Gaming laptops round up

This year’s gaming laptops are slimmer and sleeker than ever, but do these cuts come at the cost of performance? Joel Burgess

2018 has been another big year for laptop development with chip manufacturers funnelling even more resources into making compact devices for ultra modern consumers. Nvidia announced its Max-Q laptop GPU range back in 2017, but the slightly curbed output performance has meant that they were slower to be adopted than many GPU updates in the past. That said, they’re now in full swing with early 2018 builds shifting the majority of available gaming laptop GPUs to Max-Q.

This trend means that laptops require fewer heat pipes and less intensive fan structures, which has the overall effect of slimming everything down considerably. Max-Q comes at a 10% or so peak performance cost to configurations that maintain the same tier GPU, but the reduced power and space requirements means that, in many instances, this year’s gaming laptops can level up the GPU from last year’s top of the line configurations. If you only care about the FPS then there isn’t much to get excited about, but if you find the potential to game on something that isn’t a chore to carry around appealing, then 2018 has been one of the best years yet.

What’s perhaps even more dramatic than Max-Q for the gaming laptop space is the shift from 4 cores to 6 on Intel’s top mainstream Core i7 laptop chip. Not only did this chip get a reasonable clock boost, but the extra two cores adds around 35% to raw processing performance of all the updated gaming models we tested from their 2017 predecessors. While there’s still plenty of progress in the desktop space keeping laptops from shrinking the performance gap drastically, upping the options to 6 cores and 12 threads has had a considerable impact.

We didn’t cover any of the gaming motherships here, but it’s also worth noting that 2018 was the first year Intel offered an overclockable Intel i9 CPU in its laptop range. The performance boosts were moderate at best, with many laptops simply not having the thermal architecture to push the chip much further without them overheating and seeing their Turbo speed limited, but it is a novel feature that shows there’s been a lot of love for the entire range of gaming laptops this year.

SSDs have continued to come down in price with plenty of affordable gaming laptops offering 256GB or even 512GB of primary solid state storage. NVMe has also continued to get faster with internal drives writing at over 2000MB/s, and maintaining absurd read speeds of over 3000MB/s. We’ve even seen the first Optane drives appearing on gaming laptop spec sheets.

Other than this we’ve seen vendors really lean into 120 and 140Hz screens, keeping the 4K offerings for the more professional gaming ultrabooks. This direction makes a lot more sense, since it prioritises frame rates and higher graphical settings over higher resolutions on screens that, arguably, are a little too small to benefit from 4K when gaming, and allows better matching of GPUs.

To round it out, we’ve even seen AMD throw its hat in the ring with a new integrated GPU that works in conjunction with an Intel Core i78705G, for graphical performance that’s on par with a Nvidia GTX 1050 and comes in a 2-in-1 form factor. So there’s a heap to like about the 2018 gaming laptop offering.