Gaming laptop?

[delicate drum]

My partner is planning on buying a gaming laptop, is the MSI Cyborg 15 any good? Or are there better things for similar budgets

[peak heron]

Do you need it for portability, such as you don't have room for a desktop, you move a lot or otherwise?

A gaming laptop sounds nice, but it is terrible price to performance ratio. A desktop for the same price will be significantly more powerful, even with the same GPU. The laptop will also have a max battery life of 20-30 min during gaming, maybe 1.5h of standard use, and will probably have loud fans too.

If you can get a desktop, get that instead (it's also cheaper to upgrade with second hand parts, replace broken parts etc)

@delicate drum

[split viper]

#1106613567966429224 or either of the tech chats

this channel is for tech issues not general discussions

[delicate drum]

it’s for school, but also for gaming. she’s going into film production so rendering videos is a large part of why she’d need a more powerful laptop

[eager inlet]

I'm gonna be honest, I wouldn't recommend an MSI laptop, I've had tons of problems with the 3 I've had.

[delicate drum]

what brands are more reputable for gaming laptops then? would something in a similar price range (1500-2500aud) by alienwear or asua be better?

not looking to custom build anything, just best prebuilt laptop on the market

for that price range

[eager inlet]

I have no idea, but I'd recommend against MSI

[sudden thistle]

try lenovo

their gaming laptops are relativly ok

[prisma girder]

With my gaming laptop, I could get around 6h of watching video out of it when it was new and gaming lasted for just under an hour

[peak heron]

You either had hybrid graphics or this is bs (for video watch time). The math is very easy, a top tier (pricing) gaming laptop with have a battery of 99Wh or less, while the tdp of their gpu is… I think it’s up to 145W with the most modern vapor chambers. Add on cpu, display, RGB keys etc and it is drawing a maximum of probably 170W or more. That is just over half an hour of gaming at peak performance even with a brand new battery. While normal computing will use much less power, it is still going through the gpu and going to be using probably 20-40W between everything (educated guess). That is ~2h - <5h of video, and I would bank on that actually being around 2.5h at best.

Maybe if this was a very, very old computer with a weak gpu i could believe that in its entirety, but modern laptops are becoming increasingly powerful without increasing battery size. This means shorter battery life, and if your laptop is stationary and constantly plugged in as a result, what’s the point?

[prisma girder]

Gaming laptops heavily limit their power draw on battery. My laptop featuring a core i7-10750H and a GTX 1660Ti can draw a combined 140W on CPU and GPU plugged in, but when I unplug it, the CPU gets hard-limited to 25W and the GPU gets hard-limited to 30W. Though my laptop draws around 13W from the battery at idle when the GPU is off and the CPU is only drawing 3W with no RGB lighting. Gaming laptops aren't gonna pull 200W from their battery. For the video playback time, I actually stated that from personal experience from dropping x% after watching an episode on Disney+

[peak heron]

They can use some tricks, such as hamstringing the gpu when on battery power, but ultimately that is reducing the power draw slightly without solving the root problem

[peak heron]

This sounds like we need an LTT video: How long does a modern gaming laptop last on battery