I’ve had a lot of requests to talk about the best and worst laptops of 2018, so let’s
go through some different categories and find out which models were winners and losers.
2018 saw Intel put out their 8th gen mobile CPUs, going up to 6 cores in the i7-8750H,
i7-8850H and i9-8950HK. While these CPUs were a nice step up in performance compared to
the 7th gen mobile chips, heat has been a major problem. A common trend in 2018 was
that these CPUs are often stuffed into laptops with inadequate cooling, requiring power limitations,
resulting in lower performance than what they could otherwise achieve in sustained multicore
workloads, I guess we’ll have to see if this changes at all with the 9th gen in 2019.
As for graphics we still had the 10 series from Nvidia, with the 1060 being a great sweet
spot for 1080p 60 FPS gaming with most games even at high settings, the 1050Ti being a
great mid range option, and the 1070 and above being excellent for higher 120Hz or 144Hz
refresh rate displays with AAA games. This has been the case for the last couple of years
now, although the rumour is we’ll be hearing about new laptop graphics cards at CES in
January, so make sure you’re subscribed for my CES coverage in a couple of weeks.
A few AMD and Radeon laptops also appeared too, over the entire year I was only able
to get my hands on one, the Acer Nitro 5, I’m not sure why review units are so hard
to come by, hopefully there will be more for me to try out in 2019.
With that quick recap out of the way I’m only going to be talking about laptops that
I’ve covered on the channel and have personal experience with, there are plenty of other
laptops out there but without actually using them I can’t really comment too much.
Let’s start with some of the best laptops of the year, keeping in mind that these are
just my personal opinions based on my own experience, everyone has different needs and
preferences, let me know in the comments what you’d pick for each category and why.
For best value my go-to laptops have generally been the Dell G5 or Acer Helios 300 earlier
on in the year, as you get pretty good specs for the money especially with sales, around
$1000 USD with GTX 1060 graphics. I think I’ve got to give the win to Walmart’s
OP gaming laptop though, and while I haven’t used their specific configuration, I have
reviewed the Apex 15 from Aftershock which uses the same Tongfang chassis. Overall it
was quite a nice machine, and with the price cuts that Walmart has introduced it appears
to be a great option if you’re in the US. Other laptops would include the Acer Nitro
5, which offers pretty good performance for the money, unfortunately I wasn’t able to
get my hands on too many cheaper options this year.
In 2018 there were quite a few thin gaming laptops that still packed high end specs,
like the i7-8750H with 1070 graphics and 144Hz screens, but thinner with good specs generally
means higher prices, so they’re not for everyone, and of course heat management will
be a challenge. Some examples would be the Razer Blade, ASUS Zephyrus M and S, the MSI
GS65 and maybe even the Aero 15x, although that is perhaps just a touch larger than the
others. All are pretty good machines, the GS65 and Zephyrus S are usually the cheapest
and should offer similar features and performance compared to the others, so in terms of value
for a thin and light well specced gaming laptop they’re both good choices. Upgrading the
GS65 is unfortunately a bit more involved though as the motherboard is reversed and
the body is a bit flexible if you push down on it, but perfectly fine during normal usage
though, in my opinion the Zephyrus S is a bit nicer. If you’ve got the money though,
the Razer Blade is the best in my opinion, the design looks great, the touchpad is excellent,
and it lasts for quite some time with its larger battery. In terms of cooling design
though the unique design of the Zephyrus models also deserve a shoutout, as I found this to
actually do a pretty good job of keeping the components cool.
There were a number of other thin laptops that didn’t quite have gaming specs but
were still very nice to use, a shout out to the Dell XPS 13 which was a nice machine in
this super portable size, and the Razer Blade Stealth which I’m reviewing at the moment.
I’ve mentioned that heat has been one of the major issues plaguing the 8th gen Intel
laptops, but which actually do a good job at keeping things cool? In terms of thinner
models the ASUS Zephyrus performed well with it’s lift up design, but I’ve got to give
this one to the Acer Helios 500. Yes it’s a 17 inch laptop and is fairly thick, but
it uses this space well in terms of cooling unlike many others. It can get fairly warm
at stock, but when you boost the fan speeds temperatures are able to drop down by around
20 degrees Celsius thanks to the thick heatsinks in the corners, allowing it to get some of
the best temperatures with the i7-8750H I’ve seen. I’ve been trying to get my hands on
the 8 core Ryzen model to do a comparison, but no luck on that so far.
To me a good video editing laptop only has a few requirements, a CPU with high clock
speeds for the editing process, more CPU cores and discrete graphics for exporting, an SD
card slot for offloading video from my camera, and a decent looking screen. If you’ve been
following the channel you may know I recently got the Gigabyte Aero 15x to use for this
purpose, and after all of the laptops I’ve used it’s still number one for me in this
category. I suspect the Dell XPS 15 may have given it a good run for its money, but I wasn’t
able to get one of those for testing. I recently upgraded the Aero, so it’s all ready for
my upcoming CES trip where it will be put to the test.
For best battery life there are two main contenders that come immediately to mind, the Gigabyte
Aero 15x and the Razer Blade. Both laptops that I tested had the Intel i7-8750H CPU and
Nvidia GTX 1070 Max-Q graphics, so quite powerful specs, but thanks to the ability of swapping
over to the Intel graphics outside of gaming their large batteries allowed them to last
the longest out of all laptops I’ve ever tested. The Razer Blade Stealth that I’m
currently in the process of reviewing did actually last longer in the “just watching
youtube” test, but it is a much lower specced device. I suspect there would be a few other
great laptops for this category, such as the MacBook Pro, but unfortunately I didn’t
get the chance to test those out in 2018.
I still haven’t used that many 2-in-1 laptops, but the Dell XPS 15 2-in-1 was easily the
best I’ve used so far. Not only are the specs pretty nice, with the Intel CPU and
Radeon GPU combination, but the whole machine just feels extremely premium. The hinge mechanism
is sturdy and the screen looks excellent, it actually made me consider getting a 2-in-1
just for watching YouTube videos on the couch, but 15 inches for a tablet device is a bit
large for me, otherwise a great machine.
Other than these categories, in general it’s been nice to see thin bezel laptops become
more popular in 2018, while I hope this trend continues as I think it looks nice, it does
mean that the overall size of the laptop needs to be smaller too, which may negatively affect
things such as cooling capacity and upgradeability.
Now let’s check out the worst laptops of 2018, there’s actually not as many as I
thought there would be, and most of them only have one major downside rather than being
all round bad choices.
The worst laptop, and probably the only one I used this year that I am unable to recommend
would be the ASUS FX504. I went into testing it hoping it would be a great value for money
machine, but there were some pretty bad performance issues. In my review I noted that there was
stuttering in various games due to power limit throttling, although a lot of people mentioned
that this issue has since been fixed by a newer BIOS update, so at least it’s been
improved. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to retest this myself as the laptop went back
to ASUS after the review. Either way that’s not the major issue I had with it, the worst
problem was that while under a combined graphical and CPU workload the i7-8750H appeared to
be capped to a 25 watt TDP, normally we’d want this to be at 45 watts. I haven’t tested
the i5-8300H model myself, but some of you mentioned in the comments that it had similar
limits.
This seems to be for a couple of reasons, firstly it had a small 120 Watt power brick.
I’ve tested a similarly specced laptop with a 120 watt power brick before, and with a
45 watt limit I found that every few seconds the screen would dim and FPS would dip as
it would only be running on battery power because it wasn’t receiving enough from
the wall, so I’m pretty sure the power brick just isn’t adequate for the hardware for
them to increase the power limit further in a future BIOS update.
The second reason is that the heatpipes inside are honestly just pathetic for a 6 core 8750H
laptop, granted the thermals in my testing were actually fairly cool, but that was just
a result of the kneecapped power limit, it’s another reason I doubt this can be improved
in the future as there just isn’t enough cooling capacity available to support a higher
power limit.
ASUS have redeemed this with the newer FX505, not only does it look nicer overall with slim
bezels, but the CPU TDP limit is 45 watts with bigger heatpipes available and a 180
watt power brick, so a better cooling solution and more power which results in better performance
from the same CPU.
The next laptop is the Dell G7 with i9-8950HK CPU. Don’t get me wrong, the G7 is a good
laptop overall, although if you caught my G5 vs G7 video you can usually get the G5
for less money and it’s basically the same. The issue isn’t actually with the G7, but
more to do with the i9 CPU being available in certain laptops. As I noted in the G7 review
I was seeing very similar performance to the G5 with the i7-8750H. Although the i9 can
technically be overclocked, in my testing overclocking was never actually useful for
sustained multicore load. This was due to power limit throttling, I wasn’t able to
achieve higher power limits after boosting the TDP, even undervolting the CPU didn’t
allow me to reach the stock 3.9GHz of the 8750H while under CPU stress test, let alone
the 4.3GHz all core turbo speed of the i9. The overclock will be more useful in less
core heavy workloads, such as single threaded applications for example, but I think if you’re
paying the $600 AUD extra to go from i7 to i9 in the case of the G7 then I’d want a
better result than this. Even if power limits get further increased in a BIOS update, the
temperatures were already close to 90 degrees celsius, so I doubt we’d see much gain before
thermal throttling became the next issue, but again these temperatures are common across
most Intel 8th gen laptops, that’s not unique to the G7 at all.
I’m sure Dell aren’t the only ones doing this, Apple had a similar situation where
they crammed the i9 into the even thinner MacBook Pro and I’d expect something similar
there. I think the only laptop I had great success with the i9 was the MSI GT75 Titan,
I was able to overclock all 6 cores to around 4.9GHz and have the CPU running with a 100
watt TDP, pretty crazy but I think that’s what you need if you want to properly take
advantage of the i9 in a laptop.
That’s it, my best and worst laptop picks for 2018, again these are just my personal
opinions after reviewing laptops throughout the year, let me know down in the comments
what you’d have picked instead for each category and why. Also let me know if you
found this sort of video useful, would you want to see a similar video at the end of
2019?
This is the last video that will go up on the channel for 2018, thanks everyone for
the support over that time and I look forward to making more videos in 2019. In particular
we should be getting 9th gen Intel laptops and new Nvidia graphics, hopefully I can get
more AMD stuff too. I’m going to be posting more behind the scenes stuff to Facebook and
Twitter as well, so if you haven’t already you can like and follow there to keep up to
date with what I’m working on, links to both can be found in the description, and
as always if you’re new here, don’t forget to subscribe for future tech videos in 2019.