I wanted to treat myself for my birthday in November and considering buying a laptop.

1. Budget : below RM4K
2. Usage : For gaming
3. Requirements (display size, battery life, weight etc) :
- 15.6 inch and above
- if possible have numpad
- must have dedicated GPU
- having 2.5 inch drive bay is a plus, or multiple m.2 slots

Although reliability depends on brand sometimes, but with knowledge you can mitigate it. Undervolting, run on power saving, disable boost when not needed, remove battery when on desk, monitor the temperature, clean the heatsink fan regularly can make a difference for longevity. I go so much that I even BIOS modded it to unlock all setting in BIOSes. Some newer laptop can't undervolt for some reason because OEM locked it oddly like the laptop I currently using.

On software side you can reduce system processes, Windows 10 and 11 are notorious with tons of processes, telemetry and such that makes hard for system to even idle. Read around (reddit a good start) how and what can you do to reduce it so your system can idle and reduce strain on hardware. Just yesterday I reduce like 40+ processes on my laptop so it won't use so much RAM at idle. Make paging file small and static and on bigger SSD so it won't eat too much write cycle

I don't believe in laptop gaming but I do buy ASUS FX506HCB with RTX3050 for gaming when I'm away. Yeah its the weakest RTX available but if you used to low end GPU you know it weakness, like reducing shadows setting I can play CP2077 with ray tracing at 1080p with DLSS set on balanced with around 40-70fps. That isn't bad and good enough for me to be happy with it. i5 11400H is good enough to handle RTX3050 even without boost when gaming at 1080p so that reduces strain on power brick, VRM and temperature.

That is how I taking care of my laptop. Though it sound a bit extreme, but I used to drill holes on laptops to make the fan get more air so the things I done is mild nowadays more towards software rather than hardware mods