Gaming Laptop or Handheld?

[Vidar]

Not sure where to put this one sorry...

With a major death in the family in April, I've been spending more time in Shropshire, and with my lower limb disability and not being able to get out and about easily I'm bored being sat around with not much to do. And obviously can't bring my gaming set up with me.

I want something portable and have a budget of upto £2k but can't decide if I should get a gaming laptop or a handheld like the new Ally X a steam deck etc?

When it's not in use here, the missus will use it for gaming while we're at home. So what do you guys think?

 

[sandys]

A gaming laptop is generally better for the money, more useable but there is some convenience to a handheld in terms of weight saving that shouldn't be understated if you need it to be truely mobile but never think of them as consoles, they are windows PC squeezed into handheld package, steam Os is closest to console experience.

I have had a few handheld I like them, my daughter uses one as her main PC, docked when doing schoolwork, but it is not straight forward for gaming, you have to be happy to fiddle with settings to get good performance, when you buy one give it enough ram as iGPUs don't have deicated RAM, so you want enough for at least 16Gb system, 8Gb VRAM. I found my preference for handheld was to have one like the rog z13 or onexplayer x1 pro/air that have a bigger screen that are bordeline not handheld with 11-13" screen and detachable keyboard/controller or wireless controller.

Most gaming handheld GPUs (bar Strix Halo rog z13) are quite weak and when gaming at home on a big screen the low quality settings that are good for smaller screens don't really pass muster blown up and ideally you want and egpu to take best advantage, at this point you will likely have spent 5070-5080 laptop money for lesser performance. gaming laptops tend to be 2-3x the weight for this performance premium mind you and use a lot more power.

I'm waiting for this bad boy to replace my x1 Pro, happy to loose detachable controllers and just use dualsense controller.

Super X Preview

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onexplayerstore.com

 

[randal]

All depends on what you play I guess. I use my deck for Indie titles, RPGs or slower paced or more forgiving FPS titles.

Anything faster paced FPS, PC all day long. But I wouldn't play a lot of the Indie titles on PC - they just work better on Deck.

Horses for courses I reckon.

 

[sandys]

There was not a game I could not play on my Radeon 890 based X1 Pro, it is just a question of modest settings and FSR use, but it's nothing like a proper games machine when you pop it on a big TV you want higher graphics fidelity IMO. yup emulation or lightweight Indie stuff the Zen 5 CPU that comes with chip absolutely smashes it, not a million miles away from my 9950x3d in single core despite its low watts.

My daughter mainly plays stardew/minecraft etc on hers, here the battery last like 10hrs but put on battlefield 6 or something you have to crank up the power and you'll get 1.5hrs her old dock had a 7600 dedicated GPU in so it could game better when docked on big monitor.

 

[Teknobry]

Definitely comes down to your use case, what kind of games do you like? Also would you need the versatility of a laptop for non gaming applications, film watching etc?

Something else to consider is a VR headset, quest 3 is fully standalone and has a good catalogue of games and can be used for pcvr as well.