One of the most challenging task for new gamers is to decide whether they should buy a desktop or laptop for playing heavy graphic oriented games. When considering a laptop there are several good and bad things that one should consider before making a purchase of notebook for games.
Positives of Gaming Laptops
Advantages: What are the good points of using a laptop computer for gaming?
- Ultra-Portability: The best feature of a laptop is that it is a mobile device, which is easily portable form one location to another. In case of gamers, they can take the gaming notebook to a tournament center or could play games at a friend’s home. For students laptops is not less than a blessing, they can travel any part of the world and take the laptop in their personal bag or lagguage.
- Compact Size: Having a full fledge computer machine squeezed down into a small notebook makes its cover less area and weight much much less than desktop computer. This makes laptop easy to handle and store in your room or your backpack. This makes laptops as very handy computer gadgets and makes life easier for the user.
- Low Power Consumption: One great aspect of running a laptop computer is that they are power conservative and does not need much electricity to run. This makes it work longer when running on a battery and secondly it generates less heat energy due to small size of parts consuming small power.
- No Heavy Cooling Needed: As mentioned earlier that small hardware components makes them run on low voltage and when computer is super busy especially the processor and graphic cards they generate small amount of heat energy. You do not need heavy cooling to keep your laptop under a moderate temperature. In some extreme gaming desktops especially custom ones, heat is so high that you need liquid coolants.
Negatives of Laptops for Gamers
Disadvantages: What are the bad points of gaming laptops for users in general?
- Expensive To Buy: One of the biggest drawback of gaming laptops are that they are not cheap like desktops. You can find cheap laptops but not gaming grade models, for those you need to spend minimum $1000 (such as Battalion from IBuyPower) and sky is the limit. A new Razer laptop named Blade is super expensive and cost around $2800. On the other hand you can find much heavy gaming desktops at affordable rates.
- No Upgrades Available: You spent bunch of cash to get your laptop for gaming, and now you regret that you cannot upgrade a hardware component especially graphic card and processor. This makes laptops are unrealistic for gamers and as the gaming industry is expanding, more heavy games are entering the market and require faster hardware components. So when you need to upgrade hardware for laptop, the only option is to sell existing one and buy a brand new.
- Popularity Amongst Gamers: Due to up-gradation issues and expensive price tags, not a lot of pro gamers use laptops for playing games, they do use them but as a secondary computer because they consider desktop as the primary gaming machine. This trend is changing with passage of time but still desktops dominates the gaming market.
- Health Caution: Not suitable for long hours of gameplay as it can negatively affect the health of the user due to staying in body postures that can lead to back or neck pain. Laptops comes with flexibility to place anywhere you want, if you check the word lap top, it means a computer that you can place on your lap! So be careful take care of your back and neck and exercise regularly.
In the last decade there has been growing trend of using notebook computers for gaming purpose, however there is a mix interest shown by computer owners in which majority still believe desktop is first choice for handling PC games whereas the price is the main factor that convince them to settle on desktop over laptop. Still for many enthusiast gamers laptop is one of the best way to enjoy demanding games. On the other hand assembling a custom game grade desktop is big pain, take a look at the ready-to-game desktops available at affordable prices.