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Trading gaming laptop for portable rig…good idea?

Batmeat

Batmeat

Senior member
I don’t know where to put this post. I’m dumping my gaming laptop, 2022 Asus Rog Strix with 3080 full power version and an i9, and looking into building/ordering an external video card, NUC, portable monitor/keyboard/mouse.

Is this a good idea or keep the laptop. Laptop has been great but does get warm.
 
I like laptops over what you're planning but, you can get more power out of piecing things together. There are niche laptops though that hit the higher power limits of GPUs. They do require dual power bricks though and I wouldn't put it on your lap for gaming.
 
If you're looking for something more powerful without the marketing markup....

Clevo Barebone Laptop Series - R&J Technology, Clevo Barebone Notebook kits, Laptop and desktop system builder

your Memory hard drives build your laptop based this Clevo Barebone Series select from options provided build
rjtech.com rjtech.com

Going barebones and adding your own drive and ram can save hundreds. RJT also doesn't add sales tax. Clevo's are easy to work on when it comes to swapping parts. You get access to the full service manual down to the transistor level. I turned a run of the mill model into a 4k Frankenstein for just a few hundred vs paying twice as much for one that's prefitted by another company.
 
I'd go this route, with an external GPU if there is need for the graphical power....

store.minisforum.com

MINISFORUM UM790 Pro

MINISFORUM UM790 Pro: Ryzen 9 7940HS, Radeon 780M. Up to 4 displays (2× HDMI 2.1 4K144 + 2× USB4 8K60), dual NVMe PCIe 4.0, Wi-Fi 6E, 2.5GbE, advanced cooling.
store.minisforum.com store.minisforum.com

Or this one
 
misuspita said:
I'd go this route, with an external GPU if there is need for the graphical power....

store.minisforum.com

MINISFORUM UM790 Pro

MINISFORUM UM790 Pro: Ryzen 9 7940HS, Radeon 780M. Up to 4 displays (2× HDMI 2.1 4K144 + 2× USB4 8K60), dual NVMe PCIe 4.0, Wi-Fi 6E, 2.5GbE, advanced cooling.
store.minisforum.com store.minisforum.com

Or this one
Click to expand...
Only obvious problem is going to be egpu support. I'm not sure usb4 is going to initiate a TB enclosure. It has the bandwidth but not sure it will handshake and come online. Nice to have dual ports though. It also might not play nice being AMD. Otherwise it's a good price point.
 
Some of the reviews I've seen on YT had a external GPU that was functioning, I think it was a INtel GPU inside 🙂)

Edit: Found it, was the non pro GTR

 
Million dollar question of course is how much are you actually traveling?

A good gaming laptop is basically impossible to beat for portability, so if you're regularly traveling for work or pleasure I would say keep the laptop 100%.

If you're not traveling much and you're really just looking to keep the systems footprint to a minimum, then yeah a compact PC will ultimately give you more performance without taking up too much more space.
 
I do travel frequently. the problem is that any gaming laptop is likely going to run into thermal throttling, even with if the GPU allows for full power. Fans on max this laptop gets hot and loud. You can monitor the cpu and gpu and see the throttling kick in; and I payed for upgraded thermal compound on the GPU and CPU. Measuring dimensions using a tiny NUC, portable monitor/keyboard/mouse isn't bad. The eGPU is where you run into the space hog. Power supply is another story. Even though my laptop has a 3800m in it, a card like a 4060 is pretty much on par and some tests is better. I don't game at 4k, 1440 is good enough for me, so a smaller eGPU would work well.
 
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