My current TSW laptop is dying. The only remotely taxing thing I do on that laptop is play TSW; in general I'm a mac user. Is there any point at all on splashing out on alienware type things? My assumption is given it's not a cutting edge game stuff like that would be a massive waste of money and I'd be better off with e.g. a Lenovo Legion Pro i7. But interested to hear from people who know what they're talking about.
I’m a mac user too but I do things a little different from you: As I have a nice desktop mac I stream from and old HP workstation using Steam. In the Mac App Store you can get Steam Link for connecting to the Windows machine and enjoy the nice Apple Display. TSW doesn’t officially support non desktop graphics cards and components so my philosophy is to use a desktop machine for ease of hardware upgrades and repairs; no monitor needed! If you specifically want a laptop then something optimised for gaming would make sense as they will have better thermal management to keep performance high for longer. Perhaps Razer?
The main disadvantage is I spend a reasonable proportion of my life (~15-20%) in places where internet is questionable or non existant. But if I think about how much of my time there I am actually on TSW it's not very much (although I do try to take my gaming laptop everywhere). So It's definitely a possibility. Probably will still go with the laptop but thank you - this is an interesting idea to sleep on and tbh not something I'd considered.
I personally have a 4 year old laptop I bought for school with a 3070, Ryzen 7 5800 and 16 gb of RAM. although not as strong as my desktop it does run most routes no problem and I think the memory is the biggest problem.
I stopped purchasing laptops a while ago because of a very bad experience with them. I had 4 laptops (1 HP, 1 MacBookPro and 2 MSI Dominator Pros in that order) and all of them broke within 2 years, some of them even sooner. The reason for 3 of them was that the internal power supply hardware or the power outlet got broken after a while of using. The MacBookPro actually made a difference to that as the 2011er series had a fault with to sufficiently drain the heat and some wires of the GPU melted after a while. Sadly, I didn't knew of that at the point of time I acquired it on Ebay. At least I got it for - in relation to a regular Apple price tag - a good price. The laptops have the problem that even if all other hardware pieces work flawlessly, it means to throw it on trash and get a new one in case of failure because either it weren't possible to acquire the appropriate hardware or it was as pricey that acquiring a new laptop made more sense. A pain in the *** because I wasted some good amount of money for superb hardware, just to got the benefit of it for a very limited time. From this point on, I only believed in Desktop PCs anymore. The advantage of Desktop PC is fairly simply. If something is broken (or you even want to upgrade hardware), its way easier to do with Desktop PCs as they are built in a way more modular way (meaning a way to swap individual pieces of hardware more easily) and you got way more variety for hardware which is compatible to add or replace. Plus you usually got more space/ports to add things to your setup simultaneously. Never waste my money on a laptop anymore (at least not for anything to do with work or being my primary PC).
I had a laptop (3070 ti, ryzen 7 6800h and 16gb of ram) the gpu was great but the cpu was weak and hot, I got rid of it and built a pc (ryzen 7 7800x3d, 4070 ti super and 32gb of ram) I will never spend money on a laptop again
Another advantage of a desktop computer, especially for Train Simulator Classic and all its bugs, is that you can keep the hardware configuration simple and reduce the amount of device drivers needed. My HP Z240 is very basic with no wi-fi or Bluetooth; just a nice fast processor and an nVidia Quadro P2000 which seems to run TSC and TSW very nicely although a very old graphics card. I had been thinking for a while of building a mobile gaming PC for train simulation and was thinking more like a briefcase with desktop components and a display attached to a full PCIe graphics card.
when you choose a laptop for playing simulation type of games, you're going to play for hours, often with high to maximum CPU and GPU utilization. The laptop will get hot and sometimes loud, so make sure it has sufficient cooling capacity and keep the ventilations grids and slots open and clean, put it on a low stand that allows air to circulate underneath. compact and ultra-compact models are best avoided
Right, forget the laptop. 1. Buy a Steam Deck for ~£350. 2. Throw it in your backpack. 3. Play it handheld while travelling. 4. Dock it to a TV or monitor in your hotel room or whatever. Problem solved without dropping £1000+ on a gaming laptop that will break or get stolen.
Guys - thank you all for your advice so far. On consideration it's perfect for 95% of people and it'll probably be perfect for me next time around with the advance of starlink . But due to my very particular circumstances (basically lots of African travel and yes since the next point may be what about power that is also a big problem but not quite so bad) that require me to be places without internet - or rubbish internet* - fairly often, and starlink not being turned on worldwide, I don't think it's going to work. Unless anyone else is in a similar position and can reassure me otherwise? Or there's something I've not thought of? My mind remains open So for arguments sake if it were a laptop how good does it need to be? *Usually some kind of very rudimentary internet is available, I'm not often completely cut off. But it wouldn't support streaming a game.
They don't. The cooling system of a "gaming" laptops does not match the heat output of the hardware. At the best case, it teeters on the edge of throttling. In the worst case, it's only enough to remove heat during the throttling.
So in full knowledge of the above problems with getting a laptop which I've made peace with, after a bit of scouring and reading threads here for the things I should be looking for in a TSW PC I've bought https://www.amazon.co.uk/MEDION-ERAZER-Beast-X40-i9-14900HX/dp/B0DR8PR81L - it's arriving Tuesday and hopefully during the week I'll get time to move TSW onto it and update thread as to how much of a mistake I've made or not. (Feel free to give me reasons I shouldn't have done it - there's still time for me to cancel order or send it back lol)
Medion just take a generic, mass produced laptop & put their brand on it, at is base it’s essentially a cheap Lenovo. Not overall bad, but at that budget I’d go with ASUS or Lenovo Legion. Legions tend to run a little cooler due to their use of PTM putty, the 7 & 9’s also use that in combination with Liquid Metal. I’d recommend you just find a gaming laptop based community & ask for advice there. Unfortunately the internet seems to struggle with the concept that people might need portability & want to game, then you just end up with ‘conversations’ such as the above. I had a laptop with a GPU for a little while & whilst it wouldn’t be my first or second choice to game on, I did appreciate the ability to actually do it wherever.
Really needs to be said, unless really care about having absolute best performance and image quality home systems aren't really needed at this point. Steam Deck from everything I've ever seen on it is pretty much capable of playing anything if you're willing to sacrifice some visuals, and that isn't even a high-end machine. There's been lots of high-end handheld's popping up with the success of that, and you can get laptops that absolutely kill at games, even if they're at a premium. Yes, there's issues, many laptop makers do not make them as sturdy as they should be, but then same could be said of those fancy high-end PCs. or their parts. Look at the whole 12VHPWR connector mess that's been going on since the launch of the 40 series. I say this by the way as someone who does have a damn near top of the line system, and it's nice to play on for sure. However ultimately I tend to take issue when people oversell it and say it's absolutely necessary to have high-end hardware. It's nice to have, and it absolutely helps with games like Spider-Man and Hogwarts Legacy be much more enjoyable experiences for me. But I'm also a more detail oriented person than most, my parents have told me as such! For I'd say the super majority of people (like my aforementioned parents) at the end of the day a Steam Deck, or really anything you can consider on the lower end, like the Series S or a PS5 will be able to play every major release well enough for them. Sure, you'll have to dial down the detail sure, but for a lot of people all they care about is if it can do not, not if it's in the absolute best presentation possible. There's a reason streaming, or heck, DVD's even in 2025 still remain more popular than either 4K or HD Blu-ray's, and likely the latter formats will never surpass them. Most people aren't cinephiles, they don't necessarily see or care if you can count every wrinkle or see some background props in more detail. Especially if that level of detail comes at the cost of their bank accounts. (Not to mention many cinephiles actively have mixes of various home media formats, and actively prefer older releases for various movies, in the same way many retro enthusiasts still play older games on the OG hardware. See how vocal Star Wars fans are about the alterations made to every release on DVD and onwards. Or more recently James Cameron using AI to upscale the existing Blu-ray cuts (which from what I hear weren't even great to begin with) of his films for the UHD release, instead of doing a proper 4K rescans)
That machine looks ideal by specification, and probably has better peak graphics capability than my old workstation. A tip I can offer as someone who used to play Train Simulator 20xx on an i7 MacBook Air and Thunderbolt Display through virtualisation, and later a MacBook Pro with an nVidia discreet GPU, is that you might notice a performance difference if you take steps to keep the laptop cool; for example I propped my machines up in the corners under the rubber feet to help the metal case conduct heat away. There are also options such as laptop cooling pads which force airflow underneath the machine. It sounds like you are going to be in some hot places so you can do some experimenting if you notice a drop in performance with fans running fast. Good luck with it and it would be good to hear how you get on. I think this thread has had some interesting conversation and maybe we need to ask for a forum category to help those of us who do go off-spec from what is officially supported so: laptops, mobile workstations, Steam Deck, Steam Play on Linux, Virtualisation and the likes so we can share experience and recommendations.
No offense intended at all, but I think you made a huge mistake there. You might regret that decision before too long. You are paying a premium price for the name, and getting low-quality OEM parts with questionable build quality and lifespan. Specific reasons the purchase is a bad idea: 1. Buying electronics from Amazon is always a bad idea. You will likely be getting a laptop that has already been used and returned by another customer, or maybe multiple customers. I've bought TV's and a couple of PlayStation 5 consoles that were supposed to be "new" from Amazon over the last few years, and they were clearly used by previous customers, so check that laptop CAREFULLY when it arrives if you intend to keep it. 2. Gaming laptops use OEM parts (Graphics cards, RAM, Motherboard etc). OEM parts are always cheaply built and of lower performance compared to regular parts. Dell supplied OEM parts are usually laughably bad. I'll leave you to research that one in more detail. 3. Laptop screens are usually NOT covered by the manufacturer warranty. So if your screen is defective at purchase, develops dead pixels, or gets broken accidentally, you are going to be stuck with a minor defect at best, or the proud owner of a £2,000 paperweight at worst. Read the small print in the manufacturers warranty carefully on arrival. 4. The Medion Beast X40 gaming laptop was launched around April 2023 from what i can gather, so it is already 2 years out of date. This makes the machine obsolete in 2025, or at least not worth paying such a premium price for... It only has USB-A ports, no USB-C at all except for one Thunderbolt 4 port. SOURCE: https://www.trustedreviews.com/reviews/medion-erazer-beast-x40 5. Medion is a sub-division of Lenovo, that are sold at Aldi supermarkets.... And if that isn't a big enough warning of the poor build quality (Lenovo won't even put their name on these laptops) I don't know what is. SOURCE: https://news.lenovo.com/pressroom/p...-ag-to-expand-its-business-in-western-europe/
Since we’re discussing laptops I was wondering if anybody has experience with mobile workstations? Some older mobile workstations I’ve encountered tend to have much better build quality than professional, or even worse ‘consumer laptops’. From what I’ve seen mobile workstations may be: Sturdily built Be physically large aiding cooling With the convergence of professional and gaming graphics with NVIDA RTX, good gaming performance should be obtainable Optimised for consistent performance rather than peak which might be better to reduce frame stuttering and glitches where throttling would normally occur on a laptop. Configured with a cleaner operating system and less of the subsidising junk-ware that consumer laptops are traditionally littered with eating up just about all available performance before you even get to install your own stuff. I have a computing policy that when outside of the Apple world I will avoid anything that is branded ‘consumer’ or ‘home’ as those terms bring thoughts of the horrible feel of low quality plastics, LED’s everywhere, junk-ware and poor service life to me; I like to pay less in the long run by getting something better that will last.
Non taken - any non malicious advice is grand by me. Die is cast to an extent now - it'll be an overnight job on my internet to download everything and then we'll see how it does. There's nothing obviously wrong with it so far, but honestly would I notice anything non obvious? Probably not. (find it astonishing you have to temporarily disable internet just to install Windows without a Microsoft account, what a joke!)
Thoughts so far - to an optimist like me everyone in this thread is right. To a pessimist everyone in this thread is wrong Firstly - be aware that the link in the OP is now more expensive than when I bought it. I paid £2099. It's currently there for £2498. Ye naysayers weren't wrong that this thing gets hot when playing TSW- not burning or anything and it's cooled down very quickly for me to write this initial post after a few trips but the heat still took me surprise. Quality- well I have no real way to judge this other than it's not obviously bad quality. I love typing on the keyboard and it feels solid. Don't know what else to say and that's probably all that can be said till more usage. The important bit - how is TSW? Fecking awesome. I'm running it with all the settings cranked to ultra and with intensive add ons like WCML South extended timetable / enhancement pack. And it's working perfectly even on the first run of a route before it's done the build up shader thing. That's all I cared about. So it's achieved all I need. The only mildly irritating thing (that I've discovered so far) is the 16:10 ratio which makes the menu screens stretched a bit; fortunately this isn't a problem in game. So what's going to matter is the reliability. In a few months time (or sooner if it screws up!) I'll try to remember to update this thread with my thoughts on how it went, since I can't find any similar thread. I agree that it would be better if there were a forum more dedicated to this but we are where we are. I'll also update the thread in a week or two if there is anything else to add to the above.
My friend had a gaming laptop. It was very powerful, but got extremely hot and melted its own graphics card. I wouldn't go near one with a barge pole. It can't run TS, but for TSW a Steam Deck is absolutely perfect. I'm not sure what the ROG Ally is like, that that should be a decent option as well.
So far it's going fantastically, btw. The laptop is coping fine, as is train sim world. It's not used for anything else really (of any importance). Unusually though, it hasn't been to Africa yet which it normally would have been by now. Much of July I'll be there (mostly Zambia, but also Tanzania and Ethiopia - everything from off grid bush villages to western style hotels to rural in-family farms) so I can update after that as to how it copes with dodgy electrical supplies and climate.
