Advice on building a gaming laptop

[Jolly Co-operator]

I built my gaming PC about two years ago, and unfortunately, my graphics card has died. Since I'll be going to college soon, and I don't expect I'll have enough room in my dorm for a desktop, I'm planning on selling the remaining parts and investing in a nice laptop that will be able to handle games, as well as be a convenient tool for my classwork. My previous graphics card was a Geforce GTX 660, and I'm hoping to get a laptop that's up to par with that standard. There are two main areas on which I need advice:

Where and how to sell my parts?

And what are the differences between building a desktop and a laptop? My PC is the only one I've ever put together, so please forgive my ignorance on the matter. I built my PC from scratch, should I do the same with my laptop? And if I were to build it from scratch, where should I buy my parts from, and is it any more difficult?

Thanks in advance for any answers or advice given.

 

[DoPo]

Where and how to sell my parts?

You can try eBay or a local computer shop (some take second hand parts).

And what are the differences between building a desktop and a laptop?

The former is sensible, the latter is mostly not done. Some retailers offer variations of laptops and/or the possibility to choose specific different parts[footnote]e.g, for a hard drive the choice may be between a 500 GB or 1 TB, the latter boosting the price, or it may be between an HDD or SSD of a lower volume for not a huge difference in price, and so on[/footnote] but the choice is really narrow - a couple of components, if that many. These aren't really that wide-spread, either, and yet are, I believe, the more common way to "build" a laptop. You could build it the same as a desktop, so, pick components and fit them together but I actually haven't heard of anybody doing that - few retailers or shops or other venues for buying laptops may offer to build it for you and for you to pick the parts. That's somewhat more open ended than giving you specific choices for specific parts, but it's more or less the same - you mostly get more choice.

That's the theory behind it, though - I've never done it, I don't know anybody who has, either. The thing is, laptops don't operate the same as PCs when it comes to components - there are a lot of considerations when building one - size, power consumption, cooling, durability, etc. It's all stuff you mostly don't care for in a desktop, as the conditions are different. But if you had to stuff everything in a box less than quarter the size of a PC case, there are a lot of corners to be cut and a lot of careful choices to be made. That's why they are mostly sold complete - they have specialised hardware - video cards are often part of the motherboard, other componets also have reduced sizes, airflow is managed way more carefully, power consumption should be accounted for, in order for the battery to last any meaningful time[footnote]even then, the estimations for 3 hours battery life are usually with components, like the WiFi, switched off and the usage being a bit above idle but not too high[/footnote]. As a result, there is little you can actually change on laptops - the good ones may have few removable components, while most would have, just about the HDD and keyboard. Swappable components are also quite expensive, too.

Building a laptop is too much work, involving too much effort, money, and time. For very little gain. At most, you will get some improved performance over the majority of laptops, but for all the resources you've poured into that, you could have probably built yourself 2 PCs.

I built my PC from scratch, should I do the same with my laptop? And if I were to build it from scratch, where should I buy my parts from, and is it any more difficult?

I suppose the above should answer these questions, but for the sake of completeness, here are the answers (in order): No. I don't know. YES!

Now, for some actual advice: depending on your budget, you could go for a PC + laptop (so, a graphics card and a cheap netbook of some sort, or even a tablet + stand + keyboard) or, if that's not possible, invest in a laptop that has a better video card. Not necessarily a gaming laptop, as those tend to be on the expensive side, but there are some "normal" laptops with ATI/nVidia cards which should work just as well. You can refer to NotebookCheck [http://www.notebookcheck.net/] when choosing laptops.

I think that's most of the direct advice I can give you, really. I'll supplement it with some more pieces of related advice:
- In my years of university study, I've not really been in a room that's too small for a desktop. Yes, I've been in small rooms, one year I rented a room literally 2 by 3 metres big [footnote]for the record, it was about 2.5m high. Further for the record - it wasn't my entire living space - there was also a shared kitchen and bathroom/toilet, but it was my primary one[/footnote] where I had a bed, a (small) desk, a chair, a (small) wardrobe and about enough space to open the door. Even then, I could have had a desktop in there...if I had a desktop, at that point, that is. Even the smallest university accommodation I have seen had enough space for a desktop.
- if you do go for a laptop, make sure you clean up all the crap they come with preinstalled, which is either useless, annoying or not of really great value. Given that you've built your own PC, I'm inclined to believe you are aware which software which not.
- further on laptops - you can squeeze a bit more hard drive space on them, as they come with one recovery partition on the hard drive. If you've ever installed any OS, you should be completely OK to wipe that partition and claim the few gigs for something else. I've used mine for my Linux swap partitions.

 

[Jolly Co-operator]

Where and how to sell my parts?

You can try eBay or a local computer shop (some take second hand parts).

And what are the differences between building a desktop and a laptop?

The former is sensible, the latter is mostly not done. Some retailers offer variations of laptops and/or the possibility to choose specific different parts[footnote]e.g, for a hard drive the choice may be between a 500 GB or 1 TB, the latter boosting the price, or it may be between an HDD or SSD of a lower volume for not a huge difference in price, and so on[/footnote] but the choice is really narrow - a couple of components, if that many. These aren't really that wide-spread, either, and yet are, I believe, the more common way to "build" a laptop. You could build it the same as a desktop, so, pick components and fit them together but I actually haven't heard of anybody doing that - few retailers or shops or other venues for buying laptops may offer to build it for you and for you to pick the parts. That's somewhat more open ended than giving you specific choices for specific parts, but it's more or less the same - you mostly get more choice.

That's the theory behind it, though - I've never done it, I don't know anybody who has, either. The thing is, laptops don't operate the same as PCs when it comes to components - there are a lot of considerations when building one - size, power consumption, cooling, durability, etc. It's all stuff you mostly don't care for in a desktop, as the conditions are different. But if you had to stuff everything in a box less than quarter the size of a PC case, there are a lot of corners to be cut and a lot of careful choices to be made. That's why they are mostly sold complete - they have specialised hardware - video cards are often part of the motherboard, other componets also have reduced sizes, airflow is managed way more carefully, power consumption should be accounted for, in order for the battery to last any meaningful time[footnote]even then, the estimations for 3 hours battery life are usually with components, like the WiFi, switched off and the usage being a bit above idle but not too high[/footnote]. As a result, there is little you can actually change on laptops - the good ones may have few removable components, while most would have, just about the HDD and keyboard. Swappable components are also quite expensive, too.

Building a laptop is too much work, involving too much effort, money, and time. For very little gain. At most, you will get some improved performance over the majority of laptops, but for all the resources you've poured into that, you could have probably built yourself 2 PCs.

I built my PC from scratch, should I do the same with my laptop? And if I were to build it from scratch, where should I buy my parts from, and is it any more difficult?

I suppose the above should answer these questions, but for the sake of completeness, here are the answers (in order): No. I don't know. YES!

Now, for some actual advice: depending on your budget, you could go for a PC + laptop (so, a graphics card and a cheap netbook of some sort, or even a tablet + stand + keyboard) or, if that's not possible, invest in a laptop that has a better video card. Not necessarily a gaming laptop, as those tend to be on the expensive side, but there are some "normal" laptops with ATI/nVidia cards which should work just as well. You can refer to NotebookCheck [http://www.notebookcheck.net/] when choosing laptops.

I think that's most of the direct advice I can give you, really. I'll supplement it with some more pieces of related advice:
- In my years of university study, I've not really been in a room that's too small for a desktop. Yes, I've been in small rooms, one year I rented a room literally 2 by 3 metres big [footnote]for the record, it was about 2.5m high. Further for the record - it wasn't my entire living space - there was also a shared kitchen and bathroom/toilet, but it was my primary one[/footnote] where I had a bed, a (small) desk, a chair, a (small) wardrobe and about enough space to open the door. Even then, I could have had a desktop in there...if I had a desktop, at that point, that is. Even the smallest university accommodation I have seen had enough space for a desktop.
- if you do go for a laptop, make sure you clean up all the crap they come with preinstalled, which is either useless, annoying or not of really great value. Given that you've built your own PC, I'm inclined to believe you are aware which software which not.
- further on laptops - you can squeeze a bit more hard drive space on them, as they come with one recovery partition on the hard drive. If you've ever installed any OS, you should be completely OK to wipe that partition and claim the few gigs for something else. I've used mine for my Linux swap partitions.

At first I was a little disappointed to see that there was only one post on this thread, but it appears you said all that needs to be said, so thank you. I'm now leaning more towards getting a new graphics card, considering what you've just told me. Before I do that though, how can I tell for absolutely certain that my graphics card is burnt out? Before you answer, I should probably tell how it got messed up in the first place. For whatever reason, games were no longer recognizing my graphics card, even though my control panel still listed it and said it was running properly. So, after some reading, I decided to try a clean install of all the card's drivers. However, after uninstalling the drivers, I couldn't get any image on my monitor except for a black screen. I tried removing the card so it would use the integrated GPU just so I could get the drivers installed, but it won't allow me to install them without the card being plugged in to the motherboard, which in turn just brings back the black screen. Any idea what's wrong? I apologize again for my ignorance on this, I really only know enough of the bare basics to build the thing and keep viruses off of it.