Don't spill coffee on the keyboard ;)

Make sure it has enough USB ports for convenience. Mine has 4, 2 DS4 charge cables, one USB stick and a mouse connected.

Not exactly gaming or content related, but my bro's work used to have HP laptops with integrated Intel graphics, and they've switched to MSI over the last year. They do CAD/CAM work. He used to complain a lot about constantly having issues with the HP units, and not just the fact that they were really under powered for the task they were being used for, but flat out reliability. They were constantly being repaired or replaced. I'm not sure which MSI models they have exactly, but he said they are in the $2500 - $3000 CAD range, which should be close to AUD prices. Most units have 4c/8t Intel CPU's with 16GB DDR4, and either GTX 1060 6GB, or GTX 1070 8GB. He says they very rarely seem to have a problem with the MSI units, and they run quite cool and quiet.

He has mentioned the battery life isn't great, but they are gaming grade laptops, and that certain MSI models seem to lag ever so slightly when he's programming. Apparently that only seems to happen on the units with a single stick of memory, so it could be that single channel memory is a bottleneck in his situation. Not sure how much that would impact content creation, but typically when it comes to gaming, dual channel memory is a plus. In terms of longevity, over years, I'm not sure about MSI, but I don't see too much of a reason to think there should be based on my bro's experience thus far. Gaming in general, especially AAA, will decrease the longevity of the hardware. If your planning to upgrade, in 5 or so years anyway, that shouldn't really be too much of a concern then.

I have an 8 year old ASUS laptop that's still kicking, but around year 5 it started overheating. I had to tear it down and the thermal paste and pads were dried out and hardened. Replaced them and it ran fine again. I used to push it pretty hard gaming on it quite a bit back then, and since it was only a mid tier laptop when I bought it, that probably led to the thermal issue showing up as early as it did. I just use it for emails and web browsing nowadays, but it does the job and is still very reliable. *Around year 6 the battery was degraded and I had to replace it as well.

yer looks liek there is two main MSI  models

a GS and GE

GS = slimmer quieter looks like a better battery  MAX-Q mobile design for the gfx cards

GE = bigger ventilation holes, probably louder and shorter battery (about 500grams more in weight).

Only thing I am not sure of is a  GTX 1070 in a GE is the same as a GTX 1070 in a GS MAX-Q mobile.

Form what i read in general about laptops, there are ones with desktop grade GPUS and smaller ones.

I have also seen the GT model, which weighs about double the GS and appears to use two power bricks.

So confusing lol

Wikipedia is your friend in finding these things out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nvidia_graphics_processing_units#GeForce_10_series_2

In this case, the 1070 in the GE has a significantly higher clockrate (about 300Mhz more!) then the Max-Q version, but probably also higher power consumption.

Thanks for that.

After reading more probably leaning towards this one (if it has one power brick). 

https://www.scorptec.com.au/product/Notebooks/Gaming-Notebooks/75557-GE75-Raider-8SF-068AU

Looks pretty good. Could have used some more USB connectors but hey, that's today's Laptops, can almost be happy to have gotten 4 of 'em, and USB 3.1 ones at that.

Hint: If you buy that one, wait a bit until the RAM prices drop further to add another 16GB RAM DIMM to your Laptop. That way you'll be safe for everything in the RAM department for the coming years without spending too much

As a work laptop, Dell XPS is very good. As a gaming one, I've heard a lot about zephyr and gog. Not rich enough to know from first hand experience which are good though hahaha

That's a nice unit. Good specs for the price. Like Bb said, another stick of RAM would really complete that unit. 32GB probably wouldn't be all that much overkill a few years down the road, if any, based on what your looking to use it for. When the price is right it would be a nice upgrade and would also give you dual channel, which should give you a nice performance boost as well.

Ram upgrade is def on the cards. I do that always with the laptops I get.

I kept further reading to see if RTX2080 was worth it or not

https://www.notebookcheck.net/GeForce-RTX-2070-Laptop-vs-GeForce-RTX-2080-Laptop-vs-GeForce-RTX-2080-Ti-Desktop_9551_9541_9526.247598.0.html

Not sure if $1100 extra is worth a 20% performance boost on the GPU. Seems like logic went out the window here lol.

Be sure to have enough RAM, and, as SvennoJ wrote, enough USB ports.