Budget Gaming laptop advice.

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Stupid_Newbie

Gawd
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Dec 4, 2005
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Hello,

I’ve been out of the hardware game for a long time. I also switched over to Mac for my laptop needs. However I had my MBP overheat, and it’s acting up. So it’s going in, and being that it’s all soldiered, it may have reached its end of life.

So I’m looking for a gaming laptop. Obviously if I was playing the few games I play, on a MBP, my needs aren’t crazy. I did bootcamp for some games.

My MBP was a 2017 MBP.
I7 2.9ghz, 16GB ram, Radeon 560 4GB, 1TB SSD.

The games I play are pretty minimal. Terraria, Core Keeper, ultima online, snowrunner (rarely as I have it on ps5), CIV6. I don’t really care if they are max graphics anymore.

The applications I use for work are Bluebeam (pdf markup tool), Navisworks (3D model explorer for construction). Standard office products. Nothing crazy.

So looking for advice on a budget gaming laptop. If my MBP is fine, my oldest boy can have the laptop for school, and some games. If it’s done, I don’t wanna go down the expensive computer for a long time route, id rather just get something half the price, twice as often.

So looking to be between 1200-2000 CAN. Looking to keep it at 1TB storage. USBC PD3.0 charging would be a huge bonus. (I have a 100w PD3 adapter in truck, so nice to not have to string out charger). 15” is fine. Don’t need larger. A TB port would be a bonus, as I have adapters and dock.

Is there anything to stay away from? Should I just aim for a 3060 for longevity? If my unoptimized bootcamp ran a 560, and gamed ok, I’m sure a 3050 would be fine. Is AMD an option? Should I aim for Ryzen over i7-9?

Battery life is a concern, though not horrible if USBC/PD3.0 charging. Not as much during gaming, as office tasks. Sometimes I use it in buildings with no power, so having a short battery life is not desirable. (It’s how I decided to go to mac ages ago from my dell D630, and big HP pavilion).

A lot of rambling. The ADHD gets the best of me trying to explain stuff.

Laptops I’ve seen locally are MSI Katana. ASUS Tuf, and Strix. Most likely buying from Costco or Bestbuy (local vendors I have), staples doesn’t seem to have much.

Thanks for your time.
 
dell has some ready to ship models on sale that are in that range. if youre near a memex, this is a good deal: https://www.memoryexpress.com/Products/MX00122400
the mbp will be fine until next year or so and then apple will stop os updates for it. and when they eventually deem it too old, turn it into a straight windows machine.
 
They are about 5hrs away. Though they ship. That seems to tick all the boxes. Thanks. Didn’t see any of the GB anywhere else I looked.
 
Stupid_Newbie said:
They are about 5hrs away. Though they ship. That seems to tick all the boxes. Thanks. Didn’t see any of the GB anywhere else I looked.
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oooooh evil post count ;)
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look into it before you dive into it. i just took a quick look...
 
I have an acer predator, works great! Rtx 3060 mobile has more cores than desktop. Can play anything but it does get hot so get a solid pad if you use it on your lap/cloth surfaces.

I like the acer because I can overclock it but there's lots of options.
 
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rhkcommander959 said:
I have an acer predator, works great! Rtx 3060 mobile has more cores than desktop. Can play anything but it does get hot so get a solid pad if you use it on your lap/cloth surfaces.

I like the acer because I can overclock it but there's lots of options.
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I have seen several nitros on sale, though their price point doesn’t seem quiet right for SSD and CPU generation.
 
Stupid_Newbie said:
I’m not concerned too much with thin and light. I’d rather have some better battery life or cooling, over thin and light. I work out of my truck or a trailer at work. My MBP is/was a tank anyway.
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I agree with you here. I do not have much experience gaming on laptops but I do have a lot of experience using work laptops to run deep mathematical computation using automated scripts for long time periods after work hours. My old company gave us all Surface Pros back in 2020 and they were trying to get us to volunteer to turn in our high-performance Dell desktop workstations.

I had a Surface Pro with fairly high specs (I believe it was a 9th gen mobile i7 cpu) along with a similarly spec'd desktop PC. That said the performance difference between the two was insane. The Surface Pro would get through roughly 1/5th the number of calculations as the desktop PC over night and the back plate on the pro would be so hot in the morning that I could barely touch it. I remember arguing with my supervisor that even though these two computers have the same specs the performance is clearly not in the same universe.

I had wrongly thought at the time that the Surface Pro used ARM or some architecture that wasn't suited for deep computational analysis, however, this is incorrect. The Surface Pro was a full X64 device with a normal Intel mobile CPU, the difference in performance (as I learned on this thread) all came down to the turbo boost, power and thermal throttling as a result of significant differences in cooling:

https://hardforum.com/threads/tryin...ance-between-mobile-and-desktop-cpus.2021632/

I figure what was happening is that the Surface Pro was not only having turbo largely disabled it was probably also thermal and/or power throttling through most of the night. Meanwhile, the desktop PC was likely running at turbo all through the night with no throttling. That accounts for the differing performance and it was absolutely huge. The problem is that this difference doesn't show up on paper and a lot of companies are making decision to get rid of desktop workstations under the false pretense that the Surface Pros they are buying will perform 1:1. I am not joking when I said it was about a 5x performance difference when running 16 hours of CAD finite elements analysis calculations. I am sure that it will not be exactly the same with gaming since it is more GPU intensive, but I have no doubt that the thermal issues will present significant real-world performance differences that aren't being shown to you on paper.

I just cannot imagine using a PC that only passively cools its CPU. I mean, it would probably be fine for internet and emails but apart from applications that require very intermittent short boosts from the CPU it's never going to compete with something that has proper active cooling.
 
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