Gadgetory

every time we post a video about X cool gadget or Y most expensive tech there's a huge influx of comments asking us to do a build guide for a super budget system or like a cheap laptop roundup and typically I respond with no that's boring but today today is a different day we're gonna be looking at the evolution of the thousand dish gaming laptop over the last five years and if you enjoy it quietly without any complaining origins gonna give away an eon 15's at the end ok ok before we begin let's set the scene each of our five laptops some of which were actually kind of difficult to obtain was priced at a thousand ish dollars when it was new and has what we would consider typical notebook graphics for the time we have representatives from five Intel architectures Sandy Bridge Ivy Bridge has well skylake and finally KB Lake in the currently shipping origin PC on 15's starting on the outside build quality at this price hasn't really changed much almost all of our competitors share a decent build typically sporting a hybrid plastic and metal finish on the exterior deck flex is basically non-existent since the thin and light gaming machines that suffer from this are usually much more expensive and both screen flex and typing induced screen wobble were acceptable safe for the lenovo y 5 10 P whose screens front glossy plastic is reminiscent of a $300 Best Buy special I'm really glad that whole thing went out of fashion speaking of casings we've actually done not too bad in that department our three newest pcs all have almost entirely black exteriors aside from some red accents while the Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge models are just about the furthest thing from a gamer aesthetic that you can get it's safe to say that I wouldn't shy away from taking any of these into a business meeting again the more out there gamer e aesthetic seems to dominate the higher end gaming skews on two screens then my eyes have become so accustomed to IPS and high-end TN panels that these older budget offerings induced what I call a splitting first world problem headache every laptop we tested features I mean I guess features is kind of a strong word here a TN gorbo Edition screen with the exception of the EON 15s to be clear that one isn't the most amazing panel in the world but the falling costs of IPs displays overall has driven a huge improvement industry-wide in the day to day usability of value laptops gaming and otherwise and full HD 1080p resolution is a nice touch what a wonderful segue who could forget about gaming laptops and their historically completely gross tastic touch pads we actually sort of lucked out on this one every unit we tested has what I would describe as a decent trackpad it's no MacBook or razor blade but none of them are at that deal-breaker level connectivity is pretty strong throughout especially as we get newer and newer the HP EliteBook we picked up even has a full-size DisplayPort connector on the side along with eSATA so that was kind of weird and USB 3 first enters the spotlight with Haswell and thank goodness for that I was even a little surprised to find that not only the EON 15s but also the MSI GL 62 have USB type-c as well not to mention that every one of them has an Ethernet port it's it's actually kind of funny to see how the trends that I spend so much time complaining about like the reduction in IO on computers aren't really affecting this segment battery life isn't really accurately measurable on used laptops due to degradation but we ran PC markets battery life test anyway it simulates a light office workload and to represent an average battery saving set up the brightness was set to 50% and power profile - battery saving mode the results were mostly unsurprising although origen Xeon 15s scored a pretty respectable almost 4 hours I guess that's where the power efficiency of each new CPU generation comes in but none of that is really the point of our investigation these are gaming laptops after all you didn't think we were gonna forget about benchmarks did you silly goose 4 games we chose one game from each year starting with when our first laptop was released 2012 so we loaded up Borderlands 2 bioshock infinite dragon aging position rise of the Tomb Raider deus ex and Ghost Recon wildlands on each laptop performance in this sector has for a long time been underwhelming kind of like no man sky except more like no man's framerate even in the older titles like Borderlands 2 at medium settings the older laptops barely cracked the 30 FPS barrier that is until you get to the modern origin yawn 15s this thing completely wipes the floor with the other systems and for good reason previous iterations of value gaming laptops often used mobile variants of contemporary GPUs like the MSI with a GT 940m X and the y 510 p with a 755 m these M GPUs from my personal experience were less likely to get driver updates and more likely to cause system stability issues and crashes even when they did have enough power by contrast current gaming laptops like our Origin PC system have full fat desktop graphics cards in this case a 1050 Ti that spec to pull a whopping 70 watts at load with all the long-term support that comes with a more streamlined product lineup so it basically comes down to this battery capacities haven't changed much and neither has build quality from our samples but creature comforts like displays have improved by leaps and bounds and as for graphics cards both performance and reliability have improved dramatically while on the CPU side power consumption especially during basic workloads has improved to such a degree that it's no longer true that a gaming laptop has to be unsuitable for other tasks so hopefully you guys stuck around because like I said before Origin PC is giving away one of these bad boys not this one this one's mine but you can enter to win yours at the link in the video description it's us only so keep that in mind while entering and good luck so thanks for watching guys if you dislike this video you can hit that button but if you like it hit the like button get subscribed and maybe consider checking out where to buy the stuff we featured at the link in the video description also down there you can buy a cool shirt like this one on our merch store or join our community forum and talk tech with all the members of the LTTE community