Gaming Laptops? ....... Really!?!

It's the Asus ROG Zephyrus G14. If you've followed my writing at all, you'll know that I don't do gaming laptops. It's just not a part of my ethos, particularly buying them new. Yet, here I am talking about not only a gaming laptop, but a current model as well. So what's the deal on this? 

The last time (the only time) I delved into the gaming laptop world was back several years ago when I got my hands on a Clevo D900 era machine that was in stripped and in bad condition for next to nothing. It didn't turn out to be a big win, but I did learn a lot about gaming machines of that time. Clevo, if you didn't already know is an OEM builder and doesn't really sell much under their own brand. Back then, gaming laptops were well and truly a niche product. Even Alienware OEM'd their machines from these guys! There was a lot of desktop or desktop derived hardware in these things and they were big, super-heavy and generally ran for less than an hour on battery power. And they were all like this....

Of course, this was back in the days of the HP HDX "Dragon", and the Dell XPS M2010 which were true "beast"; less laptops or mobile computers, but desktops that closed nicely! My, how things have changed!

Oh, don't get me wrong, big and crazy hasn't gone away. There's The Acer Predator, and the MSI Titan lines. But mostly today's gamers don't have to go to extremes to get excellent performance. That's where I arrived recently. What was I doing here? This is the story..... My daughter's boyfriend is a graduating senior and intends on being a computer science major. And since our school district has provided students with devices so he doesn't have his own up till this point. So.... what does a future CS major need in terms of a computer for the next several years. As it turns out, a decent gaming machine will be just fine for that. It will have enough memory to run virtual machines so that any OS necessary for coding can be accessed and have a monitor panel with enough resolution to see a good number of lines of code. However, for a college student to go to class and meet for group projects, they sure don't need/want something huge and difficult to carry around. And to survive the next several years of work and being carried around, he'll need something well spec'd and built.

And that's where this comes in; the Asus ROG Zephyrus G14. Small enough to be decently portable, with a Ryzen CPU and other very decent specs to last awhile. So, with modern hardware and nice design, gaming machines do have other uses.