High end gaming laptops recommendations gaming laptop

Important update:

The recommended high end gaming laptops list will now be found in the best gaming laptops new comparison system. Please use it.

This section is for those of you who wants very high performance gaming laptops. The recommendations will be for gaming laptops that are equipped with the GTX 675M GPU and up – GTX 680M and Radeon 7970M. The best of these laptops offer very high performance per price and maybe even highest than the midrange gaming laptops (GT 650M like) – unlike desktop configuration probably. The GTX 680M and Radeon 7970M have no problem performing even as high as twice the GT 650M / GTX 660M / Radeon 7850M GPUs laptops, but some of them actually cost less than twice.

If you’re not sure you want these laptops, you have to do you research. But as a quick quide – do you want highest settings for each and every game, probably even for the next two years? Are you good with high weight of 7-9 lbs? Are you good with average-at-best mobility in terms of battery running times?

If you answered the first question “yes”, then you have to ask yourself why and answer again. If you still answer yes – that is the place for you. The other two question are packed within the first one as of today.

If you’ve answer “no” then go to one of the other articles, like the under 1000$ gaming laptop to get very high gaming performance in almost any situation but also saving money and have higher mobility in terms of weight and battery.

Anyway, I suggest that you consider buying a cooling pad. Better get the temps a little lower, even for a 800$ gaming laptop.

GTX 675MX / GTX 680M vs Radeon 7970M gaming laptops

So, currently I’ll recommend buying a GTX 675MX and especially GTX 680M solutions over the Radeon 7970M for those of you who don’t want to wait for good drivers, hoping they will make the 7970M as fast as the 680M unquestionably (notebookcheck benchmarks show it is as fast and even faster if you eliminate the Enduro problems, but these benchmarks quality might not be the best).

If you are good with almost highest performance until good drivers will come up and you also prefer to save these 250$ (probably before the end of the year), than take the 7970M.

UPDATE: The new drivers really improved the performance of the 7970M. These numbers will be probably even better as there are still some differences between the hotfix supplied to Anandtech and the official 12.11 drivers. Also, according to Anandtech, AMD promised there will be more drivers releases and we have a good ground to believe that the numbers will be improved since some numbers are really strange, like in the Diablo 3 results in the Anandtech test, where you can see that the 7970M performs about as half as the 680M – doesn’t make sense at all.

Currently, the performance of the 7970M is good enough so some gaming laptops equipped with the 7970M can be recommended (like the MSI GX60), because the performance you get for the price is quite good.

About the GTX 680M vs 7970M thing. Compared to the GTX 680M, the Radeon 7970M sometimes equals it and sometimes not with the average in favor of the GTX. According to the Anandtech benchmarks, the Radeon 7970M excels in titles where AMD had worked with the developer to optimize the game to its hardware (like sleeping dogs, Dirt Showdown and more) and other benchmarks confirm it. Same for the GTX 680M. But that’s not the only case. Skyrim, too, see better performance with the 7970M and BF3 numbers are very close to each other. So, the GTX 680M is generally faster currently, but the 7970M is really fast and and it’s a matter of price really.

Moreover, based on the numbers we have so far, we can say that the 7970M should be at least as fast and probably considerably faster than the slower GTXs – GTX 675MX and GTX 670MX. Maybe that’s why Nvidia released them so quitely. This makes my mind about the MSI GX60 we’ve already mentioned, because for its price you’ll only get GTX 675M / 670MX level performance.

Important updates

1. New in the front – the new Kepler based GTX 670MX and GTX 675MX. The GTX 670MX should easily bang the GTX 675M on head, as far as I can see. That changes things. And talking about fronts – I sure hope they will stay in the gaming scene alone.
2. MSI GX60 with AMD quad A10-4600M and Radeon 7970M for 1200$ – the cheapest with 7970M by far and the benchmarks are flattering if you are going for high-end-extreme-details-1080p gaming.

Recommended GTX 675MX / GTX 680M and Radeon HD 7970M laptops (Under 1800$)

Everything on 1080p and max settings. 1400$-1600$ for basic configurations

About the GTX 675MX – it will give you probably something like +20%-30% (averagly) compared to the old GTX 675M, but will consume much lower energy. It’s still much lower performance compared to the 680M. The GTX 675MX should also be slower than the 7970M.

Fire in the hall:

Recommended GTX 675M / GTX 670MX laptops

Get a very high performance gaming laptop and save some bucks (price: 1100$-1300$ for basic configurations)

The new Kepler based GTX 670MX and GTX 675M should have about the same performance with the 670MX consuming considerably less power plus I think you can probably OC to such a level you will see its impact.

UPDATE:

The new MSI GX60 (CompSource, newegg, J&R, Adorama, , XoticPC) with A10-4600M and Radeon 7970M is now available and delivers excellent performance for 1200$ – that’s a new bar for 1200$!

I’ve included the GX60 although it has a Radeon 7970M GPU and not the 675M / 670MX, because it’s in the same price range.

I want a new Windows 7 copy:

NOW ALL “FORCE” gaming laptops come with free Windows 7!

Complete list

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