My mom likes to play No Man’s Sky and Valheim, but her Asus TUF started freezing on games. RMA found no problems and sent it back to her but it still happens. I ordered a Legion for her but now I see these posts about all Nvidia 40-series laptops freezing up. What’s a gaming mom supposed to do?
I want to echo the steam deck recommendations, but not because I have one, but rather because I daily drove gaming laptops for the better part of a decade and hated it
Sincerely. Get a device dedicated for gaming, not a compromise between form factor and expected output. A cheap used Thinkpad with some knock around Linux distro will do 90% of what you likely need a laptop for, and put the rest of your budget into a tricked out steam deck. You’ll have money left over relative to a gaming laptop, too, which are always – and I mean, always, terribly low on battery life, extraordinarily hot, and rarely performant enough to justify either shortfall. Usually they weigh a ton too.
I’m glad gaming laptops are improving steadily and integrated graphics are improving to shore up the slack through things like the steam deck and also just letting most laptops play games better without breaking the bank, but I’d have been far happier with a cheap gaming computer and a cheap laptop than an expensive gaming laptop as my only option. And in lieu of a full tower for gaming, a steam deck is your next best option
The only exception, in my eyes, is if you need a laptop as a portable video editing workstation as well as for gaming. Then gaming laptops become a more valuable proposition, but even still I’d go with the above. I just figured I’d mention something that gaming laptops have over a steam deck or other comparable offerings, steam decks make a creative workload a lot more cumbersome than a proper laptop would be
The ryzen thinkpads (T14s in my case) deliver graphics good enough for most indie games and older games. Combined with a switch I haven’t felt the need for anything else.