge PC I’ve ever owned. I’m not entirely sure what I’ll do with it, other than hopefully not need to replace it for a few years. I’ll give an update when it gets here, hopefully tomorrow.
I’ve been looking at that and some others like the Blade for my son. He’s been in school locally but is transferring to one in California and wants something easier to take back and forth. He likes the Blade a lot, but I just don’t trust Razer’s quality control. Looking forward to your feedback on the Asus.
My current ASUS does things well enough going on 6 years, and they last. Hopefully I can get a new laptop next year- what you bought looks like what I’d want.
I would so get that if I had $9000 blowing a hole in my pocket (I just wouldn’t carry it anywhere, hehe).
Pricey as heck… but does anyone remember when a laptop with basic specs (and probably weighing more than this!) and a tiny low res (probably even for the time) screen cost $3000? Amazing what you could get for 1/4 to 1/3 of that today.
At first I thought that was a mock video, cause I couldn’t consider someone would make a 21" laptop. But no, it appears to be real. It’s a Predator all right - it destroys your wallet! On the flipside, though, you won’t need to run your heater as much in the winter if you’ve got that sitting on your lap (though you may need some sort of thermal-shield for your legs!)
NVIDIA just announced a series(?) of laptops called Max-Q. Thin, light, quiet, running a GeForce GTX 1080. Purportedly to be available by June 27, for a price in the $1200 range. I expect we will find out more when they hit the streets, but here are some initial articles about it:
