Looking to buy a 15" or 17" gaming laptop for my son. Budget is £1k. Looking at what is on the market right now I'm seeing RTX 2060 spec'd units going for around this budget but also a couple of RTX3060 ones? Not up to speed with the tech but I assume the 3060 is better?
I have an HP Omen 17" that I bought in December last year which is i7-10750H and full fat RTX 2060 based and it runs the latest games without breaking sweat. Any advice or suggestions for another laptop of similar performance would be very much appreciated!
Ta.
£1k budget is just a bit short of the better machines which are sitting in the £1100-£1400 bracket with the higher wattage 3060s or 3070s at the moment but there are still decent options.
As always cooling and thermal efficiency is the dominating factor in maintaining performance. Asus TUF/Rog, Acer Predator and Lenovo Legion seem to be performing well this year.
You can get the Asus F15 TUF (ref FX506HM-HN014T) with 95w 3060 and i7 11800 for £1099 or £1200 here at ocuk.
https://www.overclockers.co.uk/asus...-intel-i7-11800h-gaming-laptop-lt-2eg-as.html
It's a mixed bag at the mo with both thin and light gaming laptops and some normal sized opting for the lower wattage 3060 or low wattage 3070. It doesn't mean bad performance but there can be a fair disparity.
I needed to prioritise portability and battery life over gaming power.
For that reason, I went with the Asus TUF Dash which has the lower power draw i7 11370 processor and 85W 3060 @£929.
It doesn't seem to come across too favourably in some of the media reviews but they are looking at it from a gaming laptop perspective rather than portability office based productivity that holds its own in games. Also there seems to be an anti 11370 sentiment atm that is missing the purpose of this cpu.
The claimed 16 hour battery life (non gaming) is genuine although I have typically managed 10-13 in heavy daily use mixed with web, office and productivity tasks. It is also totally silent in productivity use. The fans don't kick in at all.
You can even game on the silent profile and maintain sensible temps but it does limit fps by virtue of restricting power draw, even plugged in.
Performance wise, it benches on par with my Acer Predator Helios i7 10750 with full 2060 that I replaced with this.
https://www.overclockers.co.uk/asus...-intel-i7-11370h-gaming-laptop-lt-2dj-as.html
You can also get the Lenovo Legion 5 with R7 and 3060 for £999 too. My money would have gone on this had I not needed more portability.
Overall, from my experience and collating all the reviews + benchmarks recently even the low power notebook 3060s and cpus are comparable to the full power notebook 2060s.
Thus you can't really go wrong with a 3060, especially given your current set up and expectations.
Caveat emptor; it's difficult distilling and discerning a focused result against the backdrop of published gaming laptop reviews currently, which all seem to expect i9/r9 3080 class leading fps performance all the time as the only meaningful attribute.
