Is gaming laptop good for cs students? (14 facts)
Is gaming laptop good for CS students?
should students buy a gaming laptop for studying computer science or a traditional laptop is enough?.
In this article, we’re going to give an upcoming computer science student full guidance about which is the best choice to make.
Is a gaming laptop necessary for CS students?
The gaming laptop is not necessary for cs students, traditional laptops are enough unless a computer science student thinks about doing some 3d modeling or rendering. At this moment gaming laptops create a difference.
Especially if you are interested in the gaming industry or love to test games, having a good gaming computer is important to do this job. Or even interested to make a game by yourself.
More than that, you will not need to have a gaming laptop for a cs major, it is enough to have this following configuration to run code or do your class assignment without having a problem.
- 8 GB of ram
- 512 GB SSD
- i5 intel or M1 chip from apple like MacBook pro
- The 16-inch display is better to have a bigger screen that is much more comfortable than 13 inches, especially for coding.
This doesn’t mean that gaming laptop does not have an advantage, to prove that we’re going to list in the next paragraph the 10 differences that will create a gaming laptop for a computer science student.
So if you are interested in high efficiency and speed, keep reading to know more about this topic.
The 10 things that gaming laptop can add to CS students
These are the 10 advantages that cs students will have by owning a gaming laptop compared to traditional laptops:
- you can compile large projects faster
- gaming laptops are interesting for CS student interested in gaming development
- you can run multiple IDE at the same time
- you will have more storage capacity
- gaming laptops are excellent for machine learning
- They have powerful CPU’s
- run external monitors
- are useful for cs students who love animation
- good for cs students who loves 3d modeling
- are great to have a fun for playing video games
you can compile large projects much faster
Gaming laptops are three to 3 to 4 times more powerful than traditional laptops. So for students who prefer to run their programs or code much faster using a gaming laptop will be more noticeable than traditional laptops.
with a gaming laptop, you don’t have to worry about building or compiling large programs.
These kinds of laptops are equipped with powerful processors that can run a lot of applications at the same time and in record time.
gaming laptops are interesting for CS student interested in gaming development
For students interested in-game development having a gaming laptop will be a good idea. Especially, if you want to make your own games and test them.
To develop a game you need both things:
- Powerful CPU
- Powerful graphic card
These two options are located in gaming laptops. In other words, you would have a powerful CPU and at the same time high quality and powerful graphic card.
This is so important to run a game’s code, but the most interesting thing is to build graphic design elements for games that need to have a powerful graphic card.
you can run multiple IDE’s at the same time
If you would like to run multiple IDE as a computer science student it’s better to work on a gaming laptop than a traditional one.
You don’t have to worry to install powerful and heavy IDE at the same time like:
- Visual Studio
- Eclipse
- NetBeans
- Pycharm
- android studio
It is right that you won’t install these programs all because you need to work on them.
but as a computer science student especially in the first year, you love to try things to figure out what is the best road to choose or which specialty you will pick like:
- Web development
- app Phone development
- Desktop app development
- or other subfields
gaming Laptops solve the issue of removing programs or uninstalling them to keep a laptop faster.
you will have more storage capacity
Gaming laptops tend to have the largest storage than traditional laptops. For instance, if we pick MacBook Air we find that’s the standard storage 256 GB or 512 GB SSD.
But most gaming laptops tend to have more than 1Tb Storage. As a result, allows computer science students to have more room for multiple activities like installing virtual machines which take larger spaces.
For instance, a machine box can take up to 50 GB of Storage. So the 256 Gb SD will end up fastly which force a lot of computer student to buy an external and expensive hard driver.
gaming laptops are excellent for machine learning
For interested computer science students, learning machine learning using a traditional laptop will be a shortcoming. In this case, buying a gaming laptop will not be optional but an obligation.
Gaming laptops have powerful CPUs and graphic cards this helps to treat a lot amount of data in a short period of time. So this is what machine learning needs.
The gaming laptop is more powerful and faster to help you train the machine.
They have powerful CPU’s
Gaming laptops have a powerful CPU as we noticed above, they have RAMs that’s can go up to 64 GB. While traditional laptops don’t exceed 16 GB of RAM.
The most popular and traditional laptops run only with 8 GB Ram which is 8 times less than a powerful Gaming laptop.
That is to say, you can:
- run multiple heavy apps at the same time
- Open hundred of web tabs windows crashing
- Don’t face problems in Editing videos
And so many problems that can the normal laptop user face.
External monitor
Traditional laptops can’t drive many external monitors, for instance, if we take a MacBook Air as an example we found that it cant drive more than one single monitor.
This particularity is so important for Developers because the average developer works with more than two monitors.
So in the future as a software developer, you will need to work with at least 2 monitors or more than that.
You could read this article about dual monitors and know how much they are useful for students.
While some gaming laptops can drive up to 4 monitors at the same time.
useful for cs students who love animation
If you love to do animation you should buy a gaming laptop there is no option. You can’t do animation with a normal laptop because that’s required a strong graphic card.
So for cs students who love animation, having a gaming laptop will be the best option and do their hobby.
good for cs student who love 3d modeling
The same thing for cs students who love 3D modeling and fan users of Blender or Maya. Having a gaming laptop will create a huge difference in this case.
Running these programs on traditional laptops is barely impossible. Even though some good traditional laptops can run them but they won’t work properly as they do in gaming laptops.
you could read this article “learn 3d modeling from home “7 simple steps”.
are great to have a fun for playing video games
For computer science, students playing video games in off times is good to chill out and relieve the study stress.
having a gaming laptop is it best idea to take advantage of the potential they can provide to run any game without Limits.
In addition, the graphic quality that gaming Laptops provide is better and gives a great experience for gamers. In order, to have fun moments in their adventures.
you could read this article Playing video games in college is a good idea?
4 things that CS should be aware of laptop gaming
But, for a computer science student, a gaming laptop has some drawbacks that may not be acceptable for many students.
we’re going to list the 4 drawbacks that computer science students should know about gaming laptops:
- short battery life
- portability
- noisy
- expensive
short battery life
According to the experience that we made about gaming laptops and exposed in our article “11 facts about gaming laptops as a college student” we found that gaming laptops, in general, have terrible battery durability.
In general, they don’t last for more than 2 hours of consistent gaming and 3 hours of normal tasking like watching videos or browsing on the internet.
So as a computer science student you have almost to keep them plugged in a charge while traditional laptops like MacBooks can last for the whole day of college, up to 9 hours.
in other words, if you completely charge it in a home you don’t even need to carry a charger with you.
So traditional laptops can last 3 times more than gaming laptops.
not protable
the range of thickness that gaming laptops have is between 20 mm to 60mm, while traditional laptops are finner and don’t exceed 40mm. To clarify, we don’t talk about older laptop versions we take about what is in the market today.
For instance, if we compare between MacBook air as a traditional laptop like Acer nitro 5 as a gaming laptop we find:
- MacBook air is only 19mm
- Acer nitro is 26 mm
The second thing is the weight we found that gaming laptops are weighing 2 times than traditional laptops, which makes them painful to carry for long time walkings.
So instead of carrying a 1.5kg laptop, you might carry double of that.
noisy
gaming laptops are generating more noise than traditional ones, they could generate double of what normal laptops have.
- The normal laptop generates between 30 to 40 dB.
- The gaming laptop can generate up to 60 dB.
But the killer point is Macbook air generate 0 dB which means completely silent, you can sleep or meditate on the side because simply it doesn’t have any fan. you could this video to know more info about.
expensive
gaming laptops are expensive and cost double of traditional ones. the traditional laptop can cost $1000 while a good gaming laptop starts from $2000 which is not affordable for anyone.
Conclusion
for a computer science major, a gaming laptop will not be necessary to have unless you are:
- making video editing
- 3d rendering or modeling
- love to have a powerful device and do complex things at the same time
- learn machine learning or deep learning
- love gaming
other than that having a good laptop device like MacBook will be enough.
but you have to know something about MacBook before you make a killer buying mistake.
you could read this article “MacBook is good for computer science students?”
