I've yet to see any of these cards struggle to run modern 3D games at 1080p resolution, and they've let laptop manufacturers trim the heck out of their chassis.įurther Reading Nvidia Max-Q wants to make gaming laptops thinner, lighter, less fugly Every GTX notebook option from the 1050 on has delivered on promises of comparable performance to their desktop siblings.Īs a result, pretty much every recent gaming laptop we've tested in our home offices or at events has included an Nvidia card.

This isn't just limited to the impressively thin 'Max-Q' line of notebook GPUs. I would argue that it's an incredible time to dive into gaming laptops for two related reasons: flattening performance in the world of 1080p gaming, and Nvidia's seriously powerful wave of notebook GPUs over the past few years. Instead, for this Ars Technica Guidemaster, I want to take those realities into account and offer a 'state of gaming laptops in 2019' guide that will help you make as informed and comfortable a purchase as possible. The resulting landscape isn't necessarily ripe for a 'one laptop fits all' recommendation. How much worse does that get when you're stuck with a firm budget? When you buy into one good thing in a gaming laptop, you're buying into its every other element, good and bad, with no ability to swap. There's no simple way to break out and individually test laptops' big-ticket components, and singling out one gaming laptop is tough in a sector that has often suffered from bulk, heft, expense, and ugly designs.

The same cannot be said for gaming laptops. Barebones budgets, small form factors, pricey beasts: we can offer tips for each, then let shoppers mix and match those recommendations as they see fit. When building a PC, we can individually rank each component type-from CPUs to GPUs, from speakers to monitors-and aspiring builders can feel out their options for each within hearty system-builder guides. Putting together an ideal gaming desktop computer isn't always the easiest task, but at least it's a controlled kind of chaos. The ten best console racing games of all time.Staffsource: Ars staffers reminisce on the games that made them gamers.Guidemaster: The best keyboards, mice, and more for your gaming PC.Guidemaster: Finding the best gaming monitors you can buy.Our favorite gaming studios, expos, museum exhibits-in a photo blowout.Welcome to Ars Gaming Week 2019! As a staff full of gamers and game-lovers, we'll be serving up extra reviews, guides, interviews, and other stories all about gaming from August 19 to August 23.

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