All right, that title might be a slight exaggeration, but in an age of lovely slim gaming laptops like the new Razer Blade, Acer’s freshly-announced Predator Helios 500 is still very much in the ‘absolute unit’ category of these sort-of-but-not-really portable gaming machines – so much so that Acer’s top man Jason Chen (pictured above, right) needed a little help showing it off onstage yesterday at his company’s global press conference.

Weighing in at 4kg and measuring 428x298x38.7mm, this 17.3in laptop is positively monstrous compared to this year’s svelte Razer Blade, but take one look at its specs and you’ll understand why. With models going all the way up to a six-core Intel Core i9+ 8950HK (the + signifying the presence of Intel’s incredi-fast Optane Memory), a 4K IPS Nvidia G-Sync display and an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070 graphics card, this is a laptop that means serious business. Let’s take a look. Read the rest of this entry »

Gaming laptops are a funny business, aren’t they? Nine times out of ten they’re nowhere near as powerful as an equivalent desktop PC, yet they usually cost just as much, if not more, than the bulky black rectangles they’re so desperately trying to replace. There’s also a matter of looks. Most gaming laptops are very much from the shouty GAMING LAPTOP school of design with their edgy angles and flashing LEDs, not to mention the fact that most of them would likely break your back as soon as you tried to remove it from your desk.

Razer’s gaming laptops, on the other hand, have always tended to hark back to the nice slim portable laptops many of us, myself included, use for work – and their new, rather lovely 15.6in Razer Blade that I went to see a couple of weeks ago, complete with its 144Hz refresh rate and one of Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 1070 Max-Q chips, could well be one of their best yet. Let’s take a look.

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HP have been making a bit of a comeback of late. Everywhere you look it’s Omen this and Omen X sponsored that, so I thought it was high time I saw what all the fuss was about. What I’ve got here is the Omen X 17, or the catchily named HP Omen X 17-ap003na to give it its full and proper title, which is the toppest of HP’s top-end gaming laptops.

There are many other Omen X 17 configurations available, including models with different processor and graphics card combinations, but inside the 17-ap003na you’ll find an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 graphics card, a quad-core Intel Core i7-7820HK processor, 16GB of RAM, a huge 17.3in, 1920×1080 IPS display with a 120Hz refresh rate and Nvidia G-Sync support, plus a 256GB NVMe SSD and 1TB HDD, making it one of the most potent portable(ish) gaming machines I’ve seen since the MSI GT75VR Titan Pro. Read the rest of this entry »

Microsoft have been striving to present a stark alternative to Apple’s coffee-shop-ubiquitous Macbook line for a while now. In the past, their Surface range of (mostly) hybrid laptops/tablets have hardly been gaming machines, but that’s now changed with current range-topper, the shockingly expensive Surface Book 2. Its industrial edges and muted silver tones mean it announces itself as all business in the streets, but the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 tucked inside its detachable keyboard base makes a case for more than casual gaming in the sheets.

In theory, then, a gaming laptop not to feel hideously embarrassed by – not least because removing the keyboard and brandishing a hilariously large 15in tablet on the train will generate all the self-consciousness you could ever require.
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Most gaming laptops are Intel this and Nvidia that these days, making the fully AMD-powered Asus ROG Strix GL702ZC something of a rarity. Indeed, while AMD’s Ryzen CPUs may be a familiar sight on desktop PCs, this is the first time their top-end Ryzen 7 1700 chip has been taken out for a spin in laptop form, making it an admirable adversary for its Intel Core i7-7700HQ-equipped competition.

Backed up with one of AMD’s 4GB Radeon RX 580 graphics chips and a massive 17.3in 1920×1080 IPS display, the Asus ROG GL702ZC could be just the ticket for those after smooth 1080p gaming you can (sort of) take on the go. Let’s see whether it’s any good. Read the rest of this entry »

There are two types of gaming laptop in this world. Those with gorgeous, so-good-I-want-to-lick-them OLED screens and those without. Happily, Dell’s Alienware 13 is one of the former, and by god is it beautiful. If the paltry, washed-out screen on Dell’s Inspiron 15 7000 Gaming laptop was like a banged up Ford Fiesta from the mid 90s, the Alienware 13 is a modern day super car, its OLED panel and oozing luxury from each and every pixel.

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Gaming laptops are a funny old business. As we discovered with the frankly ludicrous MSI GT75VR Titan Pro, phenomenal cosmic graphics power you can (sort of) take on the move often comes with an equally planetary-sized price attached to it, making such laptops seem like indulgent extravagances compared to an identically-priced desktop. Even entry-level gaming laptops like Dell’s Inspiron 15 7000 Gaming series demand at least 899 of your hard-earned pounds, and even then you’re only getting one of Nvidia’s GTX 1050 chips for your trouble. With that kind of money, you could buy yourself a fully-fledged GTX 1070 desktop that will see you through many more years of high quality gaming and give you the flexibility to upgrade in the future.

It all begs the question about whether gaming laptops are really worth it? Indeed, when Alec reviewed the GTX 1050 Ti version of this very Dell Inspiron 15 7000 Gaming laptop earlier in the year (the 7567 edition), he concluded that its sub-par screen and bulky chassis weren’t quite up to snuff for its £1000 asking price. It also lacked a Thunderbolt 3 port, effectively hampering any potential upgrade work if you wanted to add a more powerful external GPU at a later date. Today, I’m going to see if Dell’s latest refresh of its Inspiron 15 7000 Gaming series – the 7577, to be precise – is any better.

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We’ve looked at our fair share of gaming laptops at RPS over the last year, but nothing has been quite so preposterous as MSI’s new GT75VR 7RF Titan Pro. This three grand mega laptop has the complete works: an Nvidia GTX 1080 chip paired with a quad-core 2.9GHz Intel Core i7-7820HK processor and 32GB of RAM, a 17.3in, 120Hz Full HD display (which I can only assume to be IPS because MSI neglected to specify), a mechanical Steelseries RGB keyboard, a super fast 512GB NVMe SSD and a 1TB HDD.

It’s a ridiculous piece of machinery, made even sillier by its enormous size. Measuring a colossal 428 x 314 x 58mm and weighing a back-breaking 4.56kg, this is going nowhere except the middle of a very large, sturdy desk. Even if you did manage to lug it somewhere, you wouldn’t be able to get much out of it away from a plug socket anyway, as I barely managed an hour of gaming on it with the screen set to half brightness. Read the rest of this entry »

My ongoing quest to find the perfect gaming laptop – at the conclusion of which I shall buy my favourite – continues. I should note at this point that ‘perfect’ can mean several different things in this case. Clearly, attractiveness, features and performance are the main draws, but this is by no means a money no object deal. If a decent lappie is cheap enough, the fact that I won’t spend months trying and failing to justify the cost to myself means it might tick the ‘perfect’ box despite falling short in other areas.

And so to Dell’s £1000 Inspiron 15 Gaming, aka the Inspiron 7567. A diamond in the rough, or a get-what-you-pay-for folly?
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A monster in good ways and in bad ways, but we’ll get to that shortly. First, here’s the plan. Over the coming few weeks and months, I’m going to review a number of gaming laptops from a variety of manufacturers. Each will be its own standalone review, but as well as the fact that each new review can involve greater comparison to the other systems, at the end of the whole boogaloo, I will buy the laptop I like best. Hardware reviews with a narrative arc. I’m like the Joss Whedon of computer journalism, me.

We kick off with Alienware’s latest 15″ machine (US and UK store link; exact specs and prices differ per territory), toting an NVIDIA GTX 1070 and an Intel Kaby Lake i7 CPU.
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With the profound logistical complexities of orchestrating the arrival of two 3D cards in the same place at roughly the same time apparently beyond me, my planned graphics-off between the latest budget video boards has been punted two weeks hence (hopefully, anyway). So, it’s time for another installment of the somewhat tenuously-titled Week in Tech. This week’s muses include a preposterous looking VR backpack PC from Zotac, an even more preposterous gaming laptop from Asus and the PC’s journey towards rendering photo-realistic graphics in games. Read the rest of this entry »

What with the sober-suited Euro foil to CES that is the IFA consumer electronics show, Intel’s IDF shindig, a new console or two from Sony and new version of the smartphone that dare not speak its name, it’s been a busy week or two in tech. But has there been any joy for the good old PC? You know, that dessicated old thing that just so happens to be by far the best gaming platform, period? There’s certainly been some startling new PC-gaming kit, including surely the most preposterous gaming laptop ever. But also some newness of genuine relevance, including an update on AMD’s new Zen CPU, some very interesting screens, plus a few further potentially PC-related oddities that are hard to gauge for now.

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The majority of gamers play on desktops. It’s the most cost-effective, modular way of building a system. As such, advice on specifications from VR manufacturers like Oculus (the Rift) and HTC (the Vive) has focused on desktop hardware. Over the last few years, though, the relative cost of portable gaming components has decreased while their performance increased. Gaming laptops are now a realistic option for people who want to play even the most demanding games.

Virtual reality is different, however. Excitement about VR transcends platforms, but if you run a portable rig, whether it’s up to the task is a much harder question. I went looking for answers.

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Sometimes, the numbers aren’t enough. When you compare what the new Nvidia GeForce GTX 980M looks like on paper with what it will actually do stuffed into a laptop PC, grudgingly you concede this is one of those times. Nvidia’s latest graphics chip for laptops looked good at launch, but a few weeks later I’ve now had a play and it’s burst right through my cynical, dessicated, world-weary attitude to the technology refresh cycle. This thing takes laptop gaming to a new level. Great. But here’s the real question. Is it good enough to finally put that desktop vs laptop debate to bed? Time to find out… Read the rest of this entry »

Long ago, in an age when PC magazines ruled the land, the internet had barely achieved broadband and being a tech journalist really meant something (OK, that last bit was probably never true), I used to be a laptop gaming junky. This, I’d largely forgotten until Nvidia’s new mobile GPUs launched the other day and were accompanied by some conspicuously OTT hyperbole from wet-behind-the-ears padawans in the tech press. How quickly they forget the great mobile GPUs of yesteryear. Thus, for a serious dissertation on the delights and, let’s be honest, drastic downsides of laptop gaming along with a grudging admission that the new GeForce GTX 970M and 980M do actually look pretty damn fine, you know what to do.

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Yes, we’ve done the Nvidia Maxwell graphics thing already. As a desktop GPU, the new GeForce GTXs 750 and 750 Ti aren’t all that exciting. But the same Nvidia GM107 chip rebadged Nvidia GeForce GTX 860M and stuffed into a laptop? Suddenly, things get a whole lot more interesting. The specifics aren’t official yet. But it looks like GM107 might just deliver twice the performance for the same power budget as its predecessor and that’s pretty exciting for thin-and-light gaming lappies. And remember, this is just the beginning for Maxwell – the arrival of second-gen 20nm Maxwell mobile GPUs could be spectacular. While we’re here, I thought a beginners guide to mobile GPUs would be useful for some of you. What with all the branding shenanigans both Nvidia and AMD get up to in the mobile space, keeping track of what’s actually on offer isn’t always easy. Read the rest of this entry »