Alienware Area 51M vs. Asus ROG Mothership GZ700 vs. Razer Blade 15

Absolute power? Or a nod to portability? Nvidia now bifurcates its mobile GPU offerings, with full performance or so-called Max-Q options, the latter running lower clocks, drawing less power, and squeezing into slimmer systems. A thin-and-light laptop with an Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080? For real. But what makes for the better all-around gaming laptop?

ROUND 1

Portability

Thin-and-light laptops with Max-Q graphics are more portable than desktop replacement monsters. That’s a no-brainer. By way of example, the Razer Blade 15 is now available with Nvidia’s RTX 2080 mobile GPU, yet measures just 17.8mm thin, and weighs a little over 2kg. The Alienware Area 51M is 42mm at its thickest, and clocks in at nearly 4.5 kilos. The Asus Mothership is a little slimmer at 30mm, but weighs getting on for 5kg. The real question is whether that matters. Does outright performance simply trump portability? If all you care about is performance, the answer is yes. But if that’s all you care about, you should have bought a desktop. If you do care about portability, the question is how much, and in what context? The Razer Blade 15 is seriously slim, but would you want it as your daily driver? For us, the answer is yes, but only just. It’s on a par with a 15-inch MacBook Pro in that regard. Very portable, rather than ultraportable. As for the other two, the jury is out, mainly because of the Asus’s unusual ergonomics. We’ll need a little more hands-on time to see if it really offers a superior occasional portability proposition than the Alienware.

ROUND 2