Are gaming laptops worth the value?

Johannesburg, 17 August 2023: Video gaming is a big business, even in Africa. According to new research from Semafor, gaming across the continent will grow by double digits in 2023. By 2024, the African gaming market will generate over $1 billion in revenues. This trend includes PC gaming—and gaming laptops in particular.

Gaming laptops have become very powerful, affordable and convenient. While some gamers still prefer desktop PCs or gaming consoles, many enjoy the benefits of a powerful and portable gaming rig. The gaming laptop market is growing more than 11 percent annually and will be worth a staggering $21 billion globally in 2030.

“There has been a big uptake in gaming laptops, especially since the pandemic,” says Riaad Mangera, Product Business Unit Lead at Acer Africa. “Consumers want real value from their devices, and a modern gaming laptop offers them a lot. They can use these laptops for games as well as other high-demand tasks such as design or video editing, and they enjoy the longer lifespan of the hardware components and the laptops’ excellent build quality. A gaming laptop is an investment, and not just for gaming.”

How can consumers decide if they are making the right investment? Acer, manufacturer of the popular Nitro and Predator gaming laptops, offers some tips:

GPU power: Modern gaming laptops use built-in graphic processing units (GPUs) comparable to desktop GPUs. These chips deliver great visuals, though, like desktop GPUs, their performance can vary based on the type of GPU.

Heat management: Heat is a primary reason why laptops underperform compared to alternatives. The best gaming laptops have advanced heat-dissipation features; consumers can enhance these with cooling pads.

Portability: The best gaming laptops enable consumers to take desktop-level power with them wherever they go, including fast storage and memory.

Dual purposes: A gaming laptop is very flexible. Other uses are doing office work, accessing email, jumping onto voice chat channels, downloading mods, and so on. A gaming laptop’s GPU is also helpful to explore artificial intelligence.

Battery power: Running a game consumes much more energy than doing less-intensive tasks. Gaming laptops aim to provide serious battery power. There are limits: running a high-end game will limit a battery’s performance. But when consumers use a gaming laptop for other purposes, they have battery power for days.

Sound and visuals: Gaming laptops emphasise sound and visuals to amplify the gaming experience. A gaming laptop is perfect for watching movies or listening to music, and most other laptops don’t even come close to the multimedia fidelity of a gaming laptop.