What are your favorite insane laptops?
Mine is the Dell Rugged: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9F56ION4_n0
Bump and fall proof, liquid proof, sand proof (and cat hairs proof I assume), extreme heat/cold proof, can be used as a blunt weapon in an emergency. Ridiculously overkill for anyone that’s not a geologist working in Antarctica or an archaeologist in the Gobi desert, and ridiculously overkill is fun
GPD Win Max 2. I love this little thing so much. ~8-10 hours of battery life, up to 64GB RAM, 16-core Ryzen on the newest model, 2K display. It’s only 10 inches and it can run Cyberpunk with raytracing. It also has two slots for SSD’s and an optional LTE module.
The sticks are hall effect sensors, so there’s no drift (looking at you, Nintendo). The keyboard is backlit and feels way too satisfying for something this small. (I actually like typing on it)
On the backside of the device, you can slide out two metal covers and place them on top of the thumbsticks, hiding them and making the device look more professional.
I once took this to a customer doing a training session and dropped the line “This thing is more powerful than all the computers in this room” and it was probably true.
10/10 device - it’s a solid laptop though I worry about longevity (they’re a bastard to repair because the arts are all hard to find).
Upside is it’s the perfect machine for travel gaming!
That’s true, but I found parts like the bottom chassis, display assembly and keyboard on Aliexpress. They probably have the joystick modules too.
The only thing I couldn’t find were the actual rubber thumbsticks, which might become a problem in the future when they wear out. GPD promised to sell them individually a while ago, but as of yet, they haven’t done so.
Do you grip the device in both hands to use the joysticks, or do you just move them around with your thumbs? It looks rather thick, but also very cool.
When gaming, I hold the device in both hands, just as they depict in their marketing material:
When I’m on location and I have it sitting on the desk, I use the left joystick for scrolling and the right for moving the mouse, it works really well and I don’t have to grip it (I configured AntiMicroX on Linux to translate the inbuilt Xbox controller to mouse movements).
It also has a builtin mouse mode, but you have to press the right trigger to speed up the mouse, so it’s very unconvenient when you’re not holding the device in your hands.
How hot does it get under load of stuff like Cyberpunk or similar programs? I am always jazzed to see high-end laptops, but I am aware of heat being a given. We get a lot of normies (or gamers that dip their toes into PC gaming) that have more money than sense just demanding the most powerful laptop. And they bring them in for us to check-out due to how hot they get. Some of it comes down to them not knowing how to stop all the programs from starting up with it and causing it to heat up from the jump even before launching a game or whatever. lol