I have a Lenovo Y580 that I use for gaming and for rendering (Autodesk Inventor) and I don't regret my choice one bit....
Are desktops better? DUH! But are they better enough? Depends...for me, not really. I can play all my games on highest settings no problems...I can render big things in Inventor, no problems....could it be better with a desktop? Sure...but I can't sit on a couch at a friend's place LANing or sit in bed when sick or work while in transit (carpool) with a desktop (at least not very easily)....
My laptop has a NVidia gtx 660m, an i7 3630QM, 1080p 15.6" screen, 8 gigs of RAM, and 500 GB at 7200 RPM...I could have upgraded to larger HDDs or even SSDs as well as larger amounts of RAM, but I didn't need to...this is by no means the best gaming laptop out there and on paper pales in comparison to what you can get with a desktop...but it cost me about $1100 (with best warranty), has excellent cooling, games and renders great, and is highly mobile (weight, size, battery life, etc.) which works out great for taking to work everyday and hooking up to projectors....since I would have to own a laptop anyway for work, buying a cheap laptop and then a gaming desktop would have cost more than just buying the gaming laptop...
In the last few months, a few very good computers have come out that are in the same league so to speak as the Y580 when it comes to gaming and price (obviously there are ones better but then more expensive)...very few games these days actually make good use of graphics cards better than the gtx 660m or 770m if you are doing 1080p on a 16" or smaller screen...the i5s you can get on laptops are more than capable of running pretty much any game out there (if I didn't do rendering I would have gotten an i5 instead of an i7)....
Quite frankly, their are only 3 reasons why you would really need a desktop performance over a laptop performance:
- You do intensive rendering that absolutely needs the best i7 and tons of RAM
- You absolutely have to play on the "big screen" and need something to keep a high frame rate at high resolution
- You can't afford a laptop
If you don't fall into those three categories, I think it is a hard case to argue for the desktop...the advantages of the mobility are just so many...I think it is one of those things where if you aren't used to the mobility of a laptop, you don't care cause you don't know what you are missing...but once you are used to a laptop, it is very very hard to go back to a desktop even if your life doesn't technically demand mobility....
f you are doing serious gaming you can't hold onto a setup for more than 3-4 years without it becoming obsolete...I suppose then that the option to upgrade (normally exclusive to a desktop) might be important when considering cost over the long run, but too many friends of mine have had problems where the whole upgrade thing didn't work out for them because too many parts of the desktop failed after 4-5 years....
