Gaming laptop quick-setup guide
When it comes to making the most out of your gaming laptop, there are a few changes that can turn your machine from a chuggy, clunky brick into a blazing slab of speed. Here are our top suggestions:
1 UPDATE YOUR DRIVERS
Both AMD and Nvidia tend to release a brand new set of drivers every time a triple-A game is released. If you want the absolute best performance in your games, you simply must regularly update your graphics drivers. In fact, some games may not even work if you don’t do this.
2 BLOATWARE BE GONE
One thing we’ve noticed with laptop makers is that some of them absolutely love to jam as much bloatware onto their machines as possible. They make a small licensing fee every time they do this, but it can really destroy the fun of gaming — slowing down your games or causing other apps to pop up. There are several ways of doing this. The slowest, but most thorough is to head to your control panel and then to the uninstall programs section, and uninstall each piece of bloatware one at a time. There are also applications that can do this for you — the premium version of Avast Antivirus has a performance checking routine, which discovers all those apps that are sucking down your CPU cycles and disables them.
Finally, you can type “Run” into the Win10 search bar, which will bring up a command prompt. Type in “msconfig” and a control panel will load — hit the startup tab, which will take you to the Task Manager’s start up area. From here you can see each and every application that loads when Windows 10 boots up – simply uncheck those that you don’t want to load. Be careful though — some of these are cryptically named and essential to the loading of Windows, so only uncheck the ones you’re sure of. So do a thorough clean of your laptop when you get it, and get rid of all that junk!
“Sixty frames per second is the perfect average frame rate to maintain a nice smooth gaming experience.”
3 GRAPHICS SETTINGS
Many of these new laptops come with G-Sync displays — ensure this is switched on. This means you’ll be able to have a smooth, stutter-free experience even when the frame rates drop to around 40 or 45fps. Note that this is only supported by laptops with Nvidia GPUs, and the G-Sync adds another couple of hundreds of dollars to the price of the laptop. Also, make sure the GPU is operating at maximum power mode when the laptop is plugged in, and set to single display mode (if you’re only using one monitor).
4 FRAME RATE LIMITING
60 frames per second is the perfect average frame rate to maintain a nice smooth gaming experience, but often your laptop will churn out even more frames than that. This means it’s wasting valuable resources, such as battery life, so we suggest capping your frame rate at 60. There are several applications that have this feature, and we recommend MSI’s excellent free Afterburner application for this — it’ll work on any brand of gaming laptop.
5 OVERCLOCKING
If you’re an overclocker, you might be tempted to try to crank up your CPU and GPU speeds in your new gaming laptop. However, we’d strongly advise against this... unless the maker of your laptop specifically calls it out as being overclockable. The thermal environment inside a tiny laptop is very challenging for hardware, and pushing it past the levels the builders intended can have dire consequences. You don’t want to destroy your new $3,000 gaming laptop for a possible 10% improvement in performance.
6 THE DESKTOP EXPERIENCE
When you’re at home and want a more traditional gaming PC experience, it’s possible to use your gaming laptop as a replacement for your gaming tower. Simply hook up an exterior monitor via one of the various outputs available on your laptop — this could be HDMI, DVI-I, DisplayPort or Thunderbolt 3. Now you’ve got the big-screen experience, plug in a mouse and keyboard, and you’ve got a desktop gaming PC ready to rock and roll.
7 BUY HEADPHONES AND A MOUSE
It’s a known fact that the speakers in most laptops are about as good as a set of $5 earbuds from your local service station. It’s a result of the challenge of having to fit speaker drivers into a chassis that is already packed to the brim with hardware, and the shallow depth of most laptops doesn’t give them room for the movement that a good set of drivers requires. A good set of headphones will fix this problem entirely, with the added benefit that they’ll help hide the higher fan noise that most laptops pump out compared to desktops. If your laptop happens to be a howler when it comes to fan noise, we’d even go so far as to suggest noise-cancelling headphones, which will remove the fan noise entirely.
You’ll also find that a touchpad might be fine for navigating Windows, but is utterly useless for pulling off 360 no-scopes in Call of Duty. Buy a dedicated gaming mouse to solve this. The only issue now is finding where to put your gaming mouse if you’re playing whilst on the move — thankfully there are laptop lapmounts out there that have extendable mouse pads.