gaming laptop

[hunk]

Looking for a good gaming laptop. Has anyone had experience with msi laptops? Any recommendations?

[Valerian Dragoumis]

What is your budget? What type of games are you looking to play?

I'll get Albus over here. He's a tech-aware person.

[Watcher]

Originally Posted by hunk

Looking for a good gaming laptop. Has anyone had experience with msi laptops? Any recommendations?

The latest laptop I got was msi and so far so good. Really like the power and build.

[Horatio Aurelius]

Buy Alienware! /sarcasm

[Albus Passus]

Originally Posted by Watcher

The latest laptop I got was msi and so far so good. Really like the power and build.

Watcher is right. For budget gaming, MSi is probably one of the best brands you'll come across. Avoid Lenovo at all costs. Avoid Alienware if at all possible as you pay a brand premium for their name.

Keep a few things in mind when looking at gaming laptops:

1. It'll never be as good as a desktop no matter what.

2. Some games will run poorly on your laptop even if you blow the minimum required specifications out of the water as many developers, especially indie developers, don't do proper optimization for mobile hardware. The Magicka series is notorious for that.

3. You'll probably have on-board graphics as well as a dedicated graphics card if you go the laptop route. With my MSi laptop, I had to forcefully set it so that games would use the graphics card instead of the integrated graphics, so if you're having weirdly low performance make sure that's set accurately.

4. Chances are, if you get a gaming laptop, you'll end up with a hybrid drive and a free RAM slot. I'd highly recommend swapping out the hybrid drive with an SSD. Some laptops have an extra drive slot that can fit an SSD, so put two in there if you can. Laptop drives are awful and an SSD will make that bearable. With the rapidly dropping prices as a result of Samsung blowing up the market, you should be able to get a comfortable amount of space for $300~.

5. Likewise with the RAM, more is better. Many gaming laptops come with a stock 8gb which is acceptable but requirements are rising by the year. Browsers alone can often take up 1-2gb of RAM themselves. I'd highly recommend checking out how many RAM slots you have and upgrading accordingly. 12gb is an alright place to be at for now but 16gb or 32gb are in the RAM goldilocks zone and will be for quite some time. There is absolutely no downside to having too much RAM, especially with the rise (finally) of 64-bit operating systems and applications. If you're tech-savvy, you can even use some of your extra RAM to load files directly for faster processing though that's unnecessary and a bit of a hassle.

If you get an MSi Leopard and take 4 and 5 under advisement, you'll probably spend $1500~ for a laptop that will be able to run most games. There'll be some that you can only do on low (example, Fallout 4), but many games have performance mods through the Steam Workshop or Nexus now so that can ease the pain a little. Even with a budget and waiting for deals, your gaming laptop will be worse than a dedicated desktop, so just keep that in mind when looking at your choices.

[Watcher]

SSD really is the way to go. I've had laptops with different configs and by far the SSD wins out. Laptops without them end up having so many issue and run that much slower. The SSD plus a video card makes it great.

Agreed on the rest as well. RAM is a must. Get as much as you can. Compared to everything else its one of the cheapest upgrades but matters so much. If you don't have enough RAM everything will bottleneck.

[hunk]

Are ASUS ROG worth considering? http://pc4u.org/best-gaming-laptop/

[Albus Passus]

Hit-or-miss. They're awesome when they work but I've heard some pretty bad stories that many models ship out broken or with depreciated parts. The quality of ASUS is comparable or slightly better than MSi but you run risk of a returns fiasco. The one linked in that URL you posted at the top of the list is probably one of the best gaming laptops you can get without going past $3-4k. I'm too cautious to drop over $2k on something that has a reputation of often shipping not-as-described, but if you feel confident or are otherwise okay with taking the risk of needing to jump through hoops to get a replacement, the ROG is definitely worth considering.

[Colt1945]

Msi gs70 ghost. I've had it for a year and it's an absolute beast.

[Watcher]

Originally Posted by Colt1945

Msi gs70 ghost. I've had it for a year and it's an absolute beast.

Ghost here as well.