QUOTE(IncredibleNano @ Mar 19 2018, 07:18 PM)
Based on what you are telling me, does Alienware enforce a higher power limit? If they do, aren't the throwing MaxQ and the whole goal of the thing out of the window? Or are you suggesting that the Alienware with the 1070N is better than the Zephyrus? And 10 hours non-gaming battery life? I believe we are looking at no G-SYNC in the Alienware? ROG Zephyrus runs G-SYNC so if you don't go through the trouble of disabling G-SYNC you won't get G-SYNC.
yup, the no gsync alienware. Ofcourse if i had the dedicated GPU on the battery life would drop down to 6 hours.
Alienware does enforce a higher power limit, i've seen the peak of the GPU to be 150W for the 1070N and alienware does have the 1080 maxq in the 15 and 17 inch chassis but it came after i had bought mine although i probably would not have chosen it because for me i need a portable powerhouse where battery life is important since im only using the GPU partly when coding while the IGP does a decent job at accelerating the graphics of virtual machines and running code too.
Intel IGP isnt that bad, the one on the i7 7700hq has decent performance, but the one on the skull canyon NUC is 3x faster, so picking out the alienware without gsync is worth it if as you get more compute power, and its cheaper than the variant with 1070N and gsync.
alienware has no issues with a 1080 maxq and while they do enforce higher power limits, if the GPU does not clock itself further you can always do so manually and see if its possible to increase the TDP as well as the board should be built to handle the amount of power. Its just the point of maxq was to be lower power, less heat so that thin and light laptops could have good performance only thin and light cant pack that much battery as the alienware has a 99whr battery which is the legal limit for a singular battery to carry on planes to US. The only issue with alienware is that the CPU cooling sucks so the CPU throttles. Its fixable with thermal paste and making sure the heatsink is mounted properly.
Even though the 1070N in laptops like alienware can be faster than the 1080 maxq while being cheaper, it does not discount the fact that the premium you pay for maxq goes into having a thinner, lighter laptop with the same performance but for big and bulky laptops, go with the non maxQ unless you plan to tweak the GPU and that the laptop has designed it with a higher TDP in mind. Afterall macbooks are way overpriced.
gsync/freesync is a bit of a weird thing in the laptop world. On a laptop you expect portability and it tends to ruin battery life, though the display ports do support gsync and freesync however some laptops are capable of switching the laptop display between the IGP and dGPU so you could enable/disable nvidia optimus for gsync and battery life (when not using gsync). If battery life is unimportant to you, gsync/freesync is worthwhile but some laptops do allow switching.