Gaming Laptop

[acctingman]

Hello

I'm wanting to switch to a gaming laptop and ditching my desktop PC, but I've never owned a laptop and I'm not sure what specs I should be looking at. I know laptops are not very (if at all?) upgrade-able.

I don't play games that require high end graphics cards. I play WOW and mainly WW2 strategy games.

My budget is in the $1200-$1400 range.

I'd appreciate any suggestions.

Thanks

 

[Aikouka]

I know laptops are not very (if at all?) upgrade-able.

In most laptops, the best that you can change are 2.5" drives and any mSATA, mPCIe, or m.2 cards. The latter would include SSDs and WiFi/BT cards. In some laptops, the CPU is socketed, which means you could change it, but that's becoming far less common.

So, the big question is... do you care about weight/thickness? Do you care about noise? It's important to note that as you go up in graphical processing power, you can usually only get one of two (weight or noise). I'd say you're probably best off looking for a GTX 1060 laptop.

 

[acctingman]

I don't mind it being a little heavy or thick. 95% of the time I'll be at the kitchen table or on the sofa with it.

Noise isn't a huge issue, but I don't want it too loud.

Thanks for the tips

 

[DigDog]

a laptop is never a good substitute for a desktop. you can still make do, but i have some questions for you.

1) why laptop?

hmm, that's it.

see, most people don't actually need a laptop, and can do with a tablet, which then syncs to the desktop they have at home. laptops have several limitations, including price-performance, that desktops do not have. the only problem desktops have, is that they are not portable. but most laptop owners i know, do not actually "portable" their laptop anywhere, they basically just move it from the living room to the toilet and back.

 

[acctingman]

It's a space thing. I want to be able to game on the kitchen table/sofa

 

[Stg-Flame]

From experience, my buddy opted for a laptop because he wanted to game in bed and on the couch, but he wasn't able to get used to the trackpad on the laptop and wanted a mouse, which removed the possibility of gaming properly in bed or on the couch.

Take into consideration what type of games you're looking to play and if you are fine with being tethered to a wall socket. If the types of games you are into require a mouse or controller, you might want to just look into building a high-end rig and hooking it up to your TV - that way you can still game on the sofa with a controller or at the kitchen table with a wireless controller (assuming it's within eyeshot of the TV).

 

[DaveSimmons]

I'd go insane trying to play anything except maybe turn-based games using a laptop trackpad instead of a mouse.

If you hooked up the laptop to your TV then maybe you could use a wireless keyboard with trackball, or one of those lap desk holders for KB + mouse (lapboard).

 

[Stuka87]

You're going to take a huge hit in performance going from a desktop to a laptop. You will still need a mouse for a Laptop, so you still have to be at a table, and you wont be able to use it on your laptop unless you like your legs to be very hot.

but outside of that, you should be able to find a laptop that can run WoW at that price point. Alienware, Razer, HP, few others all have machines with discrete graphics in that price range.