Hardware Gaming Laptops general performance/reliability

[grey72]

I'm looking to get a gaming laptop since I'm moving houses and I might not have room to keep a PC around at the new place. Since I'm short on cash, I'll have to sell my current machine. I've never owned or used a laptop for any significant time before, so I'm a bit wary of taking the one-way plunge into laptop territory, with all the overheating and hardware issues horror stories I've been hearing.

So I turn to you temp, How's your experience been with gaming laptops? Would you be able to live with a laptop as your only "powerful (workstation?)" computer? What should I watch out for? I'm eyeing the Dell G7 and Acer Helios 300 2018 refresh right now, So what's your preferred brand for durability?

 

[Chary]

Never had good experiences with Acer, ever. I hear Lenovo can be hit or miss, but Dell tends to be the best for these things. If Asus makes anything, I'd likely recommend that.

 

[grey72]

Never had good experiences with Acer, ever. I hear Lenovo can be hit or miss, but Dell tends to be the best for these things. If Asus makes anything, I'd likely recommend that.

Any experience with Asus's customer service? Not a deal breaker, but since this is my first time I'd like to tread carefully

 

[Sonic Angel Knight]

Try this site. Customer service is okay for me. I spent over a hour with a support person as they helped me decide since these are mostly optional parts you can choose from. They can help you decide what you do or don't need.

https://www.xoticpc.com/

 

[grey72]

Try this site. Customer service is okay for me. I spent over a hour with a support person as they helped me decide since these are mostly optional parts you can choose from. They can help you decide what you do or don't need.

https://www.xoticpc.com/

I've heard great things all around about sager, but unless they sell retail I'm unfortunately out of luck. I don't have a credit card and can't borrow anyone else's

 

[Deleted User]

I've been using a gaming laptop as my daily driver for almost a year now. It's a Dell Inspiron 15 7000 Gaming Laptop with an i5-7300HQ and a GeForce GTX 1050 Mobile. It's not too bad; while I tend to avoid higher-end games and mainly stick to emulation, it does its job well. It is a bit noisy when running more graphically-intensive games such as ACIV: Black Flag.

A friend I know uses an Msi laptop, and he's told me about overheating problems he's had with it (he even had to get a cooling pad for it), so I suppose it varies greatly from manufacturer to manufacturer.

A word of caution if you run Linux: many of these laptops are Nvidia Optimus Enabled, meaning that they run 2 GPUs: Intel's Integrated Graphics Card, and the dedicated Nvidia GPU. If you're using the proprietary Nvidia drivers, then you're probably going to need to use a third-party program such as Bumblebee in order to get GPU Switching to work properly. I've had trouble getting Vulkan to run under Bumblebee using both optirun and primusrun, and was only able to get Vulkan working using a method detailed here. There are alternatives, however, such as using nvidia-xrun, completely disabling one of the GPUs, or using the open-source nouveau drivers, however, I don't have much experience with any of these methods, so I can't say much about them. This is especially important to note if you're going to be running games that use Direct3D11 or above under Linux, as DXVK requires Vulkan to even run. Don't know what the state is regarding AMD GPUs either.

EDIT: Got the chance to try out nvidia-xrun, which basically runs an entire X server on the Nvidia GPU. Works well, and Vulkan runs fine to boot. If you don't mind switching between ttys, this is probably the way to go.

 

[Sonic Angel Knight]

Well then buy a sager brand laptop.

 

[grey72]

I've been using a gaming laptop as my daily driver for almost a year now. It's a Dell Inspiron 15 7000 Gaming Laptop with an i5-7300HQ and a GeForce GTX 1050 Mobile. It's not too bad; while I tend to avoid higher-end games and mainly stick to emulation, it does its job well. It is a bit noisy when running more graphically-intensive games such as ACIV: Black Flag.

A friend I know uses an Msi laptop, and he's told me about overheating problems he's had with it (he even had to get a cooling pad for it), so I suppose it varies greatly from manufacturer to manufacturer.

A word of caution, if you run Linux however: many of these laptops are Nvidia Optimus Enabled, meaning that they run 2 GPUs: Intel's Integrated Graphics Card, and the dedicated Nvidia GPU. If you're using the proprietary Nvidia drivers, then you're probably going to need to use a third-party program such as Bumblebee in order to get GPU Switching to work properly. I've had trouble getting Vulkan to run under Bumblebee using both optirun and primusrun, and was only able to get Vulkan working using a method detailed here. There are alternatives, however, such as using nvidia-xrun, completely disabling one of the GPUs, or using the open-source nouveau drivers, however, I don't have much experience with any of these methods, so I can't say much about them. This is especially important to note if you're going to be running games that use Direct3D11 or above under Linux, as DXVK requires Vulkan to even run. Don't know what the state is regarding AMD GPUs either.

Thanks, I'm probably not gonna dabble with linux but its good information to have

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Well then buy a sager brand laptop.

Like I said, can't really buy online and AFAIK sager don't do retail

 

[Sonic Angel Knight]

Thanks, I'm probably not gonna dabble with linux but its good information to have

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Like I said, can't really buy online and AFAIK sager don't do retail

Then what are you gonna do? Go to best buy or staples?

 

[grey72]

Then what are you gonna do? Go to best buy or staples?

Nah nah, There's a few big distributor shops that I frequent, they have pretty okay deals.
Buying Laptops here is kind of a pain TBH, eveything past a certain price everything has tons of import duty and other nonsense, retail or online and it goes as high as 50%!!!

 

[TotalInsanity4]

Any experience with Asus's customer service? Not a deal breaker, but since this is my first time I'd like to tread carefully

I'd consider ASUS to be the absolute pinnacle of PC-related products, I have never had a bad experience with them

Honestly, though, I'd completely forgo gaming laptops in general. My setup is that I have my desktop that I built, and then I have an Acer Aspire that I use to stream games to if I don't feel like sitting at my desk

 

[grey72]

Honestly, though, I'd completely forgo gaming laptops in general. My setup is that I have my desktop that I built, and then I have an Acer Aspire that I use to stream games to if I don't feel like sitting at my desk

Yeah same here, PC's are great and I would stream but I'm not in the house a lot these days, school's pretty far from home. Having my main machine in my backpack would help a ton

 

[TotalInsanity4]

Yeah same here, PC's are great and I would stream but I'm not in the house a lot these days, school's pretty far from home. Having my main machine in my backpack would help a ton

I just take my PC with me to my dorm, the entire campus is on a single network so Steam In-Home Streaming still recognizes it

 

[grey72]

I just take my PC with me to my dorm, the entire campus is on a single network so Steam In-Home Streaming still recognizes it

Don't live in a dorm, as awesome as it sounds.

 

[Deleted User]

I've basically always used a gaming laptop. Previously had a Dell Inspiron Gaming 7000 (i7, GTX1050ti). Recently upgraded to a Asus ROG STRIX (i7, GTX1070). Both are excellent machines.
The Dell has great support and was very affordable for the specs. I think the G-series you mentioned have replaced the Inspiron Gaming line so would imagine it be similar so would recommend this.