Best Gaming Laptops as of March 2015

Best Gaming Laptops as of March 2015: In an age of tablets and smartphones the laptop still reigns supreme in one arena, gaming. While there are a few tablets with the horsepower to play high in games, few have great built in controls and most are still a good bit too cumbersome to be considered comfortable or sufficiently portable to be worth the cost or effort. If you want to play some high end and graphics intensive games on the go your best bet is still a laptop, and below are the two best choices around as of March 2015.

Best Gaming Laptop: Asus G751JY-T7009H

It just rolls off the tongue doesn’t it? The Asus G751JY-T7009H is considered by many to be amongst the most powerful and overall best gaming laptop on the market today. It prices around $2500, which for this class of performance is actually a really good deal. It features a sleek case, though it does use that kind of plastic that leaves fingerprint all over it if you aren’t careful. It features a rock solid cooling system porting out of the back and an illuminated keyboard, which has become more or less standard for gaming laptops.

It features four USB 3.0 ports, an HDMI and VGA out, a blue ray players and of course an SD card reader. The big draw is a Thunderbolt port, which is a kind of replacement for PCI Express on laptops. It’s useful when connecting to large storage systems and there’s even some neat ways to connect to older peripherals that haven’t been used in laptops for a long time. The G751JY also hosts Gigabit WLAN, Bluetooth 4.0, and all of the usual wireless bells and whistles modern devices tend to have.

The keyboard is great with highly tactical backlit keys, a few extra bindable buttons, and it all feels really nice to the touch. It’s not often that we get to talk about the trackpad, as few gamers use them, but the one featured on the G751JY is massive. You still won’t want to use it on fast paced games like first person shooters, but now it is a viable option for slower based games and offers a very accurate touch.

The screen is full 1080p with 127ppi. It features really wide viewing angles, great color, and excellent blackness where displayed. If you plan on doing some serious Photoshop or design work the color accuracy is excellent to boot.

But you came for specs right? Well this thing is no joke with an Intel Core i7-4710HQ. Gee remember when things were named actual names and not just bland serial numbers? Well the new i7 runs as high as 2.5GHz to 3.5GHz processor depending on how hard you are running it. It features Hyper-threading allowing you to execute up to eight threads at the same time! It comes with a Geforce GTX 880M which is a beefy card, among the most powerful on the market. It’s powerful enough to run multimonitor setups and just about in game under the sun in with high settings throttled up, even if thing eats up battery (but it isn’t like you were really going to use the battery much anyway). All in all this will play everything out on the market and you won’t likely need to upgrade for a long time.

Best Gaming Laptop: Schenker XMG P505 PRO

Schenker? Who is Schenker? Well they are the immerging brand behind the new XMG series, and the P505 Pro delivers high end PC gaming in a thin and light case. PC gaming laptops are usually bulky affairs, sometimes dubbed “desktop replacements” as they really aren’t meant to be moved around often but offer the ability to be able to be taken on the go if needed. The XMG P505 is not a desktop replacement, it is a truly portable laptop that can hang with the best of them in terms of raw horse power.

The Schenker XMG P505 features a chassis with a 3 cm tall case closed made out of aluminum that feels solid but light. It cools through the case and up through the keyboard and a bit in the back, along with four USB 3.0 ports, two mini-display ports, an HDMI out and an SD card slot. Despite its compact design everything is really easy to get to if you ever need to service the laptop yourself which is a huge bonus for tinkerers and repair technicians. The keyboard and touchpad doesn’t suck, but isn’t as great as the Asus listed above by any stretch of the imagination but they get the job done, but the screen is serviceable at full HD and great color.

So what do you get in such a small package? This also comes with the Core i7-4710HQ with the same stats as the bigger Asus offering. The GPU is the big difference, with the Geforce GTX 980M, which is a very powerful card, potentially even more powerful than the Geforce GTX 880M in the Asus. So why would you choose the Asus at all? Well the P505 only comes with 15’ screen first off, and second to deal with the fact that the laptop is in a much smaller package the GPU is configured a bit weaker than what it could be. Of course you can just go in and crank it to the max, but be warned you may run the risk of overheating, though it should be said that the P505 has excellent heat dispersion, especially if you set up a separate keyboard and mouse and sit a bit away from the machine. And despite the fact that this is billed as a compact gaming laptop the battery life isn’t that great even when not used for gaming with just under four hours of battery life.

Still the XMG P505 PRO is easily one of the best gaming laptops of the year, as is the ASUS, and it can even bit a bit more powerful in a smaller package if you are willing to turn up the dial a bit on power. It’s also cheaper, at around $1500 without any bells or whistles, but it’s only really sold in the UK locally so expect a bit if shipping if you import it state side.

You’ll probably end up spending the same on this as the Asus G751JYonce you bump up the RAM and storage options though, so really it comes down to how big you want your screen and how much portability matters to you. The Asus isn’t really that big compared to gaming laptops of the past, but the 17’ screen and heavy bottom case edges it on the large size for a lot of gamers on the move, so really ether choice works to suit your needs.