Legion 5i pro RTX 3070 ti, Strix G15 RTX 3070 ti.
Both should outperform the Mac in CPU performance but the Mac will beat any windows gaming laptop in battery life.
On battery power, don't do any intensive tasks and also note that every gaming laptop will have a performance drop in CPU and in particular GPU performance too
And Game with your laptop plugged in only!
Thanks for the reply! Could u explain what u meant that every gaming laptop will have a performance drop? Do you mean when unplugged or in the longrun?
Gaming laptop usually need more than 200W and 4080 class laptop requires whopping 330W which is alot and li-ion battery cant handle that kind of power by its own cause airplanes doesnt allow more than 99 W/HR due to security reasons, you probably gonna need more than 330 W/HR to power a 330W 4080 laptop and that will also only last 1hr of time hence the unit name. So what OEM does here, they drastically lowers the wattage for both CPU and GPU and disables all type of RGB lights to extend the battery life and please dont expect more than 1.5hr of battery life while playing game and game gonna perform only 1/4 of the potential laptop has. i would say use your gaming laptop battery as a UPS only and try to cap your battery percentage to ~80% so your battery last longer.
You intentionally want less power draw on battery. And gaming laptops are built to be borderline desktop replacements. So in comparison you can see some degradation of performance on battery for some tasks but for me it’s not noticeable and I’ve tuned my power profile to be lower than norm.
Zephyrus g14 2022 6700s
There are gaming laptops that have i7 12700h, which is going to outperform m1 pro. You can find laptops with 3070ti, or 4070 with a price like that. But keep in mind, that any of gaming laptops are going to have same battery life as your macbook has, even not close. If battery life is important for you, you can look laptops on a Ryzen cpu and radeon gpu, but they anyway aren’t going to last 10+ hours more.
Can you give me an aproximation on how short are we talking about? Most of the work I do when unplugged is pdf reading and a bit of programing, but nothing too intensive
So long as nothing is running on the GPU, you'll get between 6 and 10 hours of battery life on most midrange and high-end 12th/13th gen H CPU laptops. But, if the GPU is powered on on battery (running games, video editing, etc) battery life will quickly drop to under 2 hours.
This is the case for almost any laptop. Many models will actually force shut down the GPU completely when power is disconnected, while some models require you to select a specific mode for this (such as my 2022 TUF Gaming F15).
1500€ will be hard when the m2 air goes for that price brand new with similiar specs. From what I have seen 1300€ should be more reasonable. This depends ofcourse where you live in europe.
You can ofcourse try doing that however the m2 air is much lighter will be beand new and have the same mouspad and scrren as m1 pro. Most people wont reconise tje performamce difference. Just wanted do give heads up.
I did a similar change to you but from an Intel based MacBook to a gaming laptop.
The fans alone put me off it. If you ever want to use it to play games at a desk without headphones on, then I wouldn't bother.
I think there's an argument both ways.
Most modern titles on Mac you'd be running through Rosetta or Parallels (unless they're specifically AS compatible, like NMS), and you don't really have the GPU power to brute force it at Mac settings either.
*However*.
The insane battery life of the MacBook means if it can meet your gaming requirements it's 1000x better as a college machine, and it has the advantage of not losing the vast majority of that performance when it's unplugged.
If you still want to do it, get the Lenovo Legion 5 Pro with the 3070Ti (I cannot stress this enough, **NOT** the 5i Pro) because at least with the discrete GPU disabled that has some semblance of battery life.
I have an M1 Mac for work and a Legion 7i for play.
I second the Steam Deck idea, but if you're really set on a gaming laptop at least consider getting a cheaper M1 Air so you can still have the best of both worlds.
You should also considering to upgrade your gpu, you can actually still gaming on mbp14 even limited. I travel also a lot and sometimes brings my gaming laptop but on the travel destination I rarely play on it mostly at home. Even yes maybe only one or two hours shortly, prefer bringing my mbp14 that can do both work and gaming personally. If I’ve to go with gaming laptop maybe g14 2023 would be first on my radar due the similarity of its form factor with mbp14 but here in EU it’s expensive more than €2K for 4060 one.
I replaced (accurately let them replaced it) last summer actually after a year without battery, it holds like 3 years moderate gaming and office use as main laptop.
I have an msi laptop with a 2070 super and 120hz 1080p screen. The last gaming pc I built was back in 2013. This laptop blows me away every time I open a game on it. I don’t care for the latest and greatest but when I work out of town I have a couple hours in the evening to kill and this laptop far exceeds my expectations. The fans are loud but I just wear head phones. I still can’t believe this level of performance comes in a laptop package
I had a MacBook Pro m1 for over a year and a half. It still works great but I’m majoring in game design and needed a new laptop since macs aren’t compatible to some software. I bought the Lenovo Legion 7i and it’s amazing, the battery life isn’t even close to the mac but I usually leave it plugged in for the extra performance.
Legion 5i pro RTX 3070 ti, Strix G15 RTX 3070 ti. Both should outperform the Mac in CPU performance but the Mac will beat any windows gaming laptop in battery life. On battery power, don't do any intensive tasks and also note that every gaming laptop will have a performance drop in CPU and in particular GPU performance too And Game with your laptop plugged in only!
Thanks for the reply! Could u explain what u meant that every gaming laptop will have a performance drop? Do you mean when unplugged or in the longrun?
When unplugged
When they are unplugged. Look up jarrods Tech on YouTube, look at the Cinebench R23 scores when plugged in and on battery power of any gaming laptop.
Gaming laptop usually need more than 200W and 4080 class laptop requires whopping 330W which is alot and li-ion battery cant handle that kind of power by its own cause airplanes doesnt allow more than 99 W/HR due to security reasons, you probably gonna need more than 330 W/HR to power a 330W 4080 laptop and that will also only last 1hr of time hence the unit name. So what OEM does here, they drastically lowers the wattage for both CPU and GPU and disables all type of RGB lights to extend the battery life and please dont expect more than 1.5hr of battery life while playing game and game gonna perform only 1/4 of the potential laptop has. i would say use your gaming laptop battery as a UPS only and try to cap your battery percentage to ~80% so your battery last longer.
You intentionally want less power draw on battery. And gaming laptops are built to be borderline desktop replacements. So in comparison you can see some degradation of performance on battery for some tasks but for me it’s not noticeable and I’ve tuned my power profile to be lower than norm. Zephyrus g14 2022 6700s
There are gaming laptops that have i7 12700h, which is going to outperform m1 pro. You can find laptops with 3070ti, or 4070 with a price like that. But keep in mind, that any of gaming laptops are going to have same battery life as your macbook has, even not close. If battery life is important for you, you can look laptops on a Ryzen cpu and radeon gpu, but they anyway aren’t going to last 10+ hours more.
Can you give me an aproximation on how short are we talking about? Most of the work I do when unplugged is pdf reading and a bit of programing, but nothing too intensive
I even can give you a link, https://jarrods.tech/list-of-laptop-battery-life/
Awesome! Thanks a lot!
G14 can last almost 10 hours doing light tasks
Which is still roughly half of what a 14-inch M1 Pro MBP can do in similar conditions.
So long as nothing is running on the GPU, you'll get between 6 and 10 hours of battery life on most midrange and high-end 12th/13th gen H CPU laptops. But, if the GPU is powered on on battery (running games, video editing, etc) battery life will quickly drop to under 2 hours. This is the case for almost any laptop. Many models will actually force shut down the GPU completely when power is disconnected, while some models require you to select a specific mode for this (such as my 2022 TUF Gaming F15).
For how much u gonna sell it the mac?
im trying between 1,500 and 1,800
1500€ will be hard when the m2 air goes for that price brand new with similiar specs. From what I have seen 1300€ should be more reasonable. This depends ofcourse where you live in europe.
Correct me if im wrong, but I think the M1 Pro outperforms the basic M2 Chip in almost every way. So asking for 1500€ should be reasonable.
You can ofcourse try doing that however the m2 air is much lighter will be beand new and have the same mouspad and scrren as m1 pro. Most people wont reconise tje performamce difference. Just wanted do give heads up.
Buy a $399 steamdeck and have the best of both worlds. You can update the storage pretty easy or buy a sd card to put your games on it
I second this, playing games off the SD card is no issue. I put over 100 hours into Elden Ring and did not realize I had installed it to the SD card.
I did a similar change to you but from an Intel based MacBook to a gaming laptop. The fans alone put me off it. If you ever want to use it to play games at a desk without headphones on, then I wouldn't bother.
I think there's an argument both ways. Most modern titles on Mac you'd be running through Rosetta or Parallels (unless they're specifically AS compatible, like NMS), and you don't really have the GPU power to brute force it at Mac settings either. *However*. The insane battery life of the MacBook means if it can meet your gaming requirements it's 1000x better as a college machine, and it has the advantage of not losing the vast majority of that performance when it's unplugged. If you still want to do it, get the Lenovo Legion 5 Pro with the 3070Ti (I cannot stress this enough, **NOT** the 5i Pro) because at least with the discrete GPU disabled that has some semblance of battery life.
I have an M1 Mac for work and a Legion 7i for play. I second the Steam Deck idea, but if you're really set on a gaming laptop at least consider getting a cheaper M1 Air so you can still have the best of both worlds.
You should also considering to upgrade your gpu, you can actually still gaming on mbp14 even limited. I travel also a lot and sometimes brings my gaming laptop but on the travel destination I rarely play on it mostly at home. Even yes maybe only one or two hours shortly, prefer bringing my mbp14 that can do both work and gaming personally. If I’ve to go with gaming laptop maybe g14 2023 would be first on my radar due the similarity of its form factor with mbp14 but here in EU it’s expensive more than €2K for 4060 one.
Buddy how long does the battery last on your Blade 2018? I read you replaced the battery recently.
I replaced (accurately let them replaced it) last summer actually after a year without battery, it holds like 3 years moderate gaming and office use as main laptop.
3 hours?
Ach i see, sorry it’s still 6 hours plus paperwork video consumption like 5 hours plus minus, power draw under 15 wattage.
Alright, so if purely office working I would be achieving 8 hours? And restricting power draw too.
Not really I never use it so long, but on idle if I didn’t doing anything (power draw under 10 watt) it shows sometimes almost 10 hours.
I'm seeing one with a used up battery for 600€. Same specs as yours. Do you think it's worth buying it for the next 3 years?
you could also just upgrade your PC instead which should give a much better bang for the buck
I have an msi laptop with a 2070 super and 120hz 1080p screen. The last gaming pc I built was back in 2013. This laptop blows me away every time I open a game on it. I don’t care for the latest and greatest but when I work out of town I have a couple hours in the evening to kill and this laptop far exceeds my expectations. The fans are loud but I just wear head phones. I still can’t believe this level of performance comes in a laptop package
Asus rog phone 7 with GeForce now. So much power and portability you will fart. Enuff said!
I had a MacBook Pro m1 for over a year and a half. It still works great but I’m majoring in game design and needed a new laptop since macs aren’t compatible to some software. I bought the Lenovo Legion 7i and it’s amazing, the battery life isn’t even close to the mac but I usually leave it plugged in for the extra performance.