Hey all, Apologies, I'm one of those people that only returns to the forum when I'm stuck in my decision making. In this instance I've got bad decision paralysis when it comes to choosing a new gaming laptop. My Wife's 'gaming' laptop has seen better days and is very much on its last legs when it comes to running games she enjoys. It's a real mixed bag of games but she enjoys nearly every poorly optimised Survival-Sim Open World game that exists so the beefier the graphics power the better. Ideally I'd like it to have 1tb of M.2 storage as she gets mighty annoyed at managing her current SSD/HDD multi drive. 17" / QHD is a plus, but I think a +hz rate / quality panel is probably more of a priority. She really likes her numpad and it'd ideally have a webcam. Battery life isn't a real concern as she is always plugged in, nor is aesthetics unless it's god awful. Not insane heat when under load would be great, but I'm not stupid enough to truly think that's a thing given the spec I'm talking about. I know that the value for money / performance out of a desktop would be better, but it wouldn't suit our current arrangement gaming wise and I'll likely be building a desktop for her in the latter half of next year anyway and this would become a shared mobile device. It won't really see any significant strenuous tasks like photo editing etc. so CPU isn't hugely important albeit for it's potential impact on gaming performance. https://www.laptopsdirect.co.uk/len...h-geforce-rtx-3080-16g-82n6001puk/version.asp This is an example of what I have been looking at, though it is at the top range of my budget. I'm aware there are decent Lenovo, Asus, Razer models etc. that might be fit for purpose. Any advice or pointing to spicy deals you've seen floating around would be amazing and receive my most tip top thanks. Hopefully not annoying posting a thread as the latest one I found when searching was ~September and the playing field is always shifting. Thanks!
This is normally the point when I'd suggest that, if you're going to have it plugged in at all times anyway, you might want to look at a laptop with an external GPU to get the best balance of performance, portability, and non-gaming battery life. But given that GPU pricing is still rather silly... you're probably better off buying a laptop with an on-board dGPU like you're planning anyway.
I know its not really what you asked for as no numpad and only 512GB, but a Black Friday deal on a Samsung 970 evo plus is less than a £100 on Amazon and it has 2 m.2 slots so you are not wasting the drive it comes with and you can have a game drive and an OS drive, but the screen and the build quality will be really up there. Also, yes it is not a 30 series, but it is £500 less. That may be a lot of money to you , I don't know, but it should still be plenty powerful enough. https://www.ebuyer.com/1138689-raze...b-512gb-ssd-rtx-2080-super-rz09-03295w42-r3w1 Thought I would just make the option known to you anyway.
I think if you've got 2k to spend you've picked out the best gaming laptop for your use case already. That should be a full power 3080 mobile GPU in there so plenty fast enough. I've got an 85w 3080 in my laptop which means it's slower than a full power 3070 but I still find it to be fantastic ( for a laptop) If you're looking to get closer to £1500 I'd suggest looking at a 3070 version of the same machine.
Lenovo Legion 5 / 5 Pro or Medion Erazer Beast X25 would fit the bill here quite nicely. I have the latter and it proving to be quite the, well, beast when it comes to gaming. Seems to tick most of your boxes as well with a 17" QHD 165Hz screen (with Mux switch for better performance). 16GB DDR4, 512GB NVME boot with spare NVME slot for expansion (I put a 1TB WD Blue in mind for £65), 125-140w RTX 3070 and a 8 Core Ryzen 5800H. The chassis is mostly metal with little to no deck flex and is pretty slim for what it is. Heat wise it tops out around 80C on the GPU in Destiny 2 and the CPU hums along in the high 60's / low 70's under full load in Cinebench (less in games). It does get quite noisy under full load but no laptop will be quiet when trying to dissipate ~180w of heat. The Legion 5 Pro can be bought with basically the same specifications although it has a 16" !6:10 QHD screen instead of a 17" screen. Normal Legion can be bought with either a 15" or 17" screen. Check out Jarrods Tech on Youtube as he reviews pretty much every gaming laptop that releases. The Erazer is listed as the XMG Neo from memory as its a Tongfang chassis rebranded.
