Eric Grevstad The Best 17-Inch Laptops for 2019 Time to muscle up! Today's biggest-screen notebooks are formidable, full-featured desktop alternatives for work and play alike. Here's everything you need to know to choose the right 17-inch gaming rig or mobile workstation, along with our top lab-tested picks.How to Buy the Best Giant-Screen LaptopIf you're a big-picture sort of person, you need a laptop to match. You yearn for a notebook (the word 'laptop' is a bit of a misnomer for these bulky thigh-crushers) that not only capably replaces a desktop PC, but also gives you an easy-on-the-eyes, panoramic view of your workspace or playing field. That means a 17-inch model, one with the largest popular screen size in the portable universe. Seventeen-inch laptops feature displays that, technically, measure 17.3 inches on the diagonal (just as so-called 15-inch laptops usually measure 15.6 inches corner to corner).
![]()
The Razer Blade is built to be a very portable gaming laptop and Razer certainly have reached that objective. The body is only 0.7inch tall when the lid is closed and it weighs only 4.1lbs. The power brick is very small and light as well. Starting at $1,599, the Blade is one of the lightest gaming laptops around, delivering strong performance and over 6 hours of battery life. This is also the first system in the Blade line to offer.
That's enough for a magnified view of full HD or 1080p resolution (1,920 by 1,080 pixels), or a comfortable view of higher resolutions such as 4K (3,840 by 2,160), which can make you squint on a smaller screen.Should You Really Go This Large, Though?On the negative side, this screen size dictates a bulky machine—one that's often too big for a briefcase, requiring a special laptop bag, backpack, or roller bag, and too heavy for more than occasional transport between home and office or cubicle and conference room.The lightest 17-inch laptops weigh in at just under seven pounds. One of the heaviest, the, tips the scale at a back-breaking 10.1 pounds, and that's not counting its two ponderous AC power bricks. Airline tray table?
More like checked baggage. Nor should you expect long battery life from a plus-size notebook. These machines are designed to run on AC power most of the time. If yours can endure unplugged for more than four hours, consider yourself lucky. (Just take a look at the runtimes of our favorites in the comparison table above.)So, are these tradeoffs too much to suffer merely for a pleasing view?
Are luggables just the large-print books of the laptop world?No—they're also the performance leaders. Their chassis accommodate the most powerful processors and graphics cards, the strongest cooling systems, the most memory, and multiple solid-state drives (SSDs) or hard drives for ample storage. They have plenty of room for all the ports you might need, as well as spacious, near-desktop-class keyboards with full keypads for numeric data entry.Jumbo laptops aren't for frequent fliers, but they fill a big niche. Let's look at what they can do, and what to look for as you shop for one.Work or Play: Which Way, Amigo? A few 17-inch laptops are general-purpose PCs for people who want an occasionally portable system with a large screen.
Most, however, fall into one of two camps with diametrically opposed, but equally hardcore, audiences: mobile workstations, and serious gaming laptops.Both types can handle what many PC users think of as work: office productivity and email using Word, Excel, Outlook, Chrome, Slack, and so on. But mobile workstations, as seen in, laugh at such modest apps. Instead, they carry independent software vendor (ISV) certifications of compatibility with programs for way tougher computing jobs: computer-aided design (CAD) and advanced 3D modeling and rendering, crunching through huge scientific or engineering datasets, or delving into video editing and the creation of worlds for virtual reality.
And they rely on state-of-the-art CPU and GPU power to do so.With the exception that CPU muscle is a little less important while GPU strength is paramount, much the same applies to gaming rigs (also the stars of that's worth checking out). They're designed to play the latest and greatest titles at high speeds—at least 60 frames per second, double the rate recognized as providing smooth gameplay—with all the visual details and eye candy turned up to 11. Onscreen stuttering or tearing just won't cut it.
Lag can be fatal during a fragfest.Whichever class of 17-inch machine you are considering, you're likely drawn to it by the one big thing the two main types have in common: the screen. Let's look at that.The Display Panel: What to Look For. In the 17-inch class, workstation and gaming laptops alike benefit from choosing the right screen type. A solid baseline pick would be an in-plane switching (IPS) or indium gallium zinc oxide (IGZO) panel, which gives you the sharpest colors and contrast, as well as the widest off-center viewing angles.
Touch screens aren't very popular in either class, with both gamers and workstation pros preferring the pixel-by-pixel control of a mouse.Gamers often choose displays capped at 1080p resolution for high frame rates' sake; fast gaming at 4K resolution requires a costly, top-of-the-line graphics processor (GPU) like Nvidia's GeForce GTX 1080, RTX 2070, or RTX 2080. By contrast, some workstation users enjoy the highest-resolution screen possible to mimic the desktop experience of multiple monitors or for editing 4K video.
Some mobile workstations also excel at precisely matching what's seen on screen to your finished work's destined output, offering a choice of the web's sRGB, print's Adobe RGB, or cinema's DCI P3 palettes or color spaces.Most laptop LCDs have a refresh rate of 60Hz, redrawing the image on screen 60 times per second. That's fine for the human eye—television is 30Hz and most movies 24Hz—and for 90-plus percent of applications and users. But it's not enough for fanatic gamers who've invested in graphics chips that can crank out more than 60 frames per second. Hence the availability of gaming laptops with so-called 'high refresh' 120Hz, 144Hz, or even 240Hz displays.
Shoppers in this stratosphere will also find some screens that support Nvidia's G-Sync or (much more rarely) AMD's FreeSync technology, able to synchronize the refresh rate of the display on the fly to the GPU's output for smoother appearances.The Heart Under the Hood: CPU, Memory, and Storage. When it comes to CPUs, Intel parts teamed with discrete GeForce, Quadro, Radeon, or Radeon Pro graphics processors lead the popularity contest over AMD's mobile Ryzen 5 and 7 chips with their integrated graphics. The most popular option for 17-inch gaming notebooks is Intel's Core i7, in either 8th or 9th Generation guise (indicated by model numbers in the 8,000s and 9,000s respectively) with at least four processing cores. The mighty—and mighty costly—8th and 9th Generation Core i9 chips occupy the top of the market.For mobile workstations, the Core i7 and Core i9 are joined by Intel's Xeon processors, which offer support for server-style error correcting code (ECC) memory. Though outside the mainstream for ISV apps, ECC's ability to detect and fix single-bit memory errors is a plus for scientific or financial computing jobs intolerant of even the slightest data corruption.Regular, non-ECC RAM will serve just fine for most buyers, though. An allotment of 8GB of memory is the bare minimum for a gaming laptop, with 16GB preferable. (More than that's not really necessary, unless you have buckets of money to burn.) Workstations have a heartier appetite for RAM, with 16GB a practical minimum and 32GB not uncommon; many models support a whopping 64GB or 128GB.
In the case of a workstation portable, you'll want to look into the specific RAM requirements of the applications you plan to run to gauge how much you should splurge on memory.As for storage, look for one or two M.2 solid-state drives, often joined by one or two 2.5-inch hard drives—the SSD for the operating system and favorite applications, the roomier hard drive for games and data. Most performance-conscious portables use slightly quicker PCI Express (PCIe) rather than SATA solid-state drives. In connection with PCIe SSDs, you'll often see the acronym 'NVMe' (for Non-Volatile Memory Express) bandied around, as well as a few proprietary monikers, such as HP mobile workstations' Z Turbo Drives. Both indicate the fastest SSDs. (See our guide to.). Half a terabyte of storage (for an SSD-only system) is the smallest amount you should accept; 1TB or 1.5TB is more mainstream, and some workstations boast up to 3TB or 4TB of capacity. If money is a limiter, a smaller SSD (say 256GB or 500GB) as the boot drive, paired with a roomy hard drive, is a good compromise.
A 17-inch laptop is the kind most likely to have room for both.Choosing a GPU: Again, the Work/Play DivideMobile workstations' graphics cards are divided between Nvidia's Quadro (more common) and AMD's Radeon Pro (less common) brands. Their silicon is optimized for different operations than the companies' respective GeForce and Radeon parts for gaming laptops, as well as for hard-charging, constantly-on rendering or calculations.On the gaming side of the fence, too, Nvidia enjoys a big market lead in mobile GPUs, and earlier this year it released its first mobile GPUs based on its brand-new 'Turing' architecture, seen first in desktop video cards like the. At the higher end of the gaming-laptop market, these Turing GPUs, indicated by 'GeForce RTX' instead of 'GeForce GTX,' are starting to phase out chips based on the 'Pascal' architecture of Nvidia's long-running GeForce GTX 1000 series.The basic story for both workstations and gaming rigs is a familiar one, though: Higher model numbers and higher prices bring you more speed and higher frame rates. They also gain you support for features such as virtual reality (VR), though midrange and high-end gaming-laptop GPUs like the GeForce GTX 1060, the GeForce RTX 1660 Ti, and above, and all of the current GeForce RTX chips, support playing and exploring VR worlds, while high-end mobile-workstation parts like the Quadro P5000 series support VR authoring or creating them. Nvidia's gaming-laptop GPUs here in the summer of 2019 have seen a shift since the spring. Before, it was a simple ladder: They climbed from the GeForce GTX 1050 to the GTX 1050 Ti, then the GTX 1060, with the formerly high-end GTX 1070 and GTX 1080 starting to fade away in favor of the GeForce RTX 2060, RTX 2070, and RTX 2080. Only the last will truly satisfy gaming hounds planning to play the latest titles at 4K resolution with all the image-quality settings dialed up, while the GTX 1050 Ti has been a passable and the GTX 1060 a better option for gamers with full HD (1,920-by-1,080-pixel) screens.
The RTX 2060 and RTX 2070, meanwhile, straddle the full HD and 4K realms.The GTX 1050, GTX 1050 Ti, and GTX 1060 are still in many laptops on the market, but two new mainstream Nvidia GPUs complicate matters a little. With the rollout of mobile versions of 2019's GeForce GTX 1650 and GTX 1660 Ti (there is no mobile version of the GTX 1660), those GPUs are slowly taking the place of the GTX 1050/GTX 1050 Ti chips and the GTX 1060, respectively. You're looking at a more up-to-date laptop if it has one of these two GTX 1600-series chips.A handful of huge, heavyweight gaming laptops carry not one but two GeForce GPUs for ludicrous speed, using Nvidia's SLI (and in the latest generation, NVLink) multi-GPU technology.
But it's hard to recommend them to any but the most committed (and flush!) gamers. They cost a fortune, their battery life is invariably brutish and short, and not all games benefit from dual-GPU setups, anyway.Ready for Our Recommendations? That's about it for general advice, except for matters of personal preference. Keyboards, for instance: Some gaming laptops go wild with colorful, customizable RGB backlighting and feature macro keys for storing frequently used command or combat sequences, while some mobile workstations' touchpads or pointing sticks feature the third (middle) mouse button often used in CAD and similar applications. And we don't think you should buy a 17-inch laptop in either of these groups that doesn't have at least one Thunderbolt 3 port, which combines USB-C and DisplayPort functionality with daisy-chainable support for external docking and storage solutions.At any rate, you're ready to shop for the notebook of your big-screen dreams. Get started by checking out the reviews we've assembled below, and good luck: Flex those biceps and get your back-strengthening routine down pat.
You're going to go big. On the flip side, your eyes will be very, very happy.
Pros: Astounding graphics and general computing performance. Desktop-class processor. Nvidia RTX 2080 GPU. Built-in eye tracking.
Comfortable keyboard. 144Hz display.
Excellent component access for upgrades.Cons: Heavy, bulky. Requires two power bricks. No 4K display option. Very short battery life.Bottom Line: Packing an Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 graphics chip and a desktop-class Intel Core i9, Alienware's massively rejiggered flagship, the Area-51m, is the best-performing gaming laptop we've tested, a monster in every sense a laptop can be. Pros: Remarkably thin and light for a 17.3-inch mobile workstation. Speedy Core i9 CPU and Quadro RTX graphics.
Nice battery life. Good array of ports.Cons: Less expandable than bulkier systems. 1080p screen is merely adequate (no 4K display available at rollout). Slightly awkward keyboard layout.Bottom Line: The MSI WS75 is a big-screen mobile workstation that weighs two and a half pounds less than its rivals, while packing eight-core CPU power and Nvidia's latest professional graphics.
The display's just average, but the laptop on the whole is impressive. Pros: Top-end 1080p-gaming pep via Max-Q GeForce RTX 2080 graphics. Solid build quality.
144Hz display with G-Sync. Customizable per-key backlighting.
Plenty of storage. Good per-component value.Cons: Big footprint and heavy versus other Max-Q laptops. Short battery life. Plain design given the price.Bottom Line: The battery life is brief and the body is hefty, but Lenovo's Legion Y740 delivers fine value among big, high-powered gaming laptops, with speed and features that rival more expensive machines. Pros: Thin and light for a 17-incher. Attractive aesthetic. Greater-than-90fps gaming performance.
144Hz screen. Good battery life for class. Ports include USB Type-C with Thunderbolt 3.Cons: Performance very similar to top non-Max-Q Pascal GPUs. Display only full HD. No G-Sync support.
512GB drive a tad tight for gaming.Bottom Line: With a spiffy thin design, lots of pep for 1080p gaming, and surprising battery life, MSI's GS75 Stealth is a solid early entry in the GeForce RTX gaming-laptop stakes. Pros: Thin, sleek design. Great-looking display with G-Sync and a 144Hz refresh rate. Gaming powerhouse with its RTX 2080 Max-Q graphics card. Plenty of storage and ports.Cons: 17-inch size is too unwieldy to be very portable.
Bottom ventilation flap seems fragile. Not an enormous improvement from equivalent GTX cards.Bottom Line: The big-screen Asus ROG Zephyrus S GX701 has its shortcomings, but it's hard to resist this GeForce RTX-based gaming laptop's frame-pushing prowess, advanced feature set, and sleek-looking design. Pros: Redesign is much trimmer than original, but maintains premium build.
Strong HD gaming performance. 144Hz display. Superior touchpad. Customizable per-key backlighting.Cons: RTX 2070 Max-Q lacks power to fully leverage the 144Hz display in AAA games. Semi-mechanical keys, volume roller, and 4K option of last-gen version are gone. Feature set now less suited to creatives.Bottom Line: Razer's 2019 revision of the Blade Pro 17 pares away some of what set apart the last-gen model, but the trimmed-down design and ample pep make this luxe system appealing enough among 17-inch gaming laptops.
Comments are closed.
|
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |