| Tarumon said: As far as why NOT laptop vs desktop, my take is desktop offers you the choice of a much much bigger screen much better positioned for gaming. A mechanical keyboard offers much better feedback, and no, attaching a keyboard to a laptop is unacceptable. Monitor will be 6-8 inches too far foward. |
Well technically you can get a gaming laptop and connect it to larger external monitors if you wanted to:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9ggPOkdBIY
But like you said, to get a similarly performing laptop would cost thousands of dollars more. Well really it's impossible since no laptop is as fast as a Core i7 3770K @ 4.5ghz + GTX690, both components that can easily fit in a relatively small case.
The other major downside of buying a laptop is very little flexibility in terms of resale value/upgrading. If you get a small PC case, you can always resell the mobo+CPU+ram and get $500 worth of new parts and reuse the PSU, DVD drive, SSD/HDDs, even videocard. You basically have a system that can continously evolve for the next 10-20 years at your discretion. With a laptop, sooner or later the entire thing is too slow and its resale value will probably be 1/6th of its original price in 3-4 years.
The one specific case where I understand where a gaming laptop would absolutely work is if you travel a lot for consulting work or just have to travel all the time out of home. You can then use the laptop for gaming in hotels/airplanes. In those cases, a gaming laptop is absolutely a worthwhile purchase. For occassional lap parties, I just can't see any value in lugging a laptop since a gaming one will weigh nearly 10 lbs if not more. Chances are at that point you'll be brining it in a backpack or sports bag to begin with where you can fit a small form factor case with a handle as well.
