Desktops are better in almost every aspect by a longshot. They’re fully upgradable, can adequately cool the components, and deliver like twice as much power to the processors.
Not my experience, at least for a long while. I give away my old laptops as hand-me-downs, and the one I got with a 1070 on it is still in operation, as is the one I got to replace it. The contemporaneous 1080 I was using at the time is in a box gathering dust.
Maybe I had bad luck with brands but none of the gaming laptops I had or used seemed to stay in good shape for more than a few years, while my PCs last over a decade.
The sample size is always going to be very small, even without accounting for things like purchasing habits or type of usage, so beyond the light trolling of this thread it’s hard to tell.
I will say that desktop pre-builts are more likely to need some tweaking than gaming laptops, in my experience. The last one I had needed a new case unless you like your CPUs well done instead of medium rare and the one before that was an Alienware that needed a full motherboard replacement halfway through its lifetime (I know about the Alienware thing, but hey, they did send a guy to my place to swap that out, so there, overpriced, overengineered garbage justified).
When I went back to a self-built desktop I ended up with a temperamental motherboard that doesn’t like my RAM on XMP on some slots but does on others, and there is some weirdness about the fan curve I can’t quite figure out. It’s all a crapshoot.
Gaming laptops are harder to troubleshoot by yourself, but on the plus side they tend to be handled on RMA, since they are a self-contained unit. Depending on whether you think that’s more or less convenient your mileage may vary on their resilience, I suppose.
I definitely don’t hate desktops or anything, but there was the meme of telling people to not buy gaming laptops for a good long while, even from very knowledgable people, even well past the point where gaming laptops on all price ranges had become very competent and versatile. The pet peeve is more with the repetition of the meme than anything else.
As much power as a microwave oven, as it turns out. In the form factor of a microwave oven, in fact. Even though gaming laptops will give you most of the performance for a fraction of the wattage.
Fully upgradeable is nice in theory, but in practice I’ve had just as many upgrade cycles where it turned out one component or another had updated their standards causing a chain reaction of buying an entire new computer. Oh, your CPU socket changed? Well, I guess it’s time to update your motherboard as well. What do you mean, you need a 1000w GPU with a different cable to go with that GPU? Oh, that new RAM standard? Yeah, physically different. So about that new motherboard…
Desktops are better in almost every aspect by a longshot. They’re fully upgradable, can adequately cool the components, and deliver like twice as much power to the processors.
Gaming laptops are perfectly usable but they don’t tend to last nearly as long as a good desktop.
Not my experience, at least for a long while. I give away my old laptops as hand-me-downs, and the one I got with a 1070 on it is still in operation, as is the one I got to replace it. The contemporaneous 1080 I was using at the time is in a box gathering dust.
Maybe I had bad luck with brands but none of the gaming laptops I had or used seemed to stay in good shape for more than a few years, while my PCs last over a decade.
The sample size is always going to be very small, even without accounting for things like purchasing habits or type of usage, so beyond the light trolling of this thread it’s hard to tell.
I will say that desktop pre-builts are more likely to need some tweaking than gaming laptops, in my experience. The last one I had needed a new case unless you like your CPUs well done instead of medium rare and the one before that was an Alienware that needed a full motherboard replacement halfway through its lifetime (I know about the Alienware thing, but hey, they did send a guy to my place to swap that out, so there, overpriced, overengineered garbage justified).
When I went back to a self-built desktop I ended up with a temperamental motherboard that doesn’t like my RAM on XMP on some slots but does on others, and there is some weirdness about the fan curve I can’t quite figure out. It’s all a crapshoot.
Gaming laptops are harder to troubleshoot by yourself, but on the plus side they tend to be handled on RMA, since they are a self-contained unit. Depending on whether you think that’s more or less convenient your mileage may vary on their resilience, I suppose.
I definitely don’t hate desktops or anything, but there was the meme of telling people to not buy gaming laptops for a good long while, even from very knowledgable people, even well past the point where gaming laptops on all price ranges had become very competent and versatile. The pet peeve is more with the repetition of the meme than anything else.
Oh, they can deliver plenty of power, for sure.
As much power as a microwave oven, as it turns out. In the form factor of a microwave oven, in fact. Even though gaming laptops will give you most of the performance for a fraction of the wattage.
Fully upgradeable is nice in theory, but in practice I’ve had just as many upgrade cycles where it turned out one component or another had updated their standards causing a chain reaction of buying an entire new computer. Oh, your CPU socket changed? Well, I guess it’s time to update your motherboard as well. What do you mean, you need a 1000w GPU with a different cable to go with that GPU? Oh, that new RAM standard? Yeah, physically different. So about that new motherboard…