We’re looking for an inexpensive gaming laptop? The lowest we’ve found in $699 on NewEgg. Is this a quality one, should we be willing to go higher, or just resign to a desktop for gaming? MSI CX61 2QC-1654US Gaming Laptop Intel Core i5-4210M 2.6 GHz 15.6" Windows 8.1 - Newegg.com
Thanks.
OK, let’s update this to - a 17 in screen & close to 1TB Hard Drive. So that leaves the former one behind & takes us into the 1199 range.
Gaming… laptop? Those two words don’t really go together, you know, for the reasons you mention.
Once you get all the good gaming bells and whistles, you’re looking at something that probably costs a fair amount more than an equivalent desktop would. Another way of putting is is that for the same money, you can get far more desktop than laptop in general.
For example, a 17" monitor (if you can even get one these days) might be $150, and a 1 TB SATA hard drive is under $100. I’d bet that the laptop equivalents are 2-3x that.
There’s perfectly capable gaming laptops, but they’re not cheap. It’s one of those “Pick Two: Gaming, Laptop, Inexpensive” situations. The graphics tend to be what really gets you; an i5 laptop with onboard video is cheap, one with a dedicated card isn’t. What sort of budget are we looking at? And what sort of games are you looking to play (do you need the best?)
The heat and power consumption of any decent graphics card is what makes it so hard to make a good gaming laptop. The best low-power desktop graphics card consumes something like 60 watts, others are in the 100W-200W range. Mobile graphics cards are in the 30-100 watt range (excluding integrated video). Laptop CPUs that you might find in a “gaming laptop” are in the 25-60 watt range. There’s just no elegant or cheap way to provide that much powers by battery, or manage that much heat in something that’s comfortable to carry and place on your lap.
If you’re looking for places to buy one, you can look at stores like xoticpc or iBuyPower, or you can go directly to the sites for MSI, Sager, ASUS, Gigatbyte, etc. Prices are not going to vary much, if at all, between stores, barring a sale at any given site. You should expect to pay at least $1200 for 17" and discrete graphics that will be able to handle the most recent games with decent performance. For the most bang for your buck I’d look at Sager (that’s what I bought, and I’m happy with it).
Oh, baloney.
I am a PC gamer, and this meme about “gaming and laptops don’t mix” is as obsolete as 1999.
I work in politics, as well as spend a lot of time not at home (including gaming away from home), so the portability of a laptop is a must for me.
There are PLENTY of affordable, powerful gaming laptops nowadays, both in the used and new departments. Sure, desktops are more powerful at any given price point than a laptop, but it’s not like you have to spend more on a gaming laptop than you’d spend on a used car, nor is it true that if you try to run a high-intensity game on a laptop that it will melt down/catch fire/collapse into a black hole.
New gaming laptops can be found for as little as $650. The laptop you linked to? It’ll work for gaming. It’ll handle modern games with little sweat (though not with maxed out settings with the higher-demand games, like the upcoming PC version of GTA V).
You can find great-condition used gaming laptops for as little as $500, on eBay and Craigslist and such like that. In fact, my current laptop, I found on Craigslist used for $525, in like-new condition. This model is not branded or sold as a gaming laptop (or, should I say, “was”, since Asus no longer makes it), but it has the same kind of specs as a medium-level gaming laptop, and can run the latest games on at LEAST medium settings, and many of them maxed out (I maxed out Saints Row IV on this PC). Only downside is that, since it’s not a ROG model (more on that a bit later), I have to use a cooling pad with it when I’m playing high-intensity games.
I can’t sit in one place to game (and surf the 'net, watch/stream HD video, edit photos, edit HD video from my camera, et cetera). Period. I detest desktops for that very reason.
Like I said, the computer you mentioned will work for gaming, though if you can get your hands on an Asus “Republic of Gamers” model (on eBay, find them by searching for terms like “Asus ROG”, “republic of gamers”, “Asus gaming laptop”, and “Asus gamer laptop”), that’s even better, because they have the best cooling systems of any gaming laptops I’ve come across so far. A gaming laptop that has a good cooling system is a must, for obvious reasons. The MSI you linked to, I’d recommend using with a cooling pad if you go for it. That little fan’ll need some help. 
What do you want to play, and how much do you care about tip-top graphical quality? (In other words are you happy playing on low or medium settings, or do you feel bad playing on anything less than high or “ultra” type settings?)
I have a perfectly wonderful gaming laptop (ignore anyone who says this is an oxymoron, they are approximately seven to ten years behind the times! :D) with a Geforce 840M card. I can’t remember what the latest game I play is. (I am admittedly behind the times on this myself) but it does games like bioshock infinite and skyrim at medium to high graphics settings.
For less intensive stuff (Diablo, League of Legends, Heroes of the Storm, Starcraft III) it plays perfectly well on high levels. (Not “ultra” type levels in SCIII–but the thing is every good gamer knows you’re best playing on low graphics settings in that game anyway. 
)
Mine cost $700 IIRC. I could have upped the screen resolution and storage* for an extra hundred bucks but I actually kept the lower resolution so that I could raise the graphics quality a little. (On a higher-res screen, if I play at the lower res it will look pixelated or fuzzy no matter what.)
I got mine from Amazon.
*You don’t really need a lot of storage, since almost all games are sold through online services like Steam anyway and you can just delete and reinstall at will for the cost of a few minutes time.
Only if you have a super-fast Internet connection. Having to constantly re-download games in Steam on my current connection would be like trying to cram a bowling ball through a drinking straw. 
That’s just it – newer games are jumping up in system requirements now that the “floor” is being set by the Xbox One and PS4 rather than the aged 360/PS3 platforms. Skyrim never had high requirements (it recommends a Radeon 4890!) and Bioshock Infinite recommends a Radeon 6950 or Nvidia GTX 560. Those cards are comparatively ancient. The GeForce 840M can only get 30+fps from games like Wolfenstein: TNO, Far Cry 4, Watch Dogs, Ryse, Shadow of Mordor, The Crew, AC: Unity, The Evil Within and other newer titles if graphics are set to low. The laptop linked in the OP is an 820M which is worse. Scroll to the bottom and check out the game benchmarks. Plus it has 2GB VRAM which is going to start being a handicap moving forward.
Again, capable gaming laptops exist but they cost money. I don’t know what the needs or wants of FriarTed are – maybe he just wants to play Skyrim or Borderlands 2 or Crusader Kings 2. If he’s looking to play the upcoming generation of AAA titles like GTA V or Witcher 3, he’s not going to have much fun with a $600 ‘gaming’ laptop.
You are correct in substance. The scare quotes were somewhat foolish but hey.
FriarTed, the discussion really does come down to the question of what it is you want to play, and what your expectations are about graphics quality. When you say “inexpensive gaming laptop” I assume you mean for playing older or less intensive contemporary games. But possibly you, like Jophiel and bump, are the kind of person who has ideas about what “real gaming” is. 
So what do you want to play?
Not as foolish as spending hundreds of dollars on a laptop thinking you’re getting a machine capable of playing contemporary games because people are benchmarking it against Skyrim and Saints Row IV and finding out that it caps out on last-generation titles. Personally, I’d call such a machine a “gaming laptop” in name only just as I’d call a desktop computer with a GTX 560 in it a “gaming desktop” in name only. Plays games up to 2013 just peachy, sure, but the name implies it can do more than that.
It has nothing to do with what “real gaming” is. If you want to play retro arcade games emulated on a Packard Bell with a 386 inside and call it “real gaming”, I don’t give a flip. It’s about an unrealistic level of performance being implied by calling a machine a gaming laptop.
Exactly.
At the core of it, there are two reasons why “gaming laptop” is a silly term.
There are usually large compromises to be made to pack all the required stuff into a laptop, and those compromises both reduce performance and raise the price. For example, a 17" monitor is pretty pitiful… I haven’t even seen one of those in the workplace for 15 years now- 21" is the bare minimum. And they tend to have 1 relatively small hard drive; I have something like 4 terabytes of disk space in my desktop, while the gaming laptops I’ve looked at have a 1 or 2 TB hard drive. That’s it, and all you’ll ever have- see the next point.
Laptops tend to be rather static hardware platforms. You can’t just go swap out your “gaming” laptop’s video card a couple of years down the line for $150 like you can with a desktop. Nor can you get a bigger monitor, or add a hard drive (usually) etc…
That’s not to say that a given “gaming” laptop may not be a powerful machine, but if you pay say… $1500 for a MSI GT Series GT70 Dominator-2293, and you get a 17.3" screen, an Intel core I7, 8 gigs of DDR3 RAM, a 1 TB hard drive, and a Nvidia GeForce GTX 970M. Not bad at all.
But in 3 years, if you want to upgrade it to play the latest games, you’re looking at another $1500, while a similarly spec’ed desktop might only cost $500-600 to upgrade the parts that need upgrading. And in another 3 years, another $500 would see you where you want to be, while the laptop would need replacement again.
To use a personal example, I last seriously upgraded my desktop in late 2013, and if I wanted to play Evolve (coming out soon, and with fairly high system requirements), all I need to do is get a newer video card ($150-200), as mine’s like 4 years old. That’s it. Had I got a “gaming” laptop in Nov. 2013, it most likely wouldn’t meet the specs, or would barely meet them if I’m lucky, with no room for upgrades.
I would call a “gaming computer” one that can play the current generation of games and up-coming titles on at least default/medium settings. For a laptop, this means a minimum 850M or 860M video processor which puts the laptop in the $900+ range. If you want to play the stuff on higher settings, bigger screen, etc then you’ll be paying more. You might find cheaper with AMD components but they tend to run hotter and, for a laptop where you can’t add more cooling beyond putting it on a fan pad, I’d stick with Nvidia.
This is excluding the occasional Crysis, (original) Metro 2033, GTA IV or other poorly optimized game that just refuses to run well on anything less than a beast upon its release.
Moving from IMHO to Game Room.
That would certainly be a silly thing to do, and I wouldn’t assume FriarTed would make that mistake based on anything written here.
“Inexpensive gaming laptop” describes these kinds of machines perfectly. As has been said repeatedly in the thread, though, it all kind of turns on what FriarTed himself meant by the phrase.
Zero of the things you said support the claim you opened up with that “gaming laptop is a silly term.” They support the claim that gaming laptops are more expensive than gaming desktops. But then, no one would have disagreed with that claim.
So: You’re actually arguing for a claim no one disagrees with, but trying to sneak in an impression that you’ve instead argued for the (actually indefensible) claim that “‘gaming laptop’ is a silly term.” Your declared intentions don’t match the outcome of your actions. This invites one to speculate what you’re really up to.
I disagree. We have a post here saying:
This is factually incorrect. It pretty much won’t handle any new AAA releases with an 820M. Forget “maxed out settings”, it won’t play them on minimum settings. Likewise:
…is misleading since Saints Row IV is based off the Saints Row the Third’s engine which is four+ years old by now. But that’s the comparison being given to support what a good gaming computer it is.
This isn’t about “real gaming” or elitism or whatever you think it’s based on here,. I disagree with Bump that the term “gaming laptop” is silly (I’ve said several times they exist, they just cost more). It’s just based on giving FriarTed accurate information on what modern games will require from a laptop and what that’s going to cost. Two years ago, I’d agree that people saying you can’t have an inexpensive gaming laptop “are approximately seven to ten years behind the times” but things have changed in the past year or so with the new consoles and the laptops running marginal tech just don’t cut it any more for new titles.
It would appear I am two years behind the times myself.