Antoligy said:
Coming from someone who has so far disagreed with everyone in this thread, I really wouldn't give your advice a second thought.
Disregarding Liquid Cooling, the biggest difference between PC's and laptops, aside from the fact that you can actually replace and upgrade parts of a PC, is that laptops tend to overheat very, very quickly.
You've forgotten to mention that "laptops coming with" windows 7 generally means Windows 7 Starter (YAY! LIMITS GALORE!) or Windows 7 Home Premium. Both are pieces of shite. Remember that laptops come with more bloatware pre-installed than consumer desktops.
I've yet to see a laptop actually overheat (read, shutting down due to overheating, not just simply being hot), but then again, I've never spent more than £700 on a laptop. Sometimes my media laptop runs GPU temperatures of around 80C when running full speed (playing Left 4 Dead at medium-high settings, on a 8600M GT) but there are always tweaks that can be done to make it more manageable. The first thing I tend to do is crack open the laptop and check the heatsinks/pipes and reapply thermal paste where necessary (after I found out that the CPU didn't have any thermal paste, I made it a point to always check - it reduced stress temperatures by around 15-20%).
I suspect that when you start spending £1000+ on a "Gaming Laptop", like the aforementioned G73, using top end graphics cards, that more of the money goes into the elaborate cooling systems (like on the G73) to keep it cool, because if a product is prone to overheating, it's simply a bad product. As for being hot... every Gaming Laptop I've ever seen in reviews are always hot. A 5870 in a laptop will be, more or less, as hot as one in a desktop. The difference is that laptops have to use an elaborate cooling system to get rid of that heat, whilst a desktop can use stock heatsinks/fans or replacements and any number of case fans.
If I sound contrary in my previous posts (about the laptop vs desktop debate), then I apologise, but my stance should be clear. Laptops are not as bad as people say (especially not twice as bad as an equivalently priced computer+monitor). I'm sure people can find plenty of examples where laptops do underperform compared to desktops (many laptops are underclocked to handle power/heat requirements), but there are still cases where laptops perform just as well as PCs. Consider the Acer 5942 or 8942 series and a PC with equivalent parts (which are usually around £900-1200, though the top 8942 laptop is £1400 featuring Core-i7 and HD5870). At stock speeds, the difference between them aren't worth talking about. The difference is that the PC will cost around £200 less, maybe more depending on where you source the parts. Then you add the cost of a monitor and windows again. The only other difference is that you can overclock a PC to get another 10% speed out of it. Laptops can't hope to do this.
So, to summarize:
PC: Plenty of space inside, easily upgradable, better cooling (though temperatures can still get high anyway), better parts available (read: HD5970 - I doubt any laptop will ever have one inside), much more power available (read: PSU, not processing power), comparatively cheaper, overclockable.
Laptop: Small = portable (even the 18.4" versions are more portable than a computer), upgradable (though options are very limited), runs hot (what do you expect?), good parts still (read: HD5870 and/or Core-i7), power efficient (e.g. 5942 only uses a 90W PSU, supposedly, compared to the 600-700W needed for most single GPU PCs), can be pricey for better laptops, includes a half decent screen (not as good as monitors, but you can always use an external display together with it), tends to come with Win7 Home as standard (I've only ever seen Win7 Starter in netbooks and CULV laptops). EDIT: Oh yes, battery. Gaming laptops have terrible battery life, but it's still useful in the case of a power outage to give you enough time to save your work, and are less prone to dying (I've seen two Gaming PCs from friends die after a power surge whilst my media laptop survived the same surge).
Anything I've missed?
