Back when I was mining Bitcoins I actually gathered a few.  At some point I wanted to play a couple Steam games that were only on Windows.  So I bought a real inexpensive CyberPower desktop.  Older i3 chip, GTX640 card, etc.  Don’t get me wrong, it’s a great machine but any of todays game I have to run at the lowest of settings to even get “good” performance.

Most of the games I want to play now do have Mac clients but looking at the entire Mac lineup, all of the machines have “game-sucky” video cards.  Built Intel stuff and what not.  The only Mac I could get into with the Mac Pro and I was not going to shell out for that.  So I hobbled along with my i3 desktop.

A month or so ago PC machines started to come out with the newest Nvidia cards and I started to see reasonable price Laptops with a real gamer setup.  I started looking around and reviewing and ended up focused on the Asus ROG GL502 line of laptops.

• ASUS ROG
• Model:  GL502VM-DB71
• CPU:  Intel Core i7 – 6700HQ 2.6 GHz
• Screen:  15.6 FHD Display (G-Sync)
• Memory:  16GB DDR4
• Video:  GeForce 1060
• Video Memory:  6GB DDR5
• Drive:  1TB SATA Drive

So looking at those specs, the video card and the G-SYNC display are the bright spots.  With that Video Card I can play all of the current games at their highest settings and still stay above 60 FPS.  The G-SYNC display works specifically with the Nvidia card and it cuts out all of the stuttering in the display.  For example, if you sit in a detailed scene and pan around, you’ll notice that the display stutters as it tries to keep up with the data.  With G-SYNC this doesn’t happen; smooth as butter!!!!

So out of the box this Asus ROG is $1399 and is a full on gaming laptop.  Cool design, keyboard and all. I had to make a few modifications that were purely my choice but I think pushed this over the edge.

First I installed a 128GB NVME SSD flash card in it.  It has an open slot for one and this things is damn fast!  I moved the Windows OS (C drive) to this and now this machine boots up from fully powered off in about 6-7 seconds.

Next removed the 1TB SATA drive and replaced it with SATA SSD drive.  This is where I stored the games and apps (D drive).  It’s not as fast as the NVME drive but it’s a lot faster then a regular drive.

So all in all I spent about $1500 on this laptop and there is nothing in the Apple lineup that I can get that even slightly approaches this machine for performance.  Also I now have the advantage of having a quality machine for Unity and other development as well.  Now I love the MacOS, I’m typing this on my MacBook Air and use these machines day in and day out.  But Apple better get their shit together on their traditional Desktop and Laptop products.  I’m glad my iPhone is with me and love playing around with our Apple TV but other products are encroaching in my house.

• (2) Kindles
• (1) Amazon Echo
• (1) Desktop PC
• (1) Laptop PC
• (Boat load) of Raspberry Pis