"The Best Gaming Laptop" - 2024

gaming laptops are confusing right now there's a ton of options to choose from and a lot of those options are super expensive but then to make matters worse the marketing around all this stuff is just extra complex like there's all this talk about like Ai and just it's way more convoluted than it needs to be uh I'm going to break this down into a fairly simple video I should hope uh in front of me are a bunch of the laptops I actually think I have most of the noteworthy devices that are available for 2024 right now we're going to go through all of them but before that I want to talk about a few things so just the higher level details when it comes to like the GPU and the CPU options that we have as well as how they affect a purchase decision but let's go in okay gpus they are single-handedly the most important factor when it comes to how good the performance of your laptop is going to be with games and the good news is that last year's gpus so like the 40 series that launched last year are the same gpus that are available this year this chart here shows how the currently available gpus roughly stack up so the older RTX 30 series gpus aren't actually that far away from the newer 40 series stuff in terms of just raw performance so we do find like a cheaper or deeply discounted 30 series gaming laptop it's still a great pickup the AMD laptop gpus available right now are also good but unless you can get a really good deal on them you just tend to get better value with laptops equipped with Nvidia gpus right now the other thing to keep in mind is GPU wattage so that's basically how much power you're feeding into gpus so typically when it comes to a GPU the more watts you feed it the better it performs and with older generations of Nvidia gpus like the 20 series and 30 series you could absolutely have like a mid-tier GPU like an RTX 3060 that would outperform a laptop that was running an RTX 370 if the 3060 was given enough juice but on the 40 series gpus it's not like that the 4050 4060 and 470 gpus all cap out at around 100 or 105 Watts anything more than that is a complete waste despite what some companies will try to tell you but the RX 4080 and 4090 those still scale quite nicely with extra power so if you have a system that can take advantage of that extra wattage you'll see the best performance there the other component we got to talk about is the CPU so CPU Choice does dictate the size or the form factor of your system because CPUs are the have the biggest differ in terms of like how much power they consume right now so we have the classic Intel Core H processors like the i7 I9 those are powerful but energy hungry and then we also have amd's ryzen HX CPUs these are also really powerful but also use a lot of energy and we also have amd's ryzen HS CPUs these tend to be a little bit more energy efficient but then new for this year are Intel's core Ultra processors so these have a new architecture and they are also geared towards Energy Efficiency now any of those four chips will give you great gaming performance but if I was trying to choose between them the way I'd break it down is this don't sweat over the CPU the graphics chip is so much more important for gaming performance but if you want a system that has better battery life or you want a quieter system or you want a cooler running system I would go for an AMD ryzen HS chip or one of those new Intel Core Ultra chips those excel at those metrics but if you want the best possible performance like the best CPU performance like if you're not just doing gaming and you want want to do uh like video editing or just workflows that lean on CPU then and only then would I get one of those core I9 or ryzen HX chips because those just run hotter now in terms of the generation of Chip there isn't enough of a difference in performance between generations to be choosing a laptop based on that despite what the marketing would tell you uh the other thing amd's ryzen chips and the Intel Core Ultra chips do have internal gpus like they're not amazing they won't give you the highest frame rate but but in a pinch if you want to save battery life or whatever you could use the internal gpus and get decent gaming performance all right let's go through some devices so first up we have Lenovo with their Legion lineup these laptops have been consistently awesome for the past like 3 or 4 years they used to suck horribly like seven years ago they used to truly suck and then something happened they got they got awesome so up top we have their Legion 9 this is forged carbon fiber this looks super sick uh the internals haven't changed much like it's just 14th gen chip in there so it's not too much to talk about same thing with this product this is their Legion Pro 7 awesome device but just a chip drop so I'm not going to dig in but this device is their new one this is the legion 7 all new design all new form factor completely redesigned thermal system and well first of all the color it's white it's already winning and then you pop it open it's even more white so it's winning even more there is something really nice about the overall package on the new Legion 7 this year I like the thermal design I like the screen I like the design also the keyboard like this is arguably one of the best keyboards in the industry it is Lenovo they do own the ThinkPad IP so this is basically like ThinkPad keyboard on a gaming laptop which is really nice the one thing that was kind of interesting to me though is that all of lenovo's Legion lineup right now still uses the core i7 and core I9 chips like the higher wattage higher heat chips so obviously Lenovo trusts in their thermal systems get rid of that heat but I'm surprised there's no like core Ultra chipped laptop like maybe in the future they'll make something that's a little bit thinner even this thing is like fairly thin but I don't know I would like to see something that actually takes advantage of that lower Waters chip from Intel coming out of Legion all right next up is Asus they have their stxs lineup this has been updated to the new 14th generation chips from Intel the higher wattage like the core i7 core I9 stuff but the rest of the product hasn't really changed much I want to to focus your attention on these two guys the G14 and g16 so these are I think the most interesting laptops that uh Asus makes this year what makes them special for me first of all is the screen so this screen is an OLED panel and it's just so nice it's redefined what I've kind of viewed gaming laptops to be first of all the one on the 14 in is 120 HZ the one on the 16 in is 240 HZ and it's just like everything just pops on this thing it's OLED high contrast really fast refresh rate super fast response time these things have less than a millisecond response time and if you look at the footprint of the G14 it is actually super small if you compare to the g16 like it is so small yet has such awesome performance coming off of this thing so the chip that's inside the G14 is the AMD ryzen chip the one that's in the chip that's inside the g16 is the Intel Core Ultra chip but both of them are great performers the other thing speakers both of them have awesome speakers the G14 in particular has a surprisingly good set of speakers on a 14-in device when I measured it this 14-in speaker has the same kind of acoustic capabilities as the ones on the MacBooks they're that good it's like I think the only one out there the only Windows gaming laptop that can hit to the same kind of audio quality as Mac comes from this thing right here uh love the white color way obviously now the darker color on the G 16 remember this thing is running the uh core Ultra chip this also looks awesome it's just so good giant trackpad now there's a few disadvantages or kind of things that I don't love about this particular product the first thing is that the RAM on both these devices are soldered on you can't upgrade it which is especially sucky for a gaming laptop secondly the power adapter uses a proprietary connection which I don't love seeing like I wish so badly that this was just some kind of High wattage USBC that they've been able to pull off but seemingly they can't do it yet uh the third thing that I don't love about it is the price these are more expensive than the G14 and g16 from the previous generations obviously it's a much thinner and more elegant design it's a lot more premium product but this thing starts at like 2100 bucks for the 14-inch model and it just goes up in price granted the screens awesome the entire product awesome but super high price tag right now Razer also launched some new devices now the 14 and 16in blade showed up in studio a little while ago but I didn't make dedicated videos on them simply because the performance is so similar to last generation very little has changed other than some chip drops so I wasn't going to waste your time making you watch a dedicated piece on that but this top one the 14in uh it doesn't have a new screen but the GPU that's inside here is actually a slightly more powerful version than the previous generation it's still an RTX 4070 and it's still 100 140 Watts like that extra wattage that Razer likes to throw onto it uh so the wattage hasn't changed but somehow they've able to make this thing higher performing now when I ran some benchmarks on it it does seem that this thing clocks a little bit faster than the previous generation and I think it's simply because it's able to sustain a higher wattage this is super sweaty but it's like the 2024 version the 14-inch blade hits about a 100 Watts maybe like 105 Watts sustained the previous generation hit like 85 Watts sustained it's a noticeable difference in kind of sustained energy consumption and I think that's why it's able to run a little bit faster that's the 14inch blade now under oh look at that skin dude um okay so this is the new 16-in blade 14th gen Intel chip like the I9 but the screen on this thing it's the St of the show look at this thing well you can't even tell but it's glossy and it is one of those 16-in OLED panels now this one in particular I think is the best gaming panel on the market it's better than the one that we saw on the Asus g16 but the reason why it's so good is because this particular panel has been tuned in conjunction with Samsung it's just the fastest one e it's got the fastest response time and it's super fast refresh rate it's just like literally the goat of gaming laptop screens the only thing that I think it could improve on is just brightness if this was a little bit brighter I think this would be literally the best possible screen you could get on gaming laptops I can't even imagine this technology getting any better it's just that good I really think that like it's it's awesome plus this is my favorite skin on the razors uh okay the 18in so this also has that 14th gen Intel chip it's just a chip drop but this is the first laptop in the world with Thunderbolt 5 so if high bandwidth external devic is important to you this is the first device to be able to do it now Thunderbolt 5 has a ton of bandwidth so you you can connect three external 4K displays all running at 144 HZ it's just if that's what you're looking for if you want to be able to have that kind of uh external connection right now this is the device to do it but overall the Razer devices I mean they're pretty solid year- on-ear and I think of all the 14-inch devices out there the 14-inch blade tends to be the highest performing just because they put a lot of effort into their cooling uh but their stuff is super expensive if you've ever wondered why I think ultimately Razer can charge that money because no one else really builds systems quite like this and I've always said that if you're the only person building a machine that's like this technically you can charge whatever you want because no one else does it all right next up is Dell's XPS lineup and these are not marketed as gaming laptops whatsoever so I contemplated whether or not you should include them in this video but in the end I decided to because these always have a place in my heart as like gaming capable the very first Performance Machine I ever bought like a gaming capable machine was like the 2016 XPS 15 and I loved it and this is way better now uh in terms of just like gaming capabilities it's got a kickass screen so these now have 120 HZ refresh rate screens they're awesome to look at I love the lattice keyboard like this is a really strange looking keyboard at first but if you play if you want to play games on it it's very comfortable the trackpad is like that invisible trackpad so you can move the the curse around but then it just kind of like disappears on the edge and the function key are non-existent they're like built into the kind of invisible display at the top it's not really a display but it's just like a bunch of LEDs that change so there's a lot of stuff that makes it not gaming friendly but gaming capable and if you're someone that's like drawn to this product because you like the way that it looks I don't blame you dude I've been there so that's why it's in this video now the thing to keep in mind is that because both of these products are geared for I guess they're meant to be like elegant premium products right they're not high performance machines as like the as the main goal these have a lower wattage GPU compared to the rest of the high performance machines and because of that you don't have the best possible performance now I think that for a lot of kind of light to moderate gaming this is more than capable and it really is one of the best looking performance machines you can get in the Windows laptop space especially with this nice white white color uh but if the top tier performance is what you're after then this ain't going to be it just because the lower GPU wattage also I must say the fan noise on these two devices is not as quiet as I was hoping I'm not sure why like the GPU wat isn't super high it doesn't pull a ton of uh Power also these now have been updated to the core Ultra chips which are less energy consumptive why are the fans still super loud I don't know they are built like tanks though the these are really sturdy and durable like the bottom panel has zero Flex on it it's like crazy how strong these things are and the hinges as well are just super tanky but again they're not built uh or marketed as gaming laptops but they have uh gaming capabilities the XPS products are very expensive though but if you get them at the right time every year you can get them with some pretty aggressive discounts so like just before the Christmas season or like Black Friday and stuff this stuff usually goes for like 203 sometimes 40% off and that's like the only time I really feel like it's worth buying them but you got to get the stuff on sale otherwise you're just you're overpaying for kind of a premium product Dell also has their Alienware lineup which is some actual gaming laptops this is their x14 and their x16 these have just had a chip drop like the new generation of those chips so nothing super exciting but I have to say the x16 is it impresses me every single time I look at it so the thing that I find most interesting about is that they still still keep the whole Alienware theme and that whole brand going with like the Unique Designs and the hexagon patterns while still cooling this particular product really well the x16 is arguably like the best product that they make I really think it's cool plus the glowing trackpad like come on dude this this thing just bangs now the new product for this year is their M16 R2 now this right here is the M16 R1 the one from last year but this one is their new one and the first thing you'll notice is they there like a massive change in size you see this whole like tail it's gone on the new M16 now the reason why they're able to remove a huge chunk of that laptop it's obviously a smaller device now is because it's got the new chip this now runs the core Ultra chips instead of the core i7 I9 stuff that was a lot hotter so the good thing is that they've made this product a lot smaller the bad thing is that the cool capabilities of this device are significantly reduced as you can imagine just removing that amount of like right look at the size difference right it's a huge amount of laptop and thermal capability that is now gone so yes it's smaller but the bad thing is that because of that reduced cooling capability this device now has fewer configurations the old one could go like 4050 all the way up to 4090 now they only have 4050 4060 407 70 configurations and the reason why is because you just can't cool as aggressively with this system now I think this product it's still good in the sense that this is a cheaper product it's a lower price point which is nice uh I think that for the kind of a average person that just wants an Alienware device this is probably a better fit than the M16 R1 but this is no longer special laptop to me this does not have the cooling capabilities of the R1 the fans are louder the product just feels less unique it feels less Alienware if I'm being honest this product just feels so kind of generic it it doesn't it's not special anymore it does have some rgbs it's got the whole Alienware look but it doesn't have the cooling capabilities that alien Wares should have and I feel like if I'm being honest I feel like this is not the direction they should have gone obviously they they know better than I do is like how to run that business but I think that this is a step down from the R1 from last year so if I was trying to decide between them if you can get the M16 R1 at this point for like a lower price point sure it's bigger and heavier thicker but I think it's a better laptop we also have some Acer devices that showed up this is the Predator Helios Neo 16 and this is the Predator Helios neo4 the 14 is really interesting to me actually to be clear these are not retail units this one is an engineering sample same with the one below so I can't do proper testing on it but the first thing I noticed is that this device is actually a little bit thicker than what I would have expected for a product of this class so this is if you can see uh it's fairly kind of like catch it there it's kind of like a regular gaming laptop it's not like a super thin one but it does use one of those core Ultra chips so I was expecting you know maybe they got to crank maybe they can crank the performance with the GPU this does have a 125 watt GPU this is running a 4070 and from my very limited testing which I don't even let's let's not call it testing from a very limited sampling this is a very high performing machine for 14inch device but uh I can't I can't give any conclusive uh commentary on it but it does look nice and does feel like the this is classic Acer Predator I like it and a fortune device from them is pretty cool the 16-inch this is not like brand new in terms of the product category they've had a 16-inch product for a while but I think the design language is a little bit different this year uh and does have like that light up logo that I've always liked the right it's almost like a Decepticon logo I think it's cool uh no OLED screen at least not from what I've seen but it does seem like a really solid overall product from Acer with my limited testing on this device okay last up is the HP Omen transcend 14 and this is the first 14-in game gaming product I've seen from The Omen lineup it's not super small like it looks very small and compact but when you compare it to like let's say like a the G14 from Asus the G14 is smaller despite having the same kind of 14in screen but what makes this one really special at least to me is its price point it is a lot less expensive than most other premium 14-inch gaming laptops so this thing starts at I think like 13400 bucks uh I also really like the screen this is not touch it's just a glossy panel there's no like matte diffusion layer and I've always loved the look of this like colors pop the blacks are just a little bit blacker when you have no diffusion on it and I'm a big fan of it now the keyboard is a little bit strange it's just like it's got that white bezel run and let me just kill the back lighting so you can kind of see the it's got that white trim around each key but I think it types nicely and it's great for games it's just a little bit strange looking and it allows the colors or like the back liting to just pop through which I think is neat if that's what you're into but you always kill it if you don't like that like or you don't like that light um okay the one thing you need to know about this product though the disadvantage is the GPU wattage so this is a relatively low powerered RTX 4060 that's in here I think it goes up to a 4070 but it caps out at 80 Watts that's with Boost so the performance isn't going to be top tier but I feel like by trimming down that GPU wattage they don't need as beefy of a thermal system on the inside so they can lower down the price to make it more accessible but also it makes the system a little bit quieter this is just a quieter running system compared to any the other 14-inch gaming laptops that I've shown so I do feel like there's got there's room for something like this right it's a little bit cheaper it's not as capable a system but I just think that for a lot of people's kind of entry into the small gaming laptop space something like this is a really good fit um but yeah this is the only h product I have right now there is a vicus I've had some other stuff but I'm like not really worth showing I feel cuz just chip drops um okay I want to wrap this video up with a conversation about pricing so right now all the stuff I've shown you has been like super expensive products and I don't think the the the point I'm trying to make here is that I don't think people should be going out and buying all these crazy expensive laptops that I've shown because the best pricing when it comes to gaming laptops usually comes from older devices but primarily older devices when they're like refurbed or on like massive sales and the thing you got to look out for is like every one of the brands that I've shown you well most of them have good sales Razer doesn't uh their pricing just kind of stays pretty consistent but the three big ones that go on sale the novo massive sales pretty frequently uh HP decent Dell SL Alienware has big sales occasionally but it's just you got to get the stuff on sale otherwise you're just paying for stupid premiums just because of the timing of when you bought it now The Benchmark to me was this product right here the Asus tough a15 this was available for ,000 a Best Buy and it got you an RTX 470 with high wattage it had great configuration options with a good screen wasn't like super bright but really color accurate and the fact that you could get that product for $1,000 like that kind of gaming capability for just 1,000 bucks that's the gold standard now I recognize that that's not available every day right that was a sale product very limited time but the fact that that product could be achieved for that kind of price point like that's where you want to aim for as Clos as you can get to that kind of value the better uh so I think that once you go like beyond, 15600 bucks you're no longer in that value range it's just aim within there go for 40 60 4070 I feel like that's like the kind of the Comfort or the value zone of where this whole product line is okay hope you guys enjoyed this video thumbs if you liked it subs if you loved it see you guys next time

Channel: Dave2D

Views: 898,906

Keywords: Dave2D, Review

Id: gWF342u6joo

Length: 23min 28sec (1408 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 22 2024