12 facts about gaming laptops for engineering students

gaming laptops are good for engineering students, in this article, we will respond to this question with proof.

So you have to keep reading to know the 14 facts about gaming laptops for engineering students.

The 7 advantages of gaming laptops for engineering students

were going to list the 7 advantages of gaming laptops for engineering students:

  • gaming laptops are useful for architect engineering
  • gaming laptops are useful for mechanical engineering
  • gaming laptops are good for computer science engineering
  • are poweful to produce music
  • good to play games
  • video editing
  • they came with additonal ports

Gaming laptops are useful for mechanical engineering

if you have a gaming laptop as a mechanical engineer you will notice a big difference between traditional laptops. You can run all the heavy mechanical software designs at once without worrying about crashing problems. In other words, you will notice the fluency of working with CAD with this kind of laptop.

Especially when it comes to rendering models, a gaming laptop has a powerful CPU and graphic card that will allow you as a mechanical engineer student to render your models before your colleagues. At the same time, you can run other programs or web tabs without any problem.

It is not necessary to have a gaming laptop to render 3d images but if you do you will notice the difference between your colleagues.

gaming laptops are useful for architect engineering

Having a gaming laptop as an architecture student is different for students who use Autocad or Sketchup to render 3d house images or furniture. The speed is noticeable, to clarify the fans are going to run louder but the results are amazing.

as an architect student, you can render up to 3 times faster having a gaming laptop than the traditional one.

Gaming laptops are designed to have a good performance in graphic tasks like:

  • 3d modeling
  • video editing
  • rendering 2d or 3d images

So architecture designers can benefit from this capacity to save time in their works. Moreover, a gaming laptop can handle anything to ask them to do. It is like having a key that opens all the doors.

Gaming laptops are good for computer science engineering

for computer engineering having a gaming laptop will not be necessary but it will create a difference in your daily task.

if you have a gaming laptop as a computer engineer student you will be able to:

  • play outside home
  • drive mutiple monitors at the same time
  • They are useful to learn machine learning
  • you will phave a good storage (good gaming laptop have more than 1TB )
  • you can run multiple software IDE’s at the same time
  • you could run and test your code faster
  • devolop and test games

Are poweful to produce music

for engineering student who loves music having a gaming laptop is beneficial for two reasons:

  • powerfulness
  • good quality speaker

powerfulness==> you can composite a lot of songs and add a lot of variables to create a professional sound, in this case is impossible for some normal laptop to do this task. This operation requires powerful CPUs.

good quality speaker==> having a good and clear sound is really important when it comes to music production, evaluating a sound without a poor quality speaker will be indefectible and a loss of time.

Good to play games

There is nothing better than playing video games stages after a long study day, it is a great thing to recompense yourself and chill out from college stress. With gaming laptops, there is no barrier you could play any game you love like:

  • GTA 5
  • League of legends
  • tomb raider
  • Minecraft
  • Call of duty

But it should be with regulation you could read this article Do successful students play video games? 7 facts

video editing

if you are an engineering student who makes videos and shares them on social media like youtube, or Facebook, a gaming laptop is something you should look for because they have:

  • high resolution screens 4K full HD
  • great for color grading
  • great contrast
  • the brightness is 2 times that traditional laptop
  • A high-frequency screen gives more smoothness to videos

They comes with a mutiple ports

gaming laptop comes with multiple ports like:

  • USB ports 3 to 4
  • HDMI ports 2
  • USB c ports

the traditional laptops don’t support all, the HDMI or the USB-A ports so there is a positive point to notice.

The 5 killer cons of gaming laptops for engineering students

the gaming laptop has 5 cons that make it bad for engineering students, so engineering students should be aware before.

gaming laptops are:

  • expensive
  • have short life battery
  • heavier
  • thicker
  • noisy
  • desktop gaming computers are more powerful than them

Expensive

The first thing that you should consider as an engineering student is that gaming laptops are expensive, they are not like traditional ones. good gaming laptops start from $2000 and can reach up to $9000 for extreme cases.

$2000 is the double price of MacBook Air or surface pro laptops, so you have to think twice before buying them. This price is not affordable, especially for students who have a lot of expenses and poor income resources.

you might find some models under $1000 but they have shortcomings and problems. In other words, the price that you have to fix in mind for a gaming laptop is $2000 above.

Short life battery

gaming laptops have a terrible battery life, after a test that we made we found that gaming laptops don’t last more than 2.5 hours for noraml tasks like web browsing watching videos, or reading.

But when engineering students tend to play games, they barely finish the 2 hours while some others don’t overcome the 1.5hours. So as an engineering student, you don’t have to expect that your gaming laptop lasts more than 2 hours in general.

in addition according to gaming, laptop battery has to be changed between 1 to 2 years while a normal laptop lasts for 5 years and this is why:

  • Normal laptop users charge their battery laptop 2 times per day as an average
  • Gaming laptop users can charge more than 7 to 8 times a day.

in other words, students charge gaming laptops 4 times more than traditional laptops. you could see more information in the table below.

Battery cycle 

Tradtional laptop

Gaming laptop

How many times laptop is charged

per day

2 times

up to 8 times

Charge cycle

1000

1000

The durabilty time

500 days = 1.5 year

125 days= 4 months 

The cycle of charge means the number of times that you can charge a battery before its performance decrease. To clarify, in this example you will charge a laptop battery 1000 times its performance decreases.

as we’ve seen in the table the gaming laptop performance starts decreasing after 4 to 5 months of use this is what explains the short life of gaming laptop battery.

if you are an engineering student you should always plug it in the charge, you will almost do that for each class. So they are not portable at all.

Heavier

gaming laptops are heavier so if you are an engineering student and you walk every day to a college this might be a problem, they will drain you and stain your shoulders. Especially if you wear a messenger bag it will be more detrimental.

we made a comparison between these 3 laptops:

  • MacBook air
  • Microsoft laptop 4
  • Asus ROG Zephyrus (gaming laptop)

you could notice the difference in the table below.

Weight

Macbook air

Microsoft laptop 4

Gaming laptop

Asus ROG Zephyrus

Device weight 

1200g

1542g

2100g

Charger weight 

450g

120g

757g

Total 

1650g

1662g

2857g

From this example, we can notice that a gaming laptop is almost 2 heavier than a traditional laptop. But many gaming laptops are heavier than that.

So as a confirmation for engineering students, on average gaming laptops are heavier 2 times than traditional ones.

Thicker

gaming laptops tend to be thicker, sometimes they can be thicker 3 times than normal laptops, so if you have a stretch messenger bag or backpack you might need to change it to hold your gaming laptops. Moreover, it will be difficult to put a gaming laptop between your notebooks or textbooks.

The majority of engineering students buy individual bags for their gaming laptops.

3 times is not a fixed rule but to be more close and responded to the question we can say that:

  • laptop gaming thickness varies between 20 mm to 40mm
  • normal laptops thickness vary between 10mm to 25mm

we’re not taking into consideration the oldest laptop

So you can find gaming laptops thicker 4 times than traditional ones, especially for Chromebooks.

you could read this article for further information ” Chromebooks for STEM majors(7 things to know)

Noisy

for engineering students who don’t like noise, a gaming laptop is a big deception. Gaming laptops are louder 2 times than traditional ones.

To clarify more gaming laptops can generate between 40 to 60db that relates to the intensity of the processor and fans, moreover if a student is gaming or reading. If you play or render an image the processors will work at their maximum power, which forces fans to turn with high speed, meaning more noise.

While the noraml or traditional laptops don’t exceed 30 dB and 40dB as a maximum.

conclusion

All the numbers that you will find about gaming laptops are picked from the experience that we made and exposed in the article 11 facts about gaming laptops as a college student.

as an engineering student, if you love high performance and work on the edge of technology the gaming laptops are for you.

But if you look for portability or affordability gaming laptop is strictly to avoid.

yassin.ajanif

Yassin ajanif is a physics graduate and electromechanical engineer width more than 5 years in the field. My goal and my team are to share our experience to help you succeed in your career as a stem major. we talk about all tips, problems, and struggle STEM students face in their career and how to overcome them.