A little background

But first, a little author's background. I've been using desktop systems all my life, but when I changed my occupation from a computer, mobility was needed. And then a seemingly brilliant idea came to mind to buy a gaming laptop on which it would be possible to work in parallel. It was 2014 on the calendar, gaming laptops were no match for the current ones at that time, so a year later disappointment came. If the keyboard for printing was very good, and the display was even better than my old monitor, then with hardware and games came out zilch.

As it turned out later, the gaming version of the installed video card was much weaker than its desktop counterpart, the trottl processor did not accelerate to the promised frequencies, and the laptop itself warmed up so that it could replace the heater in winter evenings. In the summer, even the cooling stand could not cope with it, so during the gaming we had to use a custom cooling system from a pair of two-liter bottles of frozen water. It was convenient. And it looked great with the backlight.

And no kidding, the carriage turned into a pumpkin too quickly and had to be replaced as soon as possible with a modest, but quiet and relatively cold working ultrabook. Obviously, there was wild bad luck and initially not the best choice of a laptop (we will not name brand names so as not to offend anyone), and everything written is by no means a criticism of gaming laptops, but rather an attempt to show that even such an obvious thing can eventually bring unpleasant surprises.

Risk assessment: advantages and disadvantages of both platforms

Choosing between a portable laptop and a desktop PC, it is worth evaluating several important factors, and then projecting them to your use case. Do you need mobility and autonomy, do you plan to upgrade hardware in the future, how picky are you about choosing peripherals (in particular a gaming keyboard), etc. Both options have their strengths and weaknesses and can become both a solution to problems and a pain in the ass. In general, it's like comparing apples and oranges.

Portability

The laptop definitely wins here. You can drag it to the sofa and play or watch a movie lying down. You can take it with you to the kitchen or to another room, bring it to the office so as not to be rebuilt on an office PC. Or throw it in a bag and go to a network party with friends and see each other live for once. In times of a pandemic, this is especially important. A stationary PC is deprived of this feature. You can, of course, assemble a compact Cube Case, but you still need to connect it to a monitor or TV.

Gaming laptops

Display

The issue with the display is also not as unambiguous as it may seem at first glance. Even 3-4 years ago, mediocre screens with low colour rendering (at 45% NTSC), an average brightness margin and modest contrast were installed in gaming laptops that did not belong to the elite class. And the choice of diagonals is still limited to 14, 15 and 17 ". Therefore, the search for an option with a suitable combination of hardware and display turned into another quest. In contrast, the desktop system gives the buyer the opportunity to choose any monitor that his heart desires ― classic 21, 22 or 24 ", full-size 27 " or almost a 32-inch TV. It can also have a low refresh rate or elite 144 Hz, support HDR, etc.

In 2020 – 2021, the situation has changed. Lousy displays have remained the lot of low-cost laptops, and laptops for $ 1200 – 1500 most often use very sensible IPS matrices with an increased refresh rate, much more natural colour reproduction and optional HDR support. And this display is already included in the cost of the system. And you will have to pay from $250 to $1000 dollars for an external gaming monitor. Which brings us to the next point of the dispute.

Game monitors

Price

Before the crisis of 2021, a gaming PC was much cheaper than a laptop. A strong system for playing at high graphics settings in 1080p resolution with a certain skill could be assembled for a modest $400 – 600 (excluding the monitor). It would have been a classic bundle at that time of Ryzen 5 2600, 16 GB of RAM, a relatively simple motherboard, an SSD drive and a Radeon RX580 or NVIDIA GTX 1060/1660 graphics card. A gaming laptop with similar characteristics at that time would have cost at least twice as much. Now the market has gone crazy: for non–working RX580 for spare parts on the secondary market, they ask for $ 200 – 250, and the "new" GTX 1660 in most stores will cost about $ 600 - 700. If you add a couple of hundred more from on top, you can buy a full-fledged laptop with a similar level of hardware, but a mobile version of the same video card.

Peripherals and convenience

Manufacturers of gaming laptops have recently become serious about using touchpads and keyboards, using either their own developments, like Asus and Razer, or working in collaboration with other manufacturers of peripherals (like MSI and SteelSeries). And that's great. But still not as great as a big desktop brother, in which the owner is free to choose a keyboard and mouse for his needs ― with side buttons, macros, a handstand, a full-size digital unit, mechanical or membrane switches, additional controls, etc. And if something doesn't like it or breaks, you can always order a new one. In principle, you can also replace the keyboard or touchpad in a laptop, but only with an identical version. And most likely it will cost more.

Modernization

But this is one of the most interesting questions. As practice shows, the life cycle of gaming hardware is 4-5 years, after which it's time to think about upgrading. If you do not have the opportunity to take an old PC to the trash, and then go to the store for a new one, it is better to choose wisely. In a desktop PC with well-chosen components that were bought "for growth", it is easier to do this. To raise the FPS to the desired level, most often it is enough to replace the video card, purchase an additional RAM bar or upgrade the drive.

If the processor was initially in order, then after 4-5 years it is still in business. For example, the Core i5/Core i7 processors from the Coffee Lake family released 4 years ago fully meet the high requirements of AAA projects in 2021 like Forza Horizon 5, God Of War PC and Cyberpunk 2077. Well, Ryzen 2600 and 4 years after its release can be found in the recommendations for entry-level gaming builds. Unfortunately, you can't say that about laptops. Usually, the upgrade capabilities in them are limited by RAM and the ability to install a second drive. And then it's how lucky.

Gaming computers

Exposure to time


This is a very ambiguous point, which is still worth touching upon. If you have held a modern gaming laptop in your hands, you are most likely impressed by its design, thickness and weight. You can't say that about most stationary PCs, for many it's just an old-school black box that hides somewhere under the table. But what's the point. Working at maximum power in conditions of constant heating negatively affects the performance of iron, therefore, laptop components living in darkness and cramped conditions may lose their performance earlier than expected. Especially if you do not regularly clean the dust and do not update the thermal paste. Of course, a desktop PC also needs to be taken care of by periodically blowing the case, but in general, desktop hardware is in more favorable working conditions.

Efficiency

Anyway, a desktop computer will be more performant and more stable than a laptop with "identical" hardware. Laptop manufacturers have to walk on thin ice, balancing between performance, cooling quality and battery life. It remains to go to tricks, limiting the voltage of the video card or reducing the frequency when overclocking the processor. Therefore, there are practically no variants with Core i9 or Ryzen 9 chips on sale, because there is no point in this. Firstly, you will need to build a hefty case with a pack of radiators and coolers so that the filling does not boil, and secondly, the battery charge will come to naught in the blink of an eye. You can, of course, attach an additional stand for cooling and a super power bank for additional charging, but then all mobility is lost.

However, laptop hardware ― this is such an interesting question that it is worth talking about further.

Are the video cards exactly the same here?

Radeon graphics cards are extremely rare in laptops, so we will talk exclusively about NVIDIA products. And here's the thing. Previously, the Greens had a clear division into the desktop and mobile segment. Mobile cards received the Max-Q prefix, which signaled lower clock speeds and lower power consumption than full-format video cards. But the GPUs were the same.

With the advent of the Ampere family cards, the situation has changed, and there is a smell of deception in the air. As it turned out, despite the identical names, mobile and full-format video cards now used different GPUs. For example, the laptop GeForce RTX 3080 is based on the GA104 graphics processor. The same GPU is used in the full-format GeForce RTX 3070 Ti.

At the same time, the desktop GeForce RTX 3080 is based on a more high-end GA102 processor. Consequently, the mobile GeForce RTX 3080 can not keep up with its older brother in any way ― in most tests in AAA titles of RDR2, GTA V, DOOM Eternal and Cyberpunk 2077, the difference in FPS can reach from 50 to 80%! That is, they are not brothers, at best distant relatives.

But NVIDIA marketers went even further, and let the fog in, breeding many versions of the same video core. In fact, the name may be identical, but in fact the video cards may differ markedly from each other ― for example, the frequency of the mobile RTX 3080 can range from 1245 to 1710 MHz, and the TDP level is in the range from 80 to 150 watts. Is it worth saying that a full–fledged model, which by status is supposed to consume 150 watts, will be much faster than its counterpart with a limit trimmed to 75 - 90 watts?

And it does not become fun at all from the fact that laptop manufacturers are not required to specify such parameters in the characteristics, so before buying you will have to look for this data on the official website, and if there are none, hope for geek reviewers. That's the right of surprise. And we don't even know what to say about it. It is obvious that marketing has defeated common sense, and people who unknowingly compare these video cards are actually being deceived.

In this case, in order not to buy a pig in a poke, the laptop should either be much cheaper, or its video card should be a rank higher.

What about the processor?

Intel and AMD have been practicing a similar approach in recent years ― when switching to a new architecture, they first release desktop processors, and after a while they roll out a mobile line. For example, the desktop Ryzen 3000 series came out in the summer of 2019, and in the winter of 2020, their mobile counterparts Ryzen 4000 series arrived on the shelves.

Despite the difference in the name of the series, they use the same Zen 2 architecture, the same number of cores and a similar frequency formula. However, due to the need to regulate the power consumption of mobile processors, nominal frequencies are often reduced, turbo boost is limited and sometimes the amount of cache memory is cut off. Therefore, the older processor from the laptop series is usually inferior in performance to its lower-ranking desktop counterparts. If you don't know this, then you might think that the conditional Ryzen 7 4800H is higher in the AMD hierarchy than Ryzen 7 3700X. But this is not the case.

Yes, they have the same number of cores (8+8), the same number of transistors, and a common architecture, but the similarities end there. In nominal value, the Ryzen 7 4800H operates at a frequency of 2.9 GHz and accelerates to 4.2 GHz, while the Ryzen 7 3700X starts at 3.6 GHz and accelerates to 4.4 GHz. Well, most importantly, the amount of cache memory in Ryzen 7 4800H is already 3 times less - 12 MB versus 36 MB. The graph on top shows that, depending on the type of load and the specific programme, the difference in performance between them is from 10 to 25%.

In addition to the results in synthetic tests, it is important to understand that they also behave differently at a distance. The mobile processor does not pull on the role of a marathon runner, who holds the maximum bar for a long time during automatic acceleration. As a rule, when heated, it will start throttling and will reset frequencies. And how quickly this happens depends on the laptop's cooling system. Desktops with serious cooling systems are out of competition. In general, this whole passage means that you should not expect identical results from them, focusing only on the "last name" of the processor or the number of cores.


Also on sale you can find super-fat–free ultra-scientific versions of desktop processors with an extremely economical TDP of around 15-20 watts. Most often they are marked with the letter U. For example, Core i5 10210U or Ryzen 7 4700U. Compared to desktop chips, they have even more reduced cache volume, fewer transistors, weaker overclocking and much more modest performance. Therefore, they are completely unsuitable for games.

Conclusion

With all that said, you can better understand why direct performance comparisons of gaming laptops and desktop PCs don't make much sense. A laptop will never be able to demonstrate the same stability under constant load, and its overall performance will always be less. How much less is a question of a specific configuration and price.

Most often, in the low-cost segment with GeForce GTX 1050 level graphics cards and mid-level builds with conditional GTX 2060, the difference in performance can be easily outbid by the lower price of a laptop. But in the case of hi-end systems, everything is much more complicated. Even in conditions of a shortage of video cards, the RTX 3080 system system will work much faster than an "identical" laptop, and with some luck it will cost even cheaper.

Well, returning to the topic of this article, there is no universal answer that it is better ― a gaming laptop or a stationary PC in principle does not exist. This is an individual question. But we hope that knowing all these nuances (especially the labeling of processors and video cards), it will be easier for you to approach the search for the optimal option.