I actually remembered one more advantage, which is kinda related to the "space" that someone also mentioned:

Keeping several PCs, including your older PCs, around.

So I mentioned already the case where I might want to play Team Fortress 2 with my son in the same room and desk, side by side, so that we can see each other's screens if needed, and talk easily to each others (without talking to any of the other players online using microphones). Yep, very easy with laptops.

But I remembered I also have kept most of my old laptops, either giving them some new life for some specific purpose, or just keeping them as secondary PCs around for anyone who might want to use them, installing Linux on them and using as a small-time server, whatever.

Sometimes you might have older games that play better on Windows XP or 7 than the newest Windows 10, and you'd want to keep your previous PC(s) with those older OSes and older hardware for such games. Much easier to keep them if they are your older laptops, rather than your older desktops.

My oldest laptop is an ancient IBM ThinkPad T41 laptop (it has some very old ATI mobile GPU), and it still works fine to this day, running Windows XP and Windows 98SE side by side. I have played some older games on it that had issues on newer systems, e.g. Heavy Gear 1-2.

In the past, I have tried to keep my older tower desktop along with my newer desktop PC, as a retro-gaming PC, but it was quite messy and cumbersome, and they did take lots of room. I had separate monitors and keyboard for both etc.

I get the impression that among desktop PC users, keeping your older PCs around is not that common. Either you update components in one PC, or replace it completely with a new desktop PC. Keeping around two, three or even five desktop PCs, preserving your old PCs as long as they work, is not common. I think you also mentioned you replaced your older water-cooled desktop PC with a totally new system, right?

I just counted that I have four laptops in the household that get some use and work fine, and one more which would probably work if I replaced its hard drive, but I haven't tried to revive it yet.

Like I said, apart from portability, what other pros are there to gaming laptops? We already know the extensive list of cons.

This has nothing to do with gaming on a laptop.

I don't know you and your previous/current rigs, but this to me tells me that either a) You don't play any demanding games b) you don't game on a gaming desktop c) you don't play demanding games on a gaming laptop.

It is a fact (rooted in simple aerodynamic physics) that bigger fans are not only more effective at cooling, but thus operate at lower rpm's and noise levels to achieve the same cooling. If you then also go watercooling, the required noise per cooling/heat output drops further. Gaming laptops have limited cooling ability at default with tiny and noisy fans, and you usually have to add external cooling to help out, exarcebating the whole noise issue. They'll overheat regardless at full load and thus throttle, but before that they'll make sure you can hear it!

This has nothing to do with gaming on a laptop.

I'm just curious, have you owned both a gaming desktop and a gaming laptop side by side though, like others, and me? Or is this just "For me, this is best, because this is how I have done it for years and don't know any better"?

The ordeal of laptop gaming is the hotter, louder, slower and more expensive gaming compared to a desktop. Futureproofing with upgradability is also a big plus. These are the cons I have listed quite a few times now, that people seem to gloss over.

And that's fine, if you like to move the place where you game. I'm not sure OP falls under that category, or others, so really it should be mentioned how much inferior laptop gaming is when that is not a consideration. I feel it sometimes gets glorified as 'it's fine' or 'it's not so bad' when in fact it's quite bad compared to the alternative.

Hardly the PC Master Race vs console peasant continuation wars going on here ;)

Informed decisions are best, people are just chiming in with their experiences. You have yours, with your priorities like portability, and if the OP doesn't care about that yet wants a slower, hotter, louder and more expensive gaming rig with few futureproof upgrade paths still, then let him go for it. He might even be happy with it, not knowing how much greener the grass is on the other side.

Nope, I don't. I always play my games on the best possible system/location... within my budget. The 65" TV here isn't better than my 27" PC monitor because of the distance that you sit from it. Bigger is only better until a certain point - would you like to sit 20 cm from a 10m wide 8K projector screen?
Good sound is really important to me... I bought my first decent speakers ages ago, and I've never played on anything less since then. I don't like headphones, so I don't use them (for gaming of course - listing to music on the bus is another matter).

And here I was thinking that we were having an interesting conversation, sharing different points of view. I didn't read anything here that should be taken personally.

You can actually get a USB to Ethernet (doesn't have to be USB-C) adapter for around $15 or even less.

(Also, while less practical, you could find a device with device side USB, configure it to act as an Ethernet adapter, and get a local network going that way, but you generally aren't able to do that with common hardware. (The Raspberry Pi Zero and 4 are able to do this, though note that in the 4 the host side USB port needs to provide enough power to power it unless you have some other way of powering it.))

(Also, random fact: On many Raspberry Pi models, the Ethernet port is actually a USB-Ethernet adapter internally.)

It also depends on what games you're looking at playing. There's plenty of games that will run on a sub-$300 laptop with Chromebook tier specs; I sometimes game on such a system.

Had not thought of mentioning it, but this is so true.

A lot of people look at me strange when I suggest, "Buy an off lease workstation."


But at least I'm not suggesting you haul an AIO or Micro around.

True... but for some reason that colleague of mine was unable to get such adapter to work reliably, when he was supposed to test our updated router (by connecting his laptop to the router and pinging and whatever).

So he came to borrow my work laptop for that testing, as my model had an actual eth port. Not sure why the adapter was not working for him, was it just some driver conflict or whatever.

Interesting, I didn't know that.

Is the performance supposed to be the same as with a "real" RJ45 port? I've been trying to figure out what is the bottleneck on my Raspberry Pi4 for some high-speed downloads, as in many cases I seem to get considerably lower download speeds on it than my "real computers".

I think even the online tests like speedtest.net give slower performance there, but then I am unsure if it is somehow related to using external USB HDD for storage (also the root partition; but then I think even mere USB2.0 speed should be much faster than what my theoretical maximum internet speed is?) or something else...

It is a generic observation that whenever someone says in this forum that they've decided to buy a gaming laptop and want help in choosing one, there are always people who try to convince him not to buy a gaming laptop at all (even if he has already clearly decided to do so, for a reason or another).

I see it as a similar as the people who try to convince PC gamers that gaming on PC is just stupid when you can play games on consoles "much cheaper" and easier using your big screen TV. Maybe that is true, but I still prefer playing games on PC for various other reasons besides just "cost" or "ease of use" or "staring at a small PC monitor" or "I sit in front of my PC at work every day, and I definitely don't want to sit in front of a gaming PC at home" (I've never understood why that is an issue to some, but not me, but whatever...).

Then again, I am not annoyed by explaining over and over again why I choose to play on laptops instead of desktops. I am just somewhat annoyed by those "please don't buy a gaming laptop, you will regret it!" claims in these discussions, over and over again. And no, not specifically pointing to you either.

To each his own, right? Now, I guess it would be different if someone was asking "I've been thinking whether I should buy either a gaming laptop or desktop", then we could have a more meaningful discussion of pros and cons of both. The same if someone was wondering whether he should buy a PS5 or a gaming PC.

I was commenting on your claim that for my use case, a desktop would be better. No it wouldn't be, I think I know it better than you. But since you asked, I presented another pro for gaming laptops related to space.

Overall, this is not a case of counting how many theoretical pros and cons there are for each choice, and then the one which has more pros and less cons wins and is the best solution to everyone. What matters more is how much each pro and con matter to you personally. The same when comparing e.g. PC gaming vs console gaming.

Yes it does, because I play games on that laptop too, also when it is in the living room.

First of all, "same cooling" is not enough for gaming desktops because they generate much more heat than laptops. That is related to them using much more power (W) than laptops.

Another thing you are overlooking is that desktops tend to run at least most of their fans at full capacity all the time, while laptops spin them as needed. It is not like all games use 100% CPU and 100% GPU all the time.

When I e.g. recently played Horizon Zero Dawn on one of my laptops, I didn't notice that the fans would have become too noisy to be any kind of problem. Sure they produced more noise than when I am just doing some simple desktop stuff on it, but you are just outright lying with you claims that I would be hearing some kind of jet turbine next to my ear, making me deaf.

Neither seems my son mind it at all when playing Team Fortress 2 on the same laptop, right at this very moment. I just went to check and the laptop is just humming along, producing slight humming noise. And that is a thinner "non-gaming" laptop, actual gaming thicker laptops have bigger and fatter fans.

Something tells me you don't play on gaming laptops, you just have one ancient experience from one gaming laptop that you didn't like. Either you are overly exaggerating the noise level of it, or you just happened to have a lemon that had a broken noisy fan or whatever.

The higher dB of desktop systems' various fans has always irritated me more.

Yes, I still have my old gaming desktop (now used for retro-gaming), and it has always produced much more noise than any of my laptops, even in gaming use. So much that when I turn it on, I rather close the cupboard door to make it a bit more silent (but then the air doesn't circulate as well).

And I have certainly, also recently, heard other (gaming) desktops as well.

It is odd that my son (nor me) doesn't have a similar experience with your overly exaggerated claims of noisy gaming laptops. Maybe your laptop fan(s) was indeed broken.

You sound like a console gamer trying to convince me PC gaming is a stupid idea compared to console gaming.

He made it pretty clear he is going to buy a gaming laptop and not a desktop, for reasons that he didn't specify. I presume he knows why he wants a laptop and not a desktop. If he wanted to buy a desktop, he would have asked about them.

Your one-time experience with a faulty gaming laptop is pretty much irrelevant at this point, and it seems to me you are overly exaggerating how "bad" laptop gaming is, just because you want to convince the OP not to buy a gaming laptop, even if he clearly wants one.

That's true, and it happens for about any kind of subject you can think of. Being online seems to trigger some kind of "activism gene" in the population!
On the other hand - many people's choices aren't informed at all. They might've "decided" that they want a laptop because they've seen this pretty little "metal book" at a friend's house...

The Pi 4 is not one of those models; they moved it to its own connection, so it should perform better than on earlier models.

To be honest, nowadays I take a laptop for the standard, and a desktop-only rig as the extreme option that sacrifices portability, compactness and an extended afterlife (shelved but ready just in case) in exchange for just being a bit cheaper and having some extra options for updating later (not that it is better at getting more memory etc). Not worth the sacrifice IMHO. Yet the options are there for the willing. If it will never leave the same room, by all means get a desktop, probably, My little beasts go wherever life takes them. Got the first laptop, never looked back. Cheers.

That's exactly what I have been saying, but you don't realise that and seem to be looking for an argument because you have taken these things personally and the defenses are up. I wish people would stop doing that - just because you've been doing things in a certain way for years and defend it, doesn't mean your entire image and personality is defined by that and you don't need to be the grand global representative in the matter in discussions. Time to stop associating yourself with your preferences and opinions.

Unbelievably missing the point here, showcasing complete ignorance of heat outputs and cooling and pretending gaming laptops never ramp up when gaming.

The whole point is that bigger fans don't need to run at 100% rpm due to being a lot more effective. This, coupled with their design and natural physics of the matter, mean that they are much quieter. Just by basic principles. The fact that you argue against this is comical - it's like watching someone argue water isn't wet. You won't take my word for it I'm sure, and some googled results won't convince you, but look around and you'll see tests where gaming laptops frequently hit 60 decibels at load. That's loud and annoying, and whilst the frequency spectrum is also important (whether it's high pitching noise or a low hum for instance), it doesn't detract from the fact it's like a jet engine taking off to borrow your exaggerated strawman, when you game on a gaming laptop.

People compensate for this in various ways of course. I used good cans connected to an external DAC, so the headphones covered it up. Even then there is such a thing as noise pollution compounding the fact from multiple sources, especially with open headphones.

In contrast, many desktop CPU fans report 35-40 decibels at full load, some like Noctua fans going as low as 30db, which is basically background noise in a quiet environment. Couple this with the fact that there are case walls and obstacles before the sound hits you, desktops are way way more silent, considering the decibel scale is logarithmic.

Contrary to what you so desperately are spewing about noise levels, this is not anecdotal. This is measurable and common knowledge. But sure, argue that water isn't wet until you're blue in the face.

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It's absolutely hilarious that you accuse me of drawing upon dubious anecdotal evidence that's dated, when you clearly base your entire opinion based on your own experience with an ancient 'gaming' desktop. Also, thanks for assuming I'm so dumb as not to notice a broken gaming laptop with faulty fans or improperly applied thermal paste and so on. Thanks for being so condescending. No really.

Speaking of glossing over the cons of gaming laptops, you were saying, hmmm? Let me know when you want to address the negatives of laptop gaming, instead of blowing out hot air like a balloon. Absolutely nobody has addressed the higher temperatures, costs and poorer performance of gaming laptops. All I've heard is the glorification of some old farts wanting to buy the most expensive laptops and using them with some obscure edge use cases.

And nothing of the sort, like I previously said, this isn't the PC Master Race vs console peasant continuation war. This is merely sharing experiences and talking about the pros and cons of laptop gaming. I know you want to dictate tyrannically the conversation when you don't like what's being discussed and limit the conversation to some single strict topic allowing no leeway in discussion and where it leads, but maybe you can just learn to cope. It's a valuable life skill, you'll find. Coping.

This is a ludicrous misrepresentation of what's going on here, and frankly it's terrifically insulting.

You want to so desperately dismiss my real life experience, due to apparently me being so stupid as not to notice a faulty gaming laptop and assume it's my only singular experience, whilst at the same time elevate your own experience as the Gospel Truth and worth much more than my word. It's quite sickening how dishonest and condescending that is, but judging from your previous posts on these boards, hardly surprising. I mean, you even defended horrific racist slurs against Finnish minorities, I seem to remember. So sorry for applying the same logic as you now i.e., 'this man's word is worth a lot less than mine', but that's exactly what I'm going to do.

"Your one-time experience with a faulty gaming desktop is pretty much irrelevant at this point". So there. Enjoy that. With some flava beans and a nice Chianti. But you probably couldn't hear that due to the immense noise your overpriced, poorly-performing laptop is making right now.