Help picking a gaming laptop

Vovozona · June 8, 2021

Prices were converted to USD. The second one is the only one in stock in my country that fits my budget and comer with a RTX 3000 series GPU.

The extra resolution of the Avell one looks nice but I don't think I would see a 20 Hz improvement on the refresh rate and the extra size worries me that I wouldn't able to fit in my backpack and laptop base.
I also slightly prefer the IO on the Acer one because of the SD card reader.

Acer Helios 300

512GB NVME SSD
16GB 2666Mhz Single Channel RAM
15" FHD 144Hz Screen
Core I7-10750H @ 2.6-5 Ghz
RTX 2070 Max Q 90-100W TDP (depending if turbo is active or not)
2182 USD (already with 2 TB HDD and 16GB RAM stick factored in to make it dual channel)

Avell Storm One

RTX 3060 115W TDP
Ryzen 5 4600h @ 3-4 Ghz
16 GB Dual Channel DDR4 2666Mhz RAM
500GB NVME SSD
17,3" 16:9 QHD 165 hz panel
1980 USD

mt123 · June 8, 2021

Firstly, it's always important to consider your priorities with your laptop usage. Knowing the first thing you mentioned was the RTX 30-series GPU, I'm assuming you're prioritizing gaming, though you should also consider if you'll be using it for and school work, office work, etc. I was looking for my new laptop in the past couple months and my top priorities were having a powerful CPU and lots of memory to handle the Engineering programs I'll be using in College, and generally speaking, I wanted a laptop that looked professional/ well built. Though, I also knew that I wanted to play AAA games at at least 60 FPS and 1080p medium/ high, so an RTX 20-series would fit my needs. Ultimately, and because my budget was basically unlimited (thankfully, due to my awesome savings, I'll stop tooting my horn, lol), I settled on a Dell XPS 17 with an i9-10885H, 32 GB of ram, 1 TB SSD, the base 1980 * 1200p 60 Hz display, and the RTX 2060 Max-Q, and I was able to get this around ~$2,300-$2,400, though I think if you were to spec this now, it'll come somewhere around or above $3,000 USD, and I've been loving this (especially because I've been using a school-issued Chromebook and an old iMac for school work since the pandemic started).

I was also considering lots of gaming laptops from Razer, Asus ROG, Lenovo Legion, etc., and based on the specs of these laptops, both seem pretty solid. Looking at userbench.com (https://gpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Nvidia-RTX-3060-Laptop-vs-Nvidia-RTX-2070-Mobile/m1452971vsm694798), apparently the 2070 might perform slightly better, though knowing its a Max-Q variant, that might make them more closer performing. Not really sure how much memory the 2070 has compared to the 3060, but I know the 3060 has 6 GB of memory.

So again, make sure you know what your priorities are, and maybe look into different options of laptops, too. Otherwise, these seem like very solid options.