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Comment by nindalf | Hacker News Reader

This is pretty good for the people who have such laptops, but I’m just struggling to understand the use case for a laptop. A laptop that consumes that much power can’t possibly have much battery life. At that point, are you getting much portability out of your laptop? Why not just use a desktop?

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There are two use cases for laptops. The first is the normal one where you carry your laptop around wherever you go, and actually use it on your lap sometimes. The second is to view your laptop as a mobile desktop, where you have a few stations. The laptop would always be plugged in, but it might be plugged in different places.

> Why not just use a desktop?

Gaming laptops that contain high-end GPUs can consume this much power while charging the battery and running games. And such laptops are still way more portable than a desktop. You can lift the laptop and keep it in your car, drive off and have a gaming PC ready-to-use where ever you end up. Same cannot be done with any desktop.

Typically they're throttled by poor thermals. I'd be interested to know if anyone has recommendations for rtx grade laptops with nice CPUs in 15-17 inch form factor that doesn't throttle but are still somewhat portable. I have not found any but I think I've been testing too thin ones (XPS and Blade).

Have you checked out Thinkpad P15/P17? I can't speak to as to if and how (probably to some extent unless in ideal climate) they throttle, but generally Thinkpad P series are holding up pretty well (obviously at the cost of slimness). Can be configured with up to Quadro RTX 5000 Max-Q 16GB.

EDIT: Judging by notebookcheck, you should also check out HP ZBook Fury 15 G7, Thinkpad T15g, Dell Precision 7550, and MSI WS66.

https://www.notebookcheck.net/Lenovo-ThinkPad-P15-Gen-1-lapt...

There are a number of "balanced" gaming laptops that cut back GPU power a bit to accommodate a thinner, lighter build without throttling often or at all.

One such machine is the ASUS Zephyrus G14/G15 and in the next month or two, M16 which weigh ~4.5lbs and come with Ryzen 5000 mobile CPUs (up to 5900HS) and 95W variant RTX 3000 GPUs (up to RTX 3080). I've been using the G15 for the past month and it's not bad, kind of a midway between a Macbook and traditional gaming laptop. Its looks are low profile enough that I wouldn't be embarrassed to bring it into an office.

If you're willing to push the slider a bit further in the power direction, there's machines like the Lenovo Legion 5 Pro and Legion 7 16", which weigh about 1lb more than the Zephyrus machines (~5.5lbs) but come with significantly beefier cooling, a higher TDP CPU, and 130-150W variant RTX 3000 GPUs. They're a bit more of a desktop replacement but still fairly reasonable to lug around, nothing like the 8-10lb behemoth Alienwares of old.

Ok great info, gonna check for one with a huge battery. I'd like to learn more about undervolting and such to see how much battery you can save. I want to work on it on battery for long stretches of time, activating the GPU periodically to crunch or render something and then turning it off to save on power.

Have XPS 9570, can confirm that it works gorgeously for a minute or two and then throttles down to nothing. This is both before and after opening it up to clean out the fans and redo the thermal paste.

I've had some luck forcing it to use integrated graphics until explicitly told otherwise, but CPUs tend to run hot as well. I have not yet tried new Zen processors but due to power draw I suspect they perform good in these conditions

It's still a mobile form factor.

That's basically why. It's a computer you can take with you, without worry about packaging or needing to bring cables.

What's "that much power"? More than 100 watts?

I can find a laptop with a recent ryzen CPU and an RTX 2060 that gets 10 hours of battery life. At the same time, those parts could be pushed to 150 watts if you had enough cooling. And you'd need even more power to charge while using it flat-out.

I think such kind of devices are primarily portable and occasionally mobile. It is a subtle but important difference. Most gaming PC notebooks over 13" are too bulky anyway to be considered mobile devices. The only beefier notebook that still reasonably can be used as a mobile device even at 16" screen sizes are, in my experience, macbooks pro. but YMMV

I have a desktop and a laptop. Playing a game on my desktop means spending time well away from my family. Using my gaming laptop on my dining room table means I'm still around. I can answer the door, help out if need be. Makes things much easier in a busy household.

Because most desktops don't have integral screens and keyboards. Nor do they stay on and compute in an albeit degraded state in transit.

Not everyone is just using laptops as a word processor/browser. Sometimes you just need oomph.

i would love if my macbook stayed on and computed when i closed the lid. behavior is pretty inconsistent no matter what settings i check in control panel. sometimes i close the lid and it holds its ssh connections, sometimes it drops them and i don't know why.

Can't help on the lid closure, but apparently there's some screensaver setting that tells the system to keep working in the background even when the lockscreen appears after screensaver activation.

I like to be able to move a powerful computer to different rooms of my house.

I use my laptop as a portable desktop and plug it in where I'm going. I have zero use case for a laptop that isn't plugged in.

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