MONSTROUS LAPTOPS
like this aren’t exactly a dime a dozen these days (despite us featuring two of them in as many issues), and with good reason. Honestly, it feels like the world of gaming sort of transcended the form factor for a time.
It’s all to do with screens. In short, monitor and panel tech became too advanced and too cheap to produce, too quickly, and that happened at a far faster rate than GPU development could keep up with. As screen resolution and refresh rates improved in an almost exponential manner, becoming more efficient in the process, graphics cards kind of went the opposite way. Performance increased gen-on-gen, sure, but as transistor count, specialist ray tracing, and AI hardware were implemented, so too did power draw and heat increase as a result. And when you’re limited to a half-inch of form factor for your cooling, like most modern laptops, that unsurprisingly has a knock-on effect on what exactly you can fit into the things.
Take most modern ‘gaming’ notebooks in the $1,000-$2,000 price bracket. Almost all of them feature some form of OLED panel or another, likely at a 2/3K resolution and usually pushing upward of 120Hz at least on the refresh. Often, they’re paired with an RTX 4060 or similar. The thing is, they’re not all equal, those GPUs. You can find RTX 4060s with TDPs ranging from 75W to 120W. The lower the wattage, the lower the clock speeds to compensate. And those decisions are made once again to optimize against thermal limits. What you’re left with, then, are gaming laptops with fantastic screens that you typically have to game on at 1080p. It’s not really what you want.