[seanp2k2]

Kinda hilarious to see gamers buying laptops that can't actually leave the house in any practical meaningful way. I feel like some of them would be better off with SFF PCs and the external monitors they already use. I guess the biggest appeal I've seen is the ability to fold up the gaming laptop and put the dock away to get it off the desk, but then moving to an SFF on the ground plus a wireless gaming keyboard and wireless mouse that they already use with the normal laptop + one of those compact "portable" monitors seems like it'd solve the same problem.

[kristianp]

My wife can get an hour of gaming out of her gaming laptop. They're good for being able to game in an area of the house where the rest of the family is, even if that means being plugged in at the dining table. Our home office isn't close enough.

Also a gaming laptop is handy if you want to travel and game at your hotel.

[jwells89]

I’ve been wondering for a while now why ASUS or some other gaming laptop manufacturer doesn’t take one of their flagship gaming laptop motherboards, put some beefy but quiet cooling on it, put it in a pizza-box/console enclosure, and sell it as a silent compact gaming desktop.

A machine like that could still be relatively small but still be dramatically better cooled than even the thickest laptop due to not having to make space for a battery, keyboard, etc.

[antonkochubey]

ZOTAC does these - there are ZBOX Magnus with laptop-grade RTX 4000 series GPUs in 2-3 liter chassis. However their performance and acoustics are rather.. compromised, compared to a proper SFF desktop (which can be built in ~3x the volume)

[jwells89]

Yeah, those look like they’re too small to be reasonably cooled. What I had in mind is shaped like the main body of a laptop but maybe 2-3x as thick (to be able to fit plenty of heatsink and proper 120/140mm fans), stood up on its side.