Why I Won’t Buy A Gaming Laptop

I accidently hit my phone against my Macbook Pro screen and cause a thick screen tear on the right side. A week later the bottom half of my screen started flickering. The laptop is still useable and I can still see most of the screen but I don’t want a partially working screen and the battery life has diminished since it drains quickly when I take it off the charger.

I’ve been researching on getting a new laptop and since I’m interested in streaming and game recording I want to switch back to PC. When I first bought my Macbrook Pro I was debating between getting a Macbook Pro or an Alienware gaming laptop. I went with the Macbook Pro simply because they had the best keyboard on the market back in 2015 and had a higher screen resolution than 1080. Writing and photo editing were more important to me back then than gaming. Writing and photo editing are still important to me but in 2019 I can get a PC with a comfortable keyboard and a 4k screen for photo editing.

My biggest problem is deciding whether to get the Dell XPS 4K edition that is great for photo and video editing but with a GPU that isn’t powerful enough to game at 4K and even if I get the 1080p resolution the refresh rate is still 60hz which doesn’t bring the full potential of PC gaming. Or, I get an Alienware PC at 1080p with 144hz refresh rate and a 2070 GPU to game on the go.

If I could go back in time I would’of bought the Alienware instead of the Macbook Pro. I spent $3,000 on a maxed out Macbook Pro and I didn’t use any of the exclusive programs on Mac or did any creative stuff to take advantage of the extra power. An Alienware that cost $3,000 is a beefy PC and I could have gamed and done a lot more with my streaming and game recording because many gaming software are dedicated or better optimized for Windows.

But, after doing much research I learned that gaming laptops are not as powerful as gaming desktops and they cost more because of the portability. There are desktop replacements like the Alienware Area 51m which is upgradable and has a desktop grade GPU and CPU installed , but that starts off at $2,000 with a 1660ti GPU. Desktop PCs with 1660ti GPUs usually start off at $700 and no more than $1,000.

For $2,500, I can get a gaming desktop with an i9 CPU, 32 gb ram, RTX 2080 super GPU, 1 to 2 tb of ram, and other specs. To get these same specs in a laptop I’d be spending about $3,000 with less power than the desktop version.

That’s why I decided that I’ll just get the XPS 15 laptop which is great for photo and video editing. I can still do some light gaming on medium settings and a downscale resolution to 1080p. I’ll probably only do Apex Legends, The Sims 4, and the like but I’ll save the AAA titles for my Xbox.

If I really want to game on PC then I rather save and buy a beefy gaming desktop. I won’t be able to play games with those glorious framerates on the go, but I’ll survive with some mobile gaming and a Nintendo Switch Lite.

I’m not even going to buy a gaming desktop anytime soon. The new generation of console gaming is coming out Holiday 2020 and I hope that the new standard would be that all games run at at least 60fps or more.