Going Mobile…? Desktop?
So, it’s been quite a while! Today I’d like to make a fairly quick post about my most recent toy, and the impact it’s actually had (within 24 hours - that’s pretty impressive!) on the way I’m working and doing eLeague.gg stuff!
Behold, my newest gadget (toy) - the Gigabyte P57X-1070-603S:
It’s a pretty big 17" Laptop, with the new GeForce 10 series graphics cards built into it (a Geforce GTX 1070 to be exact). It’s a device of many firsts for me:
- My first gaming dedicated laptop
- My first $2500+ laptop
- My first 17" laptop
- My first attempt at rolling everything I do into a single machine, realistically
It’s the fourth point that I’m going to be rambling on about today. Prior to owning this laptop, I was always a fan of the MacBook Air - using it in excess of 8 hours a day, I was essentially surgically grafted to it. It let me move around and still keep up coding.
The way I worked revolved around a core desktop setup (5 monitors, nice keyboard, etc) and I would float around coding on my laptop during the day. But unfortunately, I noticed something:
- I would splurge on my desktop, and it was great, but…
- I spent more time on my laptop than at my desktop at home
- I couldn’t do everything on my laptop (like photoshop, gaming, etc)
- At eLeague.gg events I ended up bringing both desktop & laptop
So I figured that I would really need something that could let me roll everything into one. How fortunate it was for me then, that NVIDIA rolled out its 10 series GPU into laptops that essentially, had all the clout of modest desktop gaming PCs with minimal compromise. Hence, I’m now a primary laptop user, back in the Windows ecosystem.
The benefits are pretty amazing so far, and I haven’t even had an opportunity to attend a LAN yet:
- My laptop replaces my current primary machine at work, and is far and away the most powerful machine in the office.
- At eLeague.gg I can now focus on immediately using my laptop to begin management and deployment of the event’s technical features without having to wait for the team to roll out network and power functionality. More time for management, less time in labour means I can focus on refining the event for both our (growing number of!) attendees, and sponsorship commitments.
In the spirit of brevity, I’ll go over how things are changing in our development and workflow, especially on a code level in another post, for now - this laptop appeared at a time of drastic change in how things work for us here at eLeague.gg
ASUS have come out with a slightly cheaper, similarly spec’d laptop since I started writing this post, and I thoroughly recommend it for any potential gamers out there looking for a powerful machine to use at LAN parties and on-the-go gaming. It’s slightly smaller at 15.6" so it’s a bit more convenient than the massive 17" Gigabyte laptop I have.
Check out this article written by Alex ‘Dippa’ Walker about the laptop!