Hi all, I'm not exactly sure if this I'd where I should put this but I'm gonna be going away for university this fall. Will be going from Toronto to Vancouver and was just wondering if a small gaming PC would be the best choice or a gaming laptop? Obviously I'm gonna be studying but whenever I feel like having a break I'd like to hop on and play some games. I will be staying with family, no dorms or anything. Only times I will be going back home is for Christmas and whenever the year is over (hoping I don't fail anything and have to take summer school lol). Would it make more sense just to buy a gaming laptop? I already have a laptop I was planning to use, it's not great at running games or anything but it should work for school and browsing. Or should I just build a decent PC and leave it there? Or even travel with it. How hard is it to travel with a PC on a plane? I have about 6 months until I have to leave so saving up money will be no problem. Been a really difficult choice for me to make! Thanks :)
Just build either an ITX or small-micro atx system. The N200 from corsair is the largest case I would recommend but something along the lines of a Sugo SG05 is what I would go for personally.
I personally think a desktop computer would be better. It would be much more powerful and outlast the laptop. You could build a micro atx or mini itx which would be easy to move for when you go on vacation.
If you build a micro atx or mini itx desktop going Intel is basically your only option, unless getting one of amd's new apus. Their GPU performance (from what I heard) is around a amd 7770 or gtx 650.
If you'll be moving around MOST of the time the gaming laptop is your best bet but will get much less performance. If you plan to keep your computer in one place most of the time the desktop would be better, in my opinion.
All in all said, its mostly Dependant on how much you plan to move around, how high quality gameplay you want and what you really want.
If you are going to university then a laptop is an absolute must. Lectures are much easier to deal with when you can follow the slides/notes on your own machine and make savable notes as you go. Also, taking readings/journal articles to tutorials in pdf on a laptop beats carrying around bundles of paper by a long-shot. Universities are increasingly relying on students having portable computers, so bank on them requiring that you have one at least some of the time.
I think I found a nice middle-ground with my machine. I'm a PhD student and do a bit of teaching and really needed a good combination of portability and power (I run some pretty heavy computationally heavy analyses). I'm also an avid gamer and wanted to be able to play in my down time.
For this reason I went with a Gigabyte P27k, a 17" laptop with an i7, 16gb of RAM, a GTX 765m, an SSD and extra HDD out of the box and space for a second HDD. I now run it with Windows 8.1 on the SSD, use one HDD as general storage and have Linux installed on the other HDD. This machine does everything I need and while it isn't the smallest/lightest laptop on the market, it is perfectly portable (I just slip it in my backpack). I have also been running Skyrim at 1080p without issue and can pretty much max out other things I enjoy like the Dragon Age and Mass Effect series.
If you can find something like this in your price range (which is pretty reasonable given that you aren't dealing with the crazy mark ups we live with in Australia) you would be set I think.