By Liyo Kikon
HAVING a gaming laptop with desktop grade performance is no longer a dream, they’re finally here! Thanks to the GTX 10 series graphics cards, we can finally buy one of these bad boys in a couple of months or sooner. A lot of companies like Alienware, Acer, Asus, MSI, and others have joined the master race for building the ultimate gaming laptop.
Everyone in Nagaland faces the same problem with electricity and if you own a desktop gaming machine, you need to have a massive battery backup for uninterrupted gaming but with these gaming laptops, it will solve the electricity problem and also give you great portability at the same time. Now, one thing to remember is that these laptops are not going to be cheap, most of them will cost around 1-2 lakhs or more but hopefully, with more competition and given enough time, the prices will drop quickly.
So, what can you expect from such a laptop? The answer is simple - a portable powerhouse. Yes, it has been proven that they will give you desktop grade performance and you will be able to play any game you throw at it with the settings maxed out. But that’s not all, most of these laptops are going to be sold as “VR Ready” which means that it will fully support Virtual Reality titles using headsets such as Oculus Rift or HTC Vive. The whole industry is moving towards virtual reality and having a ‘VR Ready’ computer will prove to be useful in the future. As for the current games, even the most demanding titles like Overwatch or Doom will run smoothly without any problems on high settings. I’ve seen demos where high end games run at 100 frames per second on a laptop in HD resolution and Ultra settings! We can only gawk at these kind of performance and dream about owning a portable machine like this, but this dream will soon become a reality, as long as you can beat the downside of spending a small fortune on such a machine.
And even if you are not a gamer, you can use these laptops for other heavy work such as video editing, 3D, or others. The biggest advantage with using a gaming laptop for work is that these laptops are designed to work well under pressure and they will run any program with ease. Take for example a 3D artist who has to create a model and render it out quickly, the high end graphics card in these laptops will handle a huge amount of polygons in the 3D model and the artist will be able to navigate around the scene smoothly which does not happen if the graphics card isn’t good. And once the scene is complete, the rendering will process faster since these laptops are equipped with a powerful processor and the same thing goes for a video editor, imagine being able to edit 4K videos easily. I know, for those of you who are not into video editing, it may not sound like a big deal, but any professional video editor will tell you that editing a 4K video can be impossible on an average system.
But like the title says, these are the ultimate gaming laptops and they are built to ensure that you get high performance with even the most graphically intense games. You will easily be able to get anywhere from 60-100 frames per second or even more on all the games and generally you can get anywhere from 3-8 hours of battery backup depending on the laptop. With a ton of choices coming up from the best companies, the laptop I’m really looking forward to is the new Alienware series which looks really awesome. They went for a slimmer and hinge-forward design this time but the initial testing shows that this does not affect the performance since it can run anything, including VR and obviously, they kept their signature look with the backlit and fully customisable keyboard and trackpad, it really is a beautiful and seriously powerful machine.
If you are planning to buy a powerful laptop for games or work, then I would recommend you to wait a bit for these laptops to hit the mainstream market in India which will probably happen in a couple of months because with these laptops, they will come with one of Nvidia’s new GTX 1060 or 1070 or 1080 graphics card and waiting for a little while will pay off in the long run since the performance difference with other laptops which are available right now is massive, even if the laptop has a high end card like the GTX 980. And the best part is that the 10 series graphics card are indeed desktop grade, which means they will blow most of your friend’s desktop setup out into space.
