5 YEARS OF GAMING LAPTOPS TESTED!
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2018-05-06
·
1,181 words · ~5 min read
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every time we post a video about x-cool
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gadget or why most expensive tech
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there's a huge influx
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of comments asking us to do a build guide for a super budget system or like
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a cheap laptop roundup and typically i
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respond with uh no that's boring
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but today today is a different day we're going to
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be looking at the evolution of the thousand-ish gaming laptop over the last
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five years and if you enjoy it quietly
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without any complaining origen's gonna give away an eon 15s at
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the end okay okay
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before we begin let's set the scene each of our five
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laptops some of which were actually kind of difficult to obtain was priced at a
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thousand ish dollars when it was new and has what we would consider
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typical notebook graphics for the time
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we have representatives from five Intel architectures sandy bridge ivy bridge
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haswell sky lake and finally kb lake in
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the currently shipping origin pc eon 15s
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starting on the outside build quality at this price hasn't really changed much
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almost all of our competitors share a decent build typically sporting a hybrid
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plastic and metal finish on the exterior deck flex is basically non-existent
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since the thin and light gaming machines that suffer from this are usually much
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more expensive and both screenflex and
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typing induced screen wobble were acceptable save for the lenovo y510p
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whose screen's front glossy plastic is reminiscent of a 300
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best buy special i'm really glad that whole thing went out of fashion speaking
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of casings we've actually done not too bad in that department our three newest
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pcs all have almost entirely black exteriors aside from some red accents
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while the sandy bridge and ivy bridge models are just about the furthest thing
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from a gamer aesthetic that you can get it's safe to say that i wouldn't shy
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away from taking any of these into a business meeting again the more out
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there gamery aesthetic seems to dominate the higher end gaming skus
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onto screens then my eyes have become so
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accustomed to ips and high ntn panels
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that these older budget offerings induced what i call
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a splitting first world problem headache
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every laptop we tested features
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i mean i guess features is kind of a strong word here a tn
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garbo edition screen with the exception
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of the eon 15s to be clear that one isn't the most
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amazing panel in the world but the falling costs of ips displays overall
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has driven a huge improvement industry-wide in the day-to-day
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usability of value laptops gaming and
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otherwise and full hd 1080p resolution
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is a nice touch what a wonderful segue
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who could forget about gaming laptops and their historically completely gross
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tastic touch pads we actually sort of lucked out on this one every unit we
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tested has what i would describe as a decent track pad it's no macbook or
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razer blade but none of them are at that deal breaker level connectivity is
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pretty strong throughout especially as we get newer and newer the hp elitebook
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we picked up even has a full-size displayport connector on the side along
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with eseta so that was kind of weird and usb3 first enters the spotlight with
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haswell and thank goodness for that i was even a little surprised to find that
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not only the eon 15s but also the MSI
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gl62 have usb type c as well not to
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mention that every one of them has an Ethernet port it's actually kind of
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funny to see how the trends that i spend so much time complaining about like the
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reduction in i o on computers aren't really affecting this segment battery
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life isn't really accurately measurable on used laptops due to degradation but
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we ran pc mark 8's battery life test anyway it simulates a light office
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workload and to represent an average battery saving setup the brightness was
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set to 50 percent and power profile to battery saving mode the results were
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mostly unsurprising although origin xeon 15s scored a pretty respectable almost
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four hours i guess that's where the power efficiency of each new CPU
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generation comes in but none of that is really the point of our investigation
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these are gaming laptops after all you didn't think we were gonna forget about
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benchmarks did you silly goose for games
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we chose one game from each year starting with when our first laptop was
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released 2012. so we loaded up borderlands 2
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bioshock infinite dragon age inquisition rise of the tomb raider deus ex and
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ghost recon wildlands on each laptop
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performance in this sector has for a
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long time been underwhelming kind of
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like no man's sky except more like
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no man's frame rate even in the older titles like borderlands 2 at medium
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settings the older laptops barely crack the 30 FPS barrier that is until you get
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to the modern origin eon 15s this thing
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completely wipes the floor with the other systems and for good reason
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previous iterations of value gaming
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laptops often used mobile variants of
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contemporary gpus like the MSI with a
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gt940mx and the y510p with a 755 m these
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m gpus from my personal experience were
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less likely to get driver updates and more likely to cause system stability
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issues and crashes even when they did
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have enough power by contrast current gaming laptops like our origin pc system
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have full fat desktop graphics cards in
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this case a 1050 ti that specs to pull a
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whopping 70 watts at load with all the long-term support that comes with a more
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streamlined product lineup so it basically comes down to this battery
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capacities haven't changed much and neither has build quality from our
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samples but creature comforts like displays have improved by leaps and
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bounds and as for graphics cards both performance and reliability have
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improved dramatically while on the CPU side power consumption especially during
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basic workloads has improved to such a degree that it's no longer true that a
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gaming laptop has to be unsuitable for
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other tasks so hopefully you guys stuck around
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because like i said before origin pc is giving away one of these bad boys not
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this one this one's mine but you can enter to win yours at the link in the
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video description it's us only so keep that in mind while entering and good
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luck so thanks for watching guys if you disliked this video you can hit that
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button but if you liked it hit the like button get subscribed and maybe consider
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checking out where to buy the stuff we featured at the link in the video description also down there you can buy
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a cool shirt like this one at our merch store or join our community forum and
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talk tech with all the members of the LTT community