TRUE GAMING LAPTOPS
Many doubted the day would come when laptops could finally take on desktop PCs when it came to gaming performance, but that’s just what the latest generation of mobile GPUs do.
There was a time not too long ago when we would have argued against buying a gaming laptop. Big, bulky, expensive and underpowered, it usually worked out cheaper to buy a cheap work-focused laptop for getting your stuff done on the road, then buying a small gaming rig separately for playtime at home.
How times have changed, especially this year. It’s now possible to buy a gaming laptop weighing just a couple of kilograms, yet delivers the gaming performance of a dedicated gaming machine. One thing that hasn’t changed, though, is price — a good gaming PC is still a rather scary proposition to your wallet.
Gaming laptops now come in three main varieties based around size — 13-, 15- and 17-inch units. The smaller machines tend to be less powerful, while the huge 17-inch slabs often come packing twin graphics cards. One thing they all tend to suffer from is a woeful battery life. When you’re running hardware this fast, it churns through batteries within a couple of hours. The other main difference between a normal laptop and a gaming laptop is the graphics processing unit — in many other ways, they’re identical, with a similar CPU, amount of memory and storage. But slap a GPU into a laptop and, suddenly, it’s able to process the demanding 3D graphics demanded by today’s games. It’s this reason they cost so much more — firstly, the GPUs aren’t cheap. Secondly, they tend to run hot, so the builders have to create complex thermal solutions.
The good news is that today’s gaming laptops are available in much smaller form factors, and Nvidia’s new GeForce GTX 10-series mobile parts can deliver gaming performance on-par with your desktop. Just be prepared for some serious cash expenditure in the process...
HOW WE TESTED
All of the laptops in this roundup were tested identically. This began with the installation of the latest drivers of the day, Nvidia’s GeForce Game Ready Driver, version 375.70, which is WHQL certified — note that not a single laptop included an AMD GPU. We then ensured the GPU driver was set to maximum power mode, single display, G-sync and V-sync disabled. We then used 3DMark’s Fire Strike benchmark, which runs at 1,920 x 1,080. While several of the laptops in this roundup supported even higher resolutions, the clear majority are only 1080p, so this was the resolution used for testing.
Next up were two real-world game benchmarks, Grid Autosport and Metro: Last Light, both at Ultra settings (though SSAA was disabled for Metro: Last Light). The first is known for being relatively easy-going on laptops, while the latter used to bring most laptops to a screeching halt — as you’ll see, though, the latest generation of Nvidia GPUs handle it with ease.
PCMark 8 Home is used to test basic non-gaming application performance, and we ran this in the accelerated Home test. Finally, we used CrystalDiskMark v5 to test the performance of the primary hard drive, as the main SSD can be one area where these laptops differ markedly.
We also tried to run the PCMark 8 Home Battery test, but due to the plethora of different pieces of bloatware installed on many of the machines, we found that it failed around 50% of the time. We could have removed this bloatware, but we wanted to show how each machine performed out of the box, exactly as a buyer would find it — the only reason we updated our GPU drivers is because some samples were a little older than others, and thus had older drivers.
“One thing that hasn’t changed, though, is price – a good gaming PC is still a rather scary proposition to your wallet.”