Laptop for remote desktop gaming

prankster08 · 17 Jun 2014 at 22:43

Hello

Current build
AMD fx 8350 8x 4Ghz
AMD radeon r9 290x
Samsung 16gb 1600mhz ram
Samsung 840 pro ssd

Overall a very nice machine for me to play games, do uni work and stream films.

Now I want to be able to have that power from the comfort of my bed, is it possible to have a fairly cheap laptop remote access to my desktop and be able to play games on it reasonably well, it will be over wifi.

If so, what laptop should I be thinking about? I'd like a fairly nice display on the laptop around 18', all other specs are not important as it will only be used for remote access to the desktop. are there any other considerations to take when doing this?

thanks for any advice

adolf hamster · 17 Jun 2014 at 23:46

speaking as someone with a reasonably similar build to you, i tried it with my ivy i5 laptop and it was terrible in skyrim, indeed worse than the laptop can manage on its own.

thats just standard remote desktop though, and tbh my lan system is hardly high end.

Neodite · 18 Jun 2014 at 07:33

Has there been a major advance in remote desktops that I have missed?

Because i'm pretty sure you have no chance with this

leigh_boy · 18 Jun 2014 at 08:18

remote fx....

Flying_Hellfish · 18 Jun 2014 at 10:57

Steam in home streaming?

Steveocee · 18 Jun 2014 at 12:37

Flying_Hellfish said:
Steam in home streaming?

^^^This would be as good as you will get.

RDP'ing for games will be awful, you'd be better playing solitaire on the laptop in all honesty.

Flying_Hellfish · 18 Jun 2014 at 13:08

There's also splashtop but I _think_ it only works with nVidia. If it's steam games you will be playing then you should be good to go with basically any modern laptop. Quality/latency would be dependent on your connection as well though.

Source: I have also an i3/650ti HTPC which streams games from main rig pretty well.

prankster08 · 18 Jun 2014 at 15:21

Thanks for all the feedback, this is somewhat what I expected unfortunately

i'll look in to the steam thing, not really looked in to it before.

I also thought there would be some advancement in this area but I guess it's not very popular. maybe when cloud gaming really takes off?

Actually, how about a small steam box with a external display, most of my games are through steam and I could always dual boot for the rest. Anything to be somewhat more mobile around the house would be nice.

edit: looking in to splashtop which is actually amd based

my dad has a laptop in which I can test later and let you know how I get on, also going to test how it works on my phone

d_brennen · 18 Jun 2014 at 15:27

There is OnLive, which offers free trials of most/all of their games. The line up is pretty poor tbh, and many people can't get a good enough connection. Have a play and see if it's worth it for you.

prankster08 · 18 Jun 2014 at 21:20

I'm not really looking to take part in cloud gaming myself, I just think that my machine is more than capable of doing it itself so why not make use of it.

so I got myself splashtop personal, now my dads laptop is a bit old so its hard to determine performance, its full of a lot of crap... it can run games but not fullscreen, they have to be in windowed mode, the image quality is clear, hard to tell input lag as I was using a track pad.

also, I have set up my desktop as a hotspot if I connect to that rather than the home wifi router will that improve the connection?

I will tidy up the laptop later and test with a mouse and post anything noteworthy.

also having access to my desktop from my phone is amusing however more noticeable input lag there

Flying_Hellfish · 19 Jun 2014 at 11:19

prankster08 said:
I'm not really looking to take part in cloud gaming myself, I just think that my machine is more than capable of doing it itself so why not make use of it.

so I got myself splashtop personal, now my dads laptop is a bit old so its hard to determine performance, its full of a lot of crap... it can run games but not fullscreen, they have to be in windowed mode, the image quality is clear, hard to tell input lag as I was using a track pad.

also, I have set up my desktop as a hotspot if I connect to that rather than the home wifi router will that improve the connection?

I will tidy up the laptop later and test with a mouse and post anything noteworthy.

also having access to my desktop from my phone is amusing however more noticeable input lag there

It would obviously be better with a wired connection, but if you want true portability then perhaps look at what type of wireless connection your network and laptop have. Old laptop would likely be G which could be a bottleneck.

With regards to the fullscreen thing, I think that was perhaps where the nVidia part comes in - I'm not sure if this has changed recently, but this was the position last year:

https://support-splashtoppersonal.splashtop.com/entries/23247897-Play-game-in-full-screen-mode

With regards to steam in-home streaming, it doesn't need to be SteamOS as the steam client will do do this on windows, however yes non-steam games won't work 100% - adding a non-steam game to the library has worked for some, though it's anecdotal evidence and I haven't tried it myself.