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Decided it's time to pull an experiment.
I have a dedicated gaming desktop mini-ITX style. It's the bee's knees for me and gets the job done with anything I throw at it. However, for work, I had to purchase a laptop to do many of my computer-related tasks as the Army and it's wonderful wisdom can't seem to provide me one for whatever reason. I went with an Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 as it has a dedicated graphics card, is compact to carry, and I figured why not? It's specs include a Ryzen 7 5800HS, 16gb RAM, and an RTX 3060 6GB.
For the next month, I figured I'd use only my laptop and see how life is with it. I haven't exclusively run a laptop in 10 years, so this should take a little getting used to. To prep for it, I had to upgrade the hard drive from the atrocious 512gb hard drive to a 1TB drive. Did a fresh install of windows, and put all the things I needed to get the computer running smoothly. So far I've gone about a week and it's not been too bad. Going from a 27in screen to a 14in does suck a lot. As well as going from 1440 165hz to a 1080 144hz is a bit of a downgrade for my eyes.
The pros, so far, are I can take it everywhere and I don't have to jump between computers for work. It runs very quiet on silent mode, and even in the default mode. Because I did a fresh install, I could get rid of some of the bloatware Asus put on the computer and even changed the Wi-Fi card to a better Intel AX210. It's been super quick with the better SSD and Wi-Fi card. The computer runs the few games I loaded very well with little or no reduction in performance. The most demanding game being Ghost Recon Breakpoint.
There are a few cons, however. The computer sports a RTX 3060 so that's a hell of a downgrade (obviously) from the 7900XTX I have. The computer, being slim profile, gets insanely hot when gaming. I'm usually hitting 94-96c for the unit when gaming. Granted, I've only played Half-life 2, Ghost Recon Breakpoint, and Minecraft. Apparently this is normal, and a cooling pad would help. Although I do notice it gets warm just doing idle things. But I attribute that to it being a laptop and my hands are right there.
The another con I discovered (and this could be fixable but I couldn't figure it out) was the dedicated graphics card shut off regardless of the computer being plugged in or not. Once I installed Armory Crate, it began working just fine. It's not the end of the world, but it was bloatware I was wanting to avoid.
I figured I'd see how this goes for the next few weeks and try some other games I normally play such as Dirt Rally 2.0, Company of Heroes Blitzkrieg Mod, and possibly Metro Exodus (to see if it will cause the computer to light on fire).
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