How To Buy A Gaming Laptop | Be Careful!

All right so I was in the middle of testing and reviewing some of these new RTX 30 series gaming laptops and I realized that there was a very important message that I had to share with my audience and it's not just, for now, this is probably going to last the entire year.

Traditionally when it came to gaming laptops Nvidia's naming mechanism or naming pattern was pretty easy to follow right, like a gtx 1060 laptop was good and then a gtx 1070 laptop was better and then a gtx 1080 laptop would theoretically be the best right? And there's obviously variance between the three different classes based on the manufacturer. But a consumer would be able to identify which one should be good, better, and best pretty clearly. It is not the case anymore, there are a couple reasons I'll get into it briefly but at this point, with the new RTX 30 series you can have RTX 3060 laptops that can match or possibly outperform RTX 3070 laptops, and the reason being is that of wattage.

At this point Nvidia doesn't require the manufacturers or the OEMs to label their GPUs as like you know a max-q variant or max p variant there's none of that anymore. It's somewhat ambiguous, just the rtx3060 or the RTX 3070 and it's up to the manufacturer to choose how much wattage they pump into that GPU and that heavily affects the performance you get on those devices. Let's say you have an RTX 3070 and you pump 85 watts into it and then you have another device that's an awesome RTX 3070 and you pump 125-130 watts into it, the performance is vastly different. But from the consumer side, you have no idea what's going on. You could just see this device that has an RTX 3070 so you have to rely heavily on publications or youtube videos to discover the actual performance of these devices.

Now traditionally if you're reading this chances are you're gonna be looking to this stuff anyways, but you just need to, way more this year than any other year before. Now the knee-jerk reaction to this is right when you first see this when I first heard this I thought is this malicious? is this some insidious plan from Nvidia to just rip people off and there might be an element of marketing like it does benefit certain manufacturers? They can kind of hide their weaker thermal systems behind this new naming mechanism but there are some companies that would benefit from this.

If you're a manufacturer who consistently puts in high-wattage GPUs, now you can flex that a little bit harder. I do think that there is a real reason like an engineering reason as to why this has happened. So every couple of years when Nvidia comes out with a new family of graphics chips the wattage increases ever so slightly. But it just keeps going up and if you look at the size of like desktop GPUs if you look at the size of the 900 series to the 10 series, the 20 series, 30 series they've just gotten thicker and thicker to the point now we have like two-inch thick triple-slot GPUs that are like founders editions from Nvidia. They've gotten way more energy consumptive and also there are tools and mechanisms that you need to get rid of that heat. Desktops can deal with that relatively easily. Right, you can just throw in some fans. Laptops, they don't have that option we can't make these things bigger and if you look at the ac adapters it's not like the ac adapters on these devices on gaming laptops have gotten bigger. If you look at razer, their ac adapter has been the same size it's been 180 watts or 200 watts. I forget the exact number but it's been the same ac adapter for years.

At this point because they don't they can't change it, you can't have a 300-watt gaming laptop this size. So I think the thermal constraints or the thermal limitations of building a laptop have almost required this weird shift in how gaming laptop GPUs have to be named, there's no real easy solution to this. The only real way that it can see this being fixed and being really clear to consumers is if they completely dump the whole naming system of using the same name as the desktop chip for laptops. They shouldn't do it, it just makes it really unclear to the consumer, if you're uninformed you might think an RTX 3080 desktop GPU performs like a 3080 laptop, and it clearly doesn't because we're informed but for a lot of people they don't know that and I think that naming mechanism has become more difficult to adopt as time goes by so it needs to be changed.

But this new system like we're seeing with the new 30 series laptops, it's super confusing and I have to say as a reviewer it makes it difficult. I think you have to be aware of the wattage of every single GPU that's in these devices if you're interested in purchasing one. But yeah if you're looking to buy one be extra diligent in doing your research this year.

Thank you for reading, drop a comment if you have any confusion or suggestion. Until next time. See ya!