Depends if one has a separate gaming desktop as well, or not. I don't. So I prefer to use e.g. 1300€ for a capable gaming laptop that can run semi-recent games nicely in 1920x1080, instead of spending 1200€ to a gaming desktop PC and 150€ to a separate laptop that can't run much of any games. I can't take the gaming desktop with me to the summer cottage, abroad etc., or even easily move around in my home from one room to another, if I e.g. want to use it temporarily in the living room instead of the bedroom.

A laptop is not a tablet, I don't normally need to take it out to do something while sitting in a crowded bus. Generally it is enough that it fits into my laptop backpack, 99% of the time when it is powered on, it is taken out of the bag and put on a desktop table.

For my needs, I've decided a 15.6" laptops are generally the most optimal size. Portable enough, yet the screen and keyboard is still large enough.

Your mileage may vary of course.

I personally feel that the whole "but you can upgrade your desktop PC!" is pretty weak anyway. Maybe I can upgrade the graphics card (unless the new graphics card uses some new bus type that my motherboard doesn't have; yes that has happened to me in the past), but especially for e.g. CPU and sometimes even RAM, by the time I feel it would be nice to upgrade them, I find out it makes much more sense to replace the motherboard as well. And then it might be my old PC case isn't that suitable for the new motherboard form factor, so it needs to be replaced as well.

Does anybody have experience with external GPUs? You could left it home if not needed and still play demanding games.

Definitely! My work phone is turned off outside office hours.

Link? I think I have heard legends of such, but I haven't seen any actual reviews.

I guess it depends on the workplace, again. Luckily our customers don't know our direct work numbers (only the support number which is transferred automatically to whoever is in duty), and my bosses or colleagues have enough sense not to needlessly call me when I am not in duty.

I'd hate to have to carry around two phones when I am on duty. Like this week I do have a 24/7 duty, I get any alerts directly to my one and only phone. This also allows us to swap our duty hours on the fly if the need arises, ie. I don't need to drive 100km to get the duty phone from my colleague.

In my previous workplace, there was a separate alert duty phone that a person needed to keep with him when he was in duty. I recall numerous occasions when we went out for a lunch and then the alert duty person was like "Fuck! I forgot the alert duty phone on my desk! I guess I need to go back to the office without lunch...".

Sorry, no link I m just interested if anybody here has experience with them. I 've only read they are a thing and thats all I know about them.

They work but are kinda pointless at this time. Bandwith will limit the performance considerably on higher-end GPU's, so it doesn't make a lot of sense if the laptop has a 1660/2060. And for the price of the external GPU you can get a laptop with a 2060.
Like everything, there are special use cases.

Edit: Grabbed a link from a search, I've not watch the complete video and never watched that channel.

Do not have myself, only reading too many reviews and benchmarks. It all depends on what you compare to. Laptop processors do very much come in an amazing spread of speeds. What is good enough depends on what you need the pc for but the OP mentioned games and work. Now I do not know exactly what work OP does but for games you want speed unless you only do light gaming on the laptop.

Sure a lot of people need not worry about battery life as the pc is always plugged in but for some it matters.

For my needs a first generation low model Ryzen with integrated graphics would be more than enough but then I have a desktop for demanding stuff and this thread was about the OP's pc.

I count 7 to date:
https://www.gog.com/games?system=windows_10,windows_7,windows_8,windows_vista,windows_xp&sort=popularity&page=1&search=Worms

Wow, that "external laptop GPU" is more massive than I expected, close to the size of a real desktop PC case. I guess I was expecting it is some kind of external "mobile GPU", maybe a size of a 2.5" USB hard drive or something, but it is actually almost a full PC case where you insert a real desktop graphics card.

But I guess if the price is right... And I guess it could make sense if one really has a low-end light laptop and needs only a better GPU for it for heavier games.

EDIT: Also seems kinda complicated, you have the option to channel the GPU output to your laptop screen OR directly to an external monitor, and the latter option gives a considerably higher performance.

This would be nice, i hate this laptops with the exhaust inside the lid.
I use my laptop battery for power failure situations, it's stay pluged 90% of the time, it's not like i'm going to use it as it was a nintendo switch anyway.

Some have power supply inside the case, hence the bigger size.
If you really want to have something smaller, can easily build one yourself, based on something like a 1050Ti low profile. If neat appearence is needed, a 3D printed case can be made (can even add RGB XD). Should be good enough for those on integrated graphics and not overly expensive.

On Windows 10 is kinda easy to do, like 10 clicks, it is one of the best Win10 features (no need for dedicated drivers). On Linux should be possible, I do remeber seing a video of Level1tech about it.

The bigger problem is interface. Even a m.2 with pci are usually limited for a modern GPU and not easily accessible. USB wont work and very few laptops have thunderbolt (even less that really need the external GPU).

As a funny note, that was how to make FreeSync work on nVidia GPU's back in the day. A Ryzen APU or a AMD low end card would connect to the monitor and the nVidia card did all the heavy lifting. Once again, noyhing more than a couple of clicks on Win10.

Edit: Random idea... If anyone have a laptop with broken screen and want to build a arcade machine, or even a desktop, this is a ok setup.

Just for the record, i play games during my lunch break.

The reason i prefer a gaming laptop for work is because i have a scatterbrain boss who jumps from one subject to another to another and i end up with 50 different applications open on my computer all at the same time, and the computer gets slow and irritates me.... unless its a gaming laptop that can handle that way of doing things.

I presume he meant that also the older programs kept getting slower, and it does seem there was something seriously wrong with his old laptop if merely changing a filename within File Explorer would cause his Windows to halt for two minutes. A healthy HDD doesn't cause something like that, even when heavily fragmentated.

Yes it is true SDDs are nowadays the default mass storage device in any new PCs (especially laptops), but I am using two PCs side by side, one has a 500GB SSD and the other has only HDDs inside. Yes the HDD system is slower in starting Windows or generally with file operations, but apart from that it hasn't caused "lot of issues with various things".

From my point of view, the main differences in usage between SSD and HDD that you should maybe take into account:

1. With SSDs, maybe you should consider not using a swap file/partition at all, considering the stress it can cause to rewriting to the same parts of the SSD over and over again.

2. With SSDs, you don't need to care about "file fragmentation" anymore like you do with HDDs, it is a thing of a past there.

Come to think of it, for SSDs more modern file systems like ZFS or BtrFS would make more sense than the old NTFS or ext4, as those newer filesystems use the whole SSD (or HDD) filesystem area evenly, not constantly writing to the same sections even if you operate with the same files all the time.

This comes from the fact that those modern filesystems keep old versions of modified files in the filesystem (in case you need to revert back to older versions of some files), so they will write to unused or older parts of the filesystem even if you overwrite an existing file.

No need to explain to anyone (apart from maybe your boss if he catches you), I play some games on my work laptop as well. :)

In fact it kinda evens out because sometimes I also do work on my private gaming laptop (its Linux partition), instead of my official gaming laptop. After all, the only things I really need from my laptop to do my work are:

1. Ability to connect with VPN to our servers at the workplace.
2, A remote desktop program (Remmina works great on Linux)
3. Skype to be in contact with my colleagues (Linux Skype works great, IMHO even better than the Windows version, go figure).
4. The ability to read and write my work email (lots of options for that in Linux, I use Thunderbird).
5. Occasionally the ability to open some Excel or Word documents (Libre Office works well enough for that purpose in Linux, but then most of the time I open Office documents on that remote Windows server to which I'm connected to with RDP).

Apart from Skype, I can do all that even on my Raspberry Pi minicomputer (apparently there is no 32bit version of Skype for ARM CPU).

If a lawyer had worms and didn't wash his hands, and he shakes your hand, would you see it? Of course not. Same with on the computer, he himself would most likely not be aware of it. Unless you do support on his computer you would never find out.

Hehe, yes i know, I hate having bad habits like that ;)


You know, those ones are excellent and I personally don't mind buying used. Picked up a silver refurbished myself, a FUJITSU LIFEBOOK with i7 for almost nothing.