College Student Laptop

I11ogikal · July 14, 2019

Hey everyone,

I am going into my freshman year of engineering college and need a laptop that can suit my needs. I am looking for something that is relatively light, good battery life, good portability, without too much of a downgrade in the power department. I've been looking around the Alienware m15 (2070, i7-8750H, 90WHr battery), Razer blade (2070, i7-8750H, 80WHr battery), as well as Gigabyte Aero 15x9, MSI GS65, and Dell XPS 15. I'm kinda looking at the 2070, i7-8750 sweet spot while being somewhat light weight. If there are others that I should consider please tell me. The other option that I could run with would be going down the eGPU route as I have a 2080TI from my desktop that I could attach to a more lightweight latptop so that I can still get good gaming performance. Would going with an eGPU allow me to choose a more lightweight laptop and get better battery life? Any input would be awesome!

TL;DR I want a light laptop with good battery and portability that could give me 1080 144hz high gaming with onboard GPU or with an attached eGPU (2080ti) for about $2000

AndreiArgeanu · July 15, 2019

Going with an eGPU will 100% allow you to choose a laptop which is lightweight and has much better battery life than the laptop's listed above.

However it depends a lot on your needs. If you don't need powerful graphics on the go but do need or benefit from a longer battery life then go ahead and get the laptop and the eGPU however research whether it supports and eGPU or not and also most ultrabooks tend to have and intel processor that end in U. U stand for ultra low power which is good for battery life however keep in mind that those processor are not as powerful as their counterparts which make more heat and need more power. However I doubt that many ultra books feature a 144hz display.

Going with an on board gpu means that you can carry all that power with you in a small form factor if you actually need the powerful graphics while also usually being cheaper than buying an eGPU enclosure and a GPU. However on the other side, you cannot upgrade your graphics and you will spend more time plugged in the wall due to the lowered battery life and the graphics cards in the laptops do tend to be slightly slower due to cooling and power limitation and you are likely to end up with some kind of MAX Q 2070 in your laptop.

The laptops above are all a good choice if you're looking into buying a laptop with an on board GPU.

If you are interested in performance you can check user benchmark to compare cpus here just enter the cpu's you wish to compare and they'll show up. You can also use user benchmark to compare GPU's , ram and even SSD's.