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by adrian_b 524 days ago
Any laptop that in marketed as "gaming laptop" or "mobile workstation" belongs to this category.

I do not know which is the proportion of gaming laptops and mobile workstations vs. thin and light laptops. While obviously there must be much more light laptops, the gaming laptops cannot be a niche product, because there are too many models offered by a lot of vendors.

My own laptop is a Dell Precision, so it belongs to this class. I would not call Dell Precision laptops as a niche product, even if they are typically used only by professionals.

My previous laptop was some Lenovo Yoga that also belonged to this class, having a discrete NVIDIA GPU. In general, any laptop having a discrete GPU belongs to this class, because the laptop CPUs intended to be paired with discrete GPUs have a default TDP of 45 W or 55 W, while the smallest laptop discrete GPUs may have TDPs of 55 W to 75 W, but the faster laptop GPUs have TDPs between 100 W and 150 W, so the combo with CPU reaches a TDP around 200 W for the biggest laptops.

2 comments

You can't usually just add up the TDPs of CPU and GPU, because neither cooling nor the power circuitry supports that kind of load. That's why AMDs SmartShift is a thing.
People are very unaware just how much better a gaming laptop from 3 years ago is (compared to a copilot laptop). These laptops are sub $500 on eBay, and Best Buy won’t give you more than $150 for it as a trade in (almost like they won’t admit that those laptops outclass the new category type of AI pc).