Speaker 1: I’m here to tell you that the greatest gift you could possibly get anyone is frankly a gaming laptop. Super fancy, usually very expensive, lots of fun. If you give someone a gaming laptop, they’re gonna love you. If you get one from someone, you will then love that person and be loyal to them for your entire life. The problem is gaming laptops can be kind of expensive. It’s usually a multi-thousand dollars investment, but don’t worry, I’m gonna show you yes, some fancy ones, but also some budget ones, uh, that are gonna fit the bill. We really have a wide range [00:00:30] of gaming options here because who doesn’t like gaming?
Speaker 1: Let’s start off with one of my favorite gaming laptops this year. A great example of that super premium gaming laptop feel. It is the alien wear X 15 R two and it really does a lot of the things I like in a gaming laptop, which is basically be very powerful, be very flexible, but also look cool, not look like an old school gaming laptop where they’re big and [00:01:00] goy and have giant flashing lights and alien heads and all this goofy stuff that frankly if you don’t live in a dorm room you don’t really want in your life. What Alienware has done here is they made a very thin 15 inch gaming laptop that is very powerful, very flexible. You can get a lot of different CPU and GPU options. You get a lot of different screen options, which I really appreciate. You can get a 1 44 herd screen, you can get up to a 360 hert screen, a two 40 hert screen, different resolution.
Speaker 1: So I always like a lot of those options in there and yet they keep it [00:01:30] pretty thin. It’s got this inset hinge which helps it not feel too thick and chunky. Yes, there’s a little light up alien head in the back, but it’s kind of subtle. It’s much more subtle than it used to be, so I’m gonna give them a pass on that one. It also does something I really like a lot in that it breaks out what I think some of the most important keys are. Those volume keys, volume up, volume down mute and puts ’em in standalone buttons on the side so you don’t have to hit like function F four to change the volume or to mute something when you’re gaming. I think that’s one of those super important things [00:02:00] that if you don’t have it, uh, that’s gonna be a point off your score.
Speaker 1: Now the downside of course, is these things can get pretty expensive. A good configuration is gonna cost you about 2,500 bucks. You can definitely go way up from there. Uh, if you knock it down too much from there, you might as well get a budget gaming laptop instead. But super premium really one of the nicest looking gaming laptops I think you can get right now. Now the good news is budget gaming laptops are a lot better now, more powerful now than they were even a couple years ago. For a thousand bucks, [00:02:30] 1200 bucks, you can actually get something really good. Some of my go-to budget gaming laptops right now are the HP vs. That’s a really nice one. There’s also the Acer Nitro five. Uh, I just started testing the Dell G 15, which is really one of the definite go-to gaming laptops. Uh, and they all kind of will give you something like you can usually get about a 30 50 card from Invidia in them for about a thousand dollars.
Speaker 1: You get a 30 60 if you bump up to maybe 12, $1,300 and you usually have some decent options in terms of CPU [00:03:00] and GPU choice. You’re usually stuck with just one or two screen options, but all the ones I mentioned have 144 hertz screens, so at least you have a decent display there. What you’re giving up is they’re kind of thicker, they’re heavier, the keyboards and touch pads are not as good. They’re a little creaky and they have kind of that, you know, chunky, ugly gamer look, they’re not as sophisticated as something fancy like the alien wear. Uh, but this is definitely a good time to get a budget gaming laptop especially because if you get something even with a [00:03:30] 30 60 card, it’s gonna be good for a couple years at least. It’s not gonna age out as maybe some older budget gaming laptops would’ve.
Speaker 1: They wouldn’t have lasted as long. You can make a multiyear investment and still only spend a thousand dollars, $1,200. ACEs always has really interesting laptop designs in their gaming laptop right now. They have a really interesting family, the Flow family and it’s uh, three different machines and the accessory that I think is really interesting. There’s the Z 13, the X 13 and the X 16. [00:04:00] The Z 13 is a tablet. It’s meant to be a gaming tablet that’s pretty rare. X 13 is a 13 inch, uh, two in one laptop and that the screen folds, you know, 360 degrees and the X 16 is a very rare big 16 inch gaming laptop that again has the screen that folds over. If let’s say you’re using a controller and you just want to have the screen in front of you and not the keyboard, super cool.
Speaker 1: The hook here is ACEs makes an accessory. It’s an external GPU box that plugs in through a proprietary [00:04:30] connection to any of these three devices. So if you have something like a 30 50 or a 30 60, uh, a lower end GPU in one of these and you plug in this external GPU box that has in Nvidia 30 80 card in it, well then you’ve got a super high powered laptop, but you can unplug it and take the just a regular laptop version with you. It’s more portable, better battery life, uh, than if you’re home and you just want the super graphics experience plug in, uh, the external GPU box, which again is next to 1200 bucks on its own. Not inexpensive, [00:05:00] but I like that it works with a bunch of these different laptops. Of these three, I think the X 13 is probably the one that makes the most sense.
Speaker 1: It’s a pretty decent 13 inch laptop. It’s got that 360 degree hinge. You can get it I think with either a Invidia 1650 or 30 50 GP unit, depending on how much you spend, which are fine, but not great graphics card. And then you plug in your 30 80 and boom you’re at there. It’s also a little bit on the expensive side. If you get, let’s say the the 16 inch model and the external gpu, you’re looking at like 3,200 bucks for the [00:05:30] combination. This does not fall in the budget laptop category, but now I’m gonna tell you about probably the least expensive gaming PC that you can buy. But it’s also I think one of my favorite new gadgets of the entire year. It is the steam deck from Valve. It is a handheld gaming pc. A lot of other companies have tried this over the years.
Speaker 1: Nobody’s really nailed it. I had frankly very modest expectations for the steam deck and I love it. The three versions of the steam deck. There’s a $400 version that frankly does [00:06:00] not have enough storage space in it to really get you started. Uh, there’s a 5 29 version. That’s what I have. That’s the middle range. That’s the one you should get. There’s a more expensive one. Also, the nice thing is there’s a micro SD card slot, so you can just throw a one terabyte chip in there and have a decent amount of game storage. Even with that, I still find myself deleting and downloading, uh, and making room on the hard drive cuz there’s so many things I wanna play on it. It’s AMD powered, kind of maybe comparable to uh, uh, PS five or an Xbox Series X. Uh, [00:06:30] the reason it can get away with playing so many steam games, uh, and playing them so well is frankly it’s a smaller, lower red screen so you’re not pushing that many pixels so you can get decent frame rates, decent performance cuz frankly you’re playing it on this little screen.
Speaker 1: You can output it to a big monitor if you want. The experience there is not quite as good. Actually, valve makes a doc for it. Finally, you can get that for about 80 bucks and you can charge it through there and you can output via h dmmi or you can plug in the ethernet, do all kinds of cool stuff like that. But just as a grab and go PC gaming device, [00:07:00] that’s kind of like an Nintendo Switch, but also kind of like a gaming pc. I think it’s fantastic. And the best thing is there was a long waiting list for these. You have to sign up and wait months and months and months. They’re finally through that waiting list. Now you can actually order one and get it shipped almost immediately. So I hope a lot more people are gonna get a chance to try out the steam deck. The nice thing is that gaming PCs can run several thousand dollars or they can run $500 and you can get a good experience either way. If you shop carefully, great gift to give, great gift to get. [00:07:30] I’ve got some options for you. You can of course like and subscribe and see more of these, uh, gift guide videos and you can find links to the reviews of a lot of these products right down below.
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