By the way one more thing. conventional wisdom for gamers is to use Nvidia cards the reason for this is the high end Nvidia cards (1080, and 2080 series) are faster than current AMD's GPU's however I've never seen a gaming laptop with those GPU's or even a 1070 in them without being severely thermally constrained. That means on Laptops right now the field between AMD and Nvidia GPU's is actually level. Also AMD does have an advantage on Linux the amdgpu driver is GPL and part of the Kernel. this driver is good for them most pare with a couple of exceptions for which you need to install the amdgpu-pro driver which is not a kernel driver instead it actually communicates with the amdgpu driver in the kernel which means no compiles of proprietary kernel drivers on kernel updates. The two exceptions are as follows. 1) the amdgpu-pro driver is required for crossfire (multi GPU) support this may not sound important but it is if the laptop has a Ryzen mobile CPU (that are all actually APU's with their own GPU built in) 2) if you do a lot of work with Open-CL the amdgpu driver can do it but the amdgpu-pro driver is faster for ececuting Open-CL Applications. there is also a limitation to the amdgpu-pro driver it is pre-compiled and they only make packages for RHEL, Ubuntu LTS, and SuSE (no Fedora support :( ) this shouldn't be a problem for Scientific Linux because the RHEL version should work but it is something to keep in mind. by the way the latest Ryzen 7 Mobile 2700U APU should be playable in most games if they need a budget gaming laptop
I have an Asus ROG Strix GL702ZC its on the high end side and the battery life is terrible, but its got a desktop Ryzen 7 CPU 8 cores 16 threads, a 4GB AMD RX 580 video card, a 17" freesync screen. 32GB of ram,.an SSD, and a hard drive. The thing i like about it is I can easily play games on at higher frame rates than I've ever seen on a laptop (100FPS+ in most games) and it is also a power house for running VM's and containers under Linux. I can easily set up mini clouds on it when I want to test or develop network applications. it also surprisingly is cooled well and I had no issues installing Linux. I've tested it with RHEL and Fedora, and I know some one else who has one running Ubuntu. The only bad thing I would say about it running Linux is Asus has not signed on to LVFS yet so firmware updates are not automatic, but can still be done at boot via a usb thumb drive via the BIOS so its safe to blow away the windows partitions :) . By the way don't listen to any one who says Intel CPU's are better for games on a laptop they really cant handle a video card big enough for the slight extra speed on the Intel CPU's to have any noticeable.The new stuff Valve funded the development of for gaming for Linux like the DirectX11 to Vulcan stuff utilizes the extra cores on the AMD CPU's much better than the same game on Windows. Most games using DirectX11 (on Windows or Wine) can only use 2 cores and 4 cores if they are DrectX12, but Vulcan can use more and the AMD video card supports Vulcan on Linux even in the GPL driver now included with newer Linux Kernels.
That said its huge and heavy I often joke about it being more like a Compaq portable than a laptop lol. also the battery life off the charger is less than an hour so it does have some down sides.
Please see the list below. These come from a popular press article, but
I cannot post the URL as the university that provides this email
rewrites all URLs, and thus I have no certainty that any URL I post (or
is embedded in any thread to which I respond) will not be corrupted.
At the end of the popular press account, there are mentions of specific
laptop models. As I do not have the time to research this, but a number
of students want to know, which if any of these are SL 7 compatible
(meaning, all hardware is "supported")? I assume that a larger number
are Ubuntu supported, in that Ubuntu keeps closer to the "bleeding edge"
of Linux hardware support.
Thanks for any specific information.
Yasha Karant
Excerpt:
How to buy a gaming laptop
They're cheaper, lighter and more powerful than ever before.
Devindra Hardawar
If your priority is smooth gameplay, I'd recommend a laptop with a
15.6-inch 1080p screen and either NVIDIA's GTX 1060 or 1070 Max-Q GPU.
The former will run most games well at 60fps and beyond, while the 1070
will let you reach even higher frame rates and better-quality graphics
settings. Mid-range machines like HP's Omen and some of Dell's Alienware
models are a good start. If you've got a slightly bigger budget, you
should consider laptops with high-refresh-rate screens: MSI's GS65
Stealth Thin, Gigabyte's Aero 15X, Razer's Blade and pricier Alienware
configuration.
But if you're on a budget, stick to machines with the GTX 1050, 1050Ti
or 1060 Max-Q, like Dell's G3 and G5 series. You won't get
high-refresh-rate monitors with these, but they'll have enough
horsepower to reach a silky 60fps. They're ideal if you're mainly
playing MOBA titles and undemanding games like Overwatch.
It's easy to get overwhelmed by the number of options today, but that
variety is ultimately a good thing. What was once a category filled with
huge, ugly monstrosities now includes genuinely gorgeous machines that
aren't much heavier than a MacBook Pro.
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