When it comes to getting a gaming machine for yourself, many gamers are faced with two choices – laptop and PC. While they both are equally great options in their own regards, many people opt for laptops for gaming because of their mobility, battery backup and multi-purpose usage ability.
According to gamingbeasts.com, one of the leading websites for games and gaming related content, it is imperative that you choose an optimal laptop for gaming if you want to have a smooth and seamless gaming experience. The problem is, gaming laptops don’t come cheap and most of them cost hundreds of dollars, if not more, to even think of purchasing them.
This forces many people to opt for cheaper alternatives to these portable machines that may have worse hardware but come at a nominal price tag. But are these laptops the best choices for gaming? Is it worth going in cheap to get games running onto these machines or is it a better idea to save up and go for something better?
These same questions have haunted thousands of gamers for the past few years and many people struggle to answer them accurately with valid reasons. But we won’t. In this article, we will give you clear and distinct reasons why you should avoid buying cheap laptops for gaming at all costs if you want a seamless gaming experience and why it is a better idea to simply save some money to get a better machine.
1. You lose out on necessary hardware and features
To do even the most basic entry level gaming in today’s world, you need hardware that can handle the latest titles at low settings and still give you a playable framerate. That is simply not possible with cheaper laptops that use old gen hardware that is not only outdated but also doesn’t have much support for the newest games out there.
When you get a cheap laptop and run it for gaming, you will be either forced to play very basic and old games or make extremely expensive upgrades to it that are oftentimes not worth it. There is a bare minimum level of necessary and essential hardware that every laptop should have in today’s date to be able to play games at a decent FPS without any major problem. Cheap laptops simply don’t cut this mark and often fail to perform the most in this regard.
These machines also don’t have any additional features that you can use to have a better gaming experience for yourself. Notable features like AMD Freesync, AMD FidelityFX, Nvidia Gsync and Nvidia Raytracing are often found missing on these cheap laptops which you can easily find on entry level gaming machines and most gaming desktops.
2. You don’t get any future upgradeability
While we just talked about how you need to make expensive upgrades to cheap laptops to make them playable for modern titles, in many cases you don’t have the option to even do that. There are countless models out there that were specially designed to ensure their core components weren’t replaced or upgraded individually such as their CPU or their GPU.
These laptops have an unique motherboard called a soldered motherboard where the CPU is literally soldered onto the motherboard in order to ensure that it is not replaced or upgraded. Why manufacturers did this is beyond us but it has ensured that hundreds of laptop models are stuck with their old CPU and GPU – the two most important parts of any gaming machine.
While you can still upgrade RAM and storage on most of these machines, the upgrades will barely make a difference on actual game performance. These upgrades are only good for ensuring a seamless work experience or normal usage experience, not gaming experience.
3. Cheap laptops can die out earlier
Another major problem about cheap laptops is they have old and outdated hardware and equally older components running inside them. This means that your laptops have a greater chance of dying out in comparison to other premium gaming machines that you can get if you pay a little bit more for your laptop purchase.
This is one of the worst things that can happen to a gamer. When you make an expensive and major purchase such as a laptop, you expect the machine to last at least for 4-5 years before moving on again. However, with the brand quality and the reliability these cheap laptops come with, you can barely expect a lifetime of about 2 years before the laptop starts dying out itself.
What ensues is a number of repairs that you would need to make in order to use such a laptop again. Since cheap laptops have old hardware, repairing and maintaining them is more expensive than what you’d get on more modern and newer laptops. These repair costs alone can offset their price worth which is why buying a cheap laptop for gaming is not an economic decision.
4. Oftentimes, you need to upgrade a cheap laptop to make it playable for gaming
As we discussed before, in order to actually play modern AAA titles at medium settings and a smooth framerate, you need to make drastic upgrades in your cheap laptop. While it is certainly plausible and an option that you can use, it literally doesn’t make sense to buy a cheap model and then later upgrade its core components for gaming.
This is because most modern CPU and GPU upgrades alone can offset the entire price of your cheap laptop. You are considerably much better off by choosing a premium gaming machine that costs twice or thrice the amount of your cheap laptop but comes preloaded with all the upgraded hardware that you were planning to upgrade your cheap laptop with.
It also doesn’t help that laptop upgrades are significantly more expensive than PC upgrades since they aren’t used as much. Nor does it help that the market for these upgrades is extremely small for most users at which point it just becomes a better choice for everyone to go for a more reliable and expensive entry-level modern gaming machine.
Conclusion
Understanding why you should avoid buying a cheap laptop for gaming is extremely important if your main priority as an individual is solely gaming and nothing else. As a gamer, it is crucial that you make the right purchase decision when choosing a laptop for your gaming needs and we hope this article helped with exactly that.
