News - MacBook Air uses GeForce GPU via Thunderbolt for gaming boost

[watercooled]

Gaming laptops also tend to get monstrously hot, are large+heavy, have pitiful battery life, and just aren't a realistic alternative to your everyday laptop. Taking into account ergonomics, the need for external peripherals like a mouse in order to play properly, and the cost, I see them as a very niche product when you can get (or build) some fairly compact gaming PCs.

In terms of performance, you're essentially limited to two PCIe V2 lanes' worth of bandwidth, and I'm not sure what sort of impact the increased link latency might have, hence it would be nice to see some investigations into the matter, and to compare performance in general against some of the newer IGPs.

[GeorgeStorm]

It's an interesting idea that's been done before (in various ways) but I would almost always suggest getting a cheaper laptop then a fully desktop.

I bought my first 'gaming' laptop a couple of weeks ago due to wanting to go to various LANs this year and the cost of a car etc was just too high.
It's not too heavy or hot to be honest, and since I got it 2nd hand it wasn't too pricey. However when compared to a desktop it's a bit underpowered (660M 2gb), it does still seem to play all the games I want though.

[najiro]

Too much money being wasted here!
First rip-off is your Macbook and then this bunch of cabling and external converters ! Hardly cost effective!

It's like using Nitrogen to cool your Processor but it's not practical for all of us to cool our processor that way

same thought... better buy a gaming laptop in the first place...

[watercooled]

That's simply not a realistic solution for some people i.e. those who wish to have a *portable* laptop.

[GeorgeStorm]

That's simply not a realistic solution for some people i.e. those who wish to have a *portable* laptop.

To be fair, not all gaming laptops are big, there are more and more 13.3-15.6" laptops which are branded as gaming which would do the job.

[watercooled]

You wouldn't get the same level of performance then, it's one or the other. And they're far from being good value either way.

[GeorgeStorm]

You wouldn't get the same level of performance then, it's one or the other. And they're far from being good value either way.

I would have thought you could easily get the same performance as the setup in this article, but I haven't looked into them that much.

Obviously they aren't going to be good value, but somebody who wants a powerful, yet portable laptop should know they are going to be paying over the odds for it.

[watercooled]

More powerful GPUs use more power, more power means larger power circuitry, battery, heatsinks, fans. You can get fairly portable laptops with respectable gaming performance e.g. using Richland or some of the less power hungry discrete solutions, but for what normally sells as a 'gaming laptop', you must forgo portability.

Just throwing money at it doesn't solve the power/cooling requirements. I just meant gaming laptops aren't great value for money when compared to desktop gaming systems or other laptops.