What laptop to buy?

[Mono]

I am currently in the market (can wait a maximum of 4 months to buy) for a new laptop and am having trouble with the current offerings.

This laptop will be used for a few things.
1) 2D Game development and low poly 3D game development. (UE4)
2) Main driver for my day job - Virtual machine running SQL BI Stack and data analytics tools.
3) Casual gaming

Main sticking points at the moment:
* 4k vs 1080 vs 1440 - I have never used a 144hz screen but have been told its great to play on, this however does not lean well for my work and game design (4k or 1440 is better here).
15" or greater. Where are the new laptops sporting a faster than 60hz high res screen? Is this just not achievable at the moment?

* Fan/ cooling sound is a big issue for me. I do not need a hovercraft taking off while I execute code at work or do a bit of game dev while sitting with the other half (some laptops have been super loud in the past)

* I don't mind a heavy laptop but would like a semi portable one 17inch might be better to manage thermals

I liked the Razer laptops mainly due to the understated appearance (will be fine at work) but cannot get any details regarding how loud these get. I presume most 17" laptops cool better (rough rule of thumb).


I am also open to egpu setups (as long as the gpu on the laptop is enough to deal with game dev work on the go.

Has anyone been though similar recently and have some insight perhaps?

 

[Dynix]

So I've had a few Razer laptops in the past: Blade 14 (2014), 4k Blade Stealth (2017) and another 4k Blade Stealth (2018). The '17 Stealth developed a fault and was replaced with the '18 one.

I currently use my Stealth for relatively light dev work and general surfing and have been considering ditching my desktop for a while. My needs are very similar to yours - web/game dev, will be my 'daily driver' for work (VS/SQL) and allows gaming at a decent rate (though I don't play AAA games) and just bit the bullet on the new 4k Blade 15 2070 RTX which ticks all the boxes for me - decent CPU/RAM (will be upgraded to 32GB)/GPU, looks great and is portable enough. I'll be keeping my current 4k monitor and hooking that up to it also.

There's little reviews on these as they're only just getting into the wild, but if reddit is anything to go by then a few people seemed to have slightly underclocked and undervolted their CPU on last years model just to keep things in line a little better. I've got a delivery time frame of 1-2 weeks so can't provide any more insight into how it works until then I'm afraid!