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Desktop vs Laptop Gaming

In this modern age of gaming, there are more options than ever when it comes to choosing your platform. But regardless of how prolific console gaming has become – with Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo all but dominating the market – the PC master race continues to advocate the power of the desktop, and not without good reason!

But which form of PC gaming is the best for you? Is it worth investing in a personalized desktop rig, with every element handpicked to suit your specifications, or is it better to spend wisely on a powerful gaming laptop? Hopefully this article will answer some of these questions. We’ll explore the price, the performance, and the practicality of both options, so you can decide how best to spend your money.

What’s the Price Difference?

For most gamers, the main barrier to PC gaming is the initial price of the hardware. It’s all well and good spending £2.99 a pop in the Steam Summer Sale, but when it costs £1,500 to run games properly, it’s harder to see the advantage. Of course, there are cheaper options available, which makes securing a starter rig a little bit easier.

Generally, a decent pre-assembled gaming desktop will cost somewhere between £800 and £1000, while cheaper options can range from £300 to £500. This only accounts for the PC tower, however. To complete your rig and enjoy a high-quality gaming experience, you’ll need to invest in decent gaming keyboard, monitor, speakers, and mouse. Fortunately, you can start out with a cheaper rig and add to it over time, installing new graphics cards, processors, and RAM. This is good way of offsetting the initial cost while you work out your preferences.

As you might expect, gaming laptops are a darn sight cheaper than their desktop counterparts – even the high performing models are lighter on the wallet! A basic gaming laptop can cost as little £400, with no extras needed, while the top-of-the-range models can cost as much as £2000, with over a terabyte of storage and a powerful GPU. If you’re after a gaming laptop with decent specs but don’t want to pay through the nose, you’ll be looking at around £700.

If you want more power and don’t mind spending a little more, a desktop is probably the better option, but if you’d prefer to spend a little less and still run games smoothly, a laptop can do the trick!

Performance Concerns?

When it comes to gaming, performance is key. There’s nothing worse than trying to enjoy a gorgeous game while it chugs away at 7fps, making the experience more of a chore than anything else. Luckily, this is where desktop PCs are king. As long as you have a half-decent rig, you can easily play games at a butter-smooth 60fps, if not more, and a top-quality graphics card will ensure you get the most out of every game – even more than a basic console. If you want to see what your favourite game should really look like, running it on a high-end gaming PC is the best way to go.

On top of this, any gaming desktop has a massive storage limit, as well as ways to expand it further. So if you are an avid downloader of new titles, this is a great option.

While gaming laptops suffer from smaller storages compared to desktops, it is still possible to purchase one with up to 1TB of storage. Equally, there are a range of external storage devices that you can use to backup your data. Even in performance, gaming laptops have been catching up with PCs. The Gigabyte P57 v6 can run plenty of modern videos games with no problems whatsoever, including graphically-demanding titles such as Battlefield 1 and Grand Theft Auto V.

However, the main advantage of a gaming laptop is its portability. Rather than being rooted to a desk, you can freely move around your home, and even go outside, meaning you can enjoy FPSs, roleplaying games, and even live casino gaming on-the-go.

Clearly, PCs have the edge on gaming laptops when it comes to performance, but for the sake of a balanced and fair argument it’s important to recognise how far laptop capacity has come – the gap between the two is slowly shrinking!

Verdict

It may seem like a cop out, but the platform you decide to go with is entirely dependent on your personal preferences and what you’re looking for in a gaming PC. If you want to keep it cheap and portable, while still being able to play some of the latest releases, a gaming laptop is a good bet, but if you prefer to keep things traditional and want to see your games at their very best, a desktop is unparalleled.