Always get an extended 3 year warranty with a laptop. Gaming laptops have a propensity to fail or develop annoying problems, especially ones from HP and Lenovo.
I'm aware. Parts costs outside of warranty and having to let mouth breathers at some "authorized service center" like Microcenter try and repair it are my biggest turn offs with laptops. I used to repair them for a living myself, and I know all too well how the quality of hardware technicians has declined in the last few years.
It's definitely the worst time in history to be a PC enthusiast. In the past we've seen volatile memory prices, much more expensive CPU's, high storage prices, etc. However, we've not really seen them all super expensive at the same time.
What's not easy to stomach is the noise a gaming laptop makes when at full load.
What does "near desktop level" means exactly?
Only issue is that it's Gigabyte. They don't have the best reputation. Who knows what kind of cheap PSU they have paired with that in the enclosure. There will be a performance hit but it would still be faster than a 5080 and of course, more VRAM.
It's their way of acknowledging that Thunderbolt still can't provide throughput that truly equals what we get with PCIe. Over the years, I've done a lot of research on these types of solutions, and ultimately, increased stuttering and lower FPS can become a major issue, but it has come a long way.
I looked into it and finding a laptop that has thunderbolt 5 doesn't seem that easy to start. The ones that have it already have at least a 5070 Ti built in, but most have a 5090 or 5080. It would make more sense to buy an external GPU if it had no dedicated GPU just an integrated one. But I haven't been able to find any with Thunderbolt 5 that is not a hiend gaming or workstation laptop.
Your not wrong. I've experienced this gaming on my own laptop from time to time. I recently had issues with my desktop and hooked my laptop up to my monitor and I had to game with my headphones on. My desktop isn't nearly that loud despite having 9 case fans, an SSD fan and of course, my 5090's GPU fans.
To be clear, laptops (especially on the high end), aren't 1:1 with their desktop counterparts for performance. You have slower RAM, GPU's are limited in the power available to them. For example, the mobile 5090 is limited to 150w of power consumption while their desktop counterparts take upwards of 600w. You aren't going to get the same GPU and memory clocks with those limitations. Those limits are partly due to cooling limitations in a laptop and partly due to the limits of the power available in such platforms.
I hate noise, and I also hate headphones, even on my desktop I had to make a custom fan curve for my GPU for it to be barely tolerable.
Of course not, but it is a waste of money to have any kind of dedicated gpu internally if I'm going to use an external GPU. That was my point.
Honestly 3 years ago I would have said a gaming laptop as your primary device is a waste of money, you're over paying for sub standard performance. Now a days... you're paying less of a performance tax for a high end gaming laptop than you are for a 5090... so go for it.
