The Evolution of Gaming Laptops: How Have they Evolved

The gaming laptop is a very popular product today and a lot people want to know the history  or evolution of gaming laptops. Let’s make a small flashback in order to know its history and evolution.

Today gaming products are very refined products with a lot of engineering behind them that allow gamers to play wherever they go.

In the beginning, gaming laptops were very large in size to fulfill the function of “portable”, something that would change over the years.

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And today, evolution is made possible not only by laptop manufacturers, but also by Intel, NVIDIA, and AMD, companies that have striven to bring thinner chips and components to market than ever before.

The Evolution of Gaming Laptops

1. 1975, the first laptop in history is the IBM 5100

Laptop to say the least! It weighed 24 KG and IBM dared to call it “Portable Computer” in 1975. It equipped an IBM PALM processor with a frequency of 1.9 MHz, along with various configuration possibilities in RAM and ROM:

• 16-64KB of RAM.
• 32-64KB ROM.

It incorporated a small 5-inch CRT screen with 60 Hz and the drive it used was a tape drive, leaving IDE HDDs far behind and, much more, SATA.

Jokes aside, it was an advance for the time and this was paid for with a price ranging from $8,975 to $19,975.

If that sounds like a lot of money to you, think about the standard of living in the 70s in the United States, they were much more expensive!

Can’t you place yourself? Calculating the difference in inflation from 1975 compared to 2021, that $8,975 is equivalent to $45,043 today. The most expensive IBM 5100 would cost $100,249.87 today, which is outrageous!

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This laptop was not a gaming laptop, but it laid the foundations of the concept and it was not a failure at all: it was on the market until 1981, being replaced by the IBM 5150.

2. 2002, Alienware Area 51-M: the first Gaming Laptop

Alienware was a company founded in 1996 dedicated to create desktops and you see they give one model or another as ” the first gaming laptop in history “.

Some indicate that it was MSI, others Razer, but according to my research it would be Alienware with its Area 51-M.

It was the first Alienware gaming laptop whose main specifications were its 15-inch panel powered by an Intel Pentium 4 at 2.4 GHz and an ATI Radeon 7500 GPU (then ATI did not belong to AMD).

It used to come with 512 MB of RAM and a 40 GB hard drive, including a floppy drive and a DVD-ROM drive.

Given the rise of the Internet, they decided to add a modem to make it a complete substitute for a desktop PC.

Its price started at $2,700, which would be around $3,980 in 2021, but what had to be greatly improved was the main concept of the gaming laptop, overcoming 3 barriers:

• Refrigeration: We saw the first “inventions” to avoid thermal throttling, such as incorporating a fan in the power supply.
• Autonomy was super short, having to be with the adapter plugged in most of the time.
• Weight: This model weighed more than 4 KG, which made it “not very portable”.

Wherever you see it, Alienware was a very visionary company and was working on a virtual reality system called Area 51 VR over 15 years ago.

3. 2003, Dell releases the Inspiron 5100

It wasn’t as ambitious a gaming laptop as Alienware’s, but be careful with this Dell Inspiron 5100 as it was equipped with an Intel Pentium 4 at 2.6 GHz (desktop version) accompanied by a 32 MB ATI Mobility Radeon 7500 that used the AGP interface and 4 rails (could come with 16 MB) and 758 MB DDR at 333 MHz.

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Its screen was 15 inches, it mounted an SXGA+ panel and its resolution were 1400×1050, not bad at all in 2003!

It was playable on titles from that time on medium and low settings, though 90s titles were easy to run.

A curious fact is that Windows 98 was never officially supported because it caused conflicts on computers and used more than 512 MB of RAM.

Some of you may have wondered, how is it possible that it worked with a desktop chip? How much did you consume? The truth is that its power supply unit was 90 W and it got extremely hot.

Then we saw Pentium 4 for notebooks, but its clock rate was lower as was its memory bus. At that time, many MHz were not required either. Unlike Alienware, Dell’s designs would be sober or “dull”, even if it was a gaming laptop.

Next, we saw the Inspiron 5150s that came with ATI Mobility Radeon 9000 GPUs or the NVIDIA GeForce FX Go 5200.

4. 2004, Dell Inspiron 9200 with 1GB RAM

Keep in mind that DDR2 RAM had not yet reached the market, but the truth is that this gaming laptop was “vintage”. To begin with, its screen was 17 inches and its resolution was 1920 x 1200 pixels.

It lagged a bit on the Intel M 725 notebook processor running at 1.6 GHz, but made up for it with 1 GB DDR at 333 MHz and the ATI Radeon 9700 Pro running at 128 MB (using APG 4x).

The specifications were completed by a 100 GB 5400 RPM HDD, which offered sequential stability, but worse performance than the 7200 RPM ones.

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We already saw the AC’97 audio codecs around here to provide the equipment with good audio.

More than 60 Hz was not required on the screen at the time (they made little sense), but the most important thing was improved:

• Autonomy, thanks to its CPU (about 4 hours).
• Weight, which dropped to 3.63 KG.

5. 2005, Sager NP-5320

Starting in 2005, gaming laptops began to become much more popular due to the advances of the time.

We bring you this curious example of the Sager brand, a PC equipped with the Intel Pentium M 750, 1 GB DDR2 at 533 MHz of Dual Channel RAM and an ATI Mobility Radeon x700 of 256 MB GDDR2.

In addition, its screen brought the main novelty in monitors at the beginning of the 21st century: the TFT panel.

This TFT WSXGA+ panel was 15.4 inches and had a resolution of 1680 x 1050. Back then, the only standard resolution was 1024 x 768 pixels, while going up from there was “a mixed bag”.

It was a very interesting piece of equipment as it offered its CD-ROM drive, its webcam, its 4-in-1 card reader, Wireless connection through Intel PRO and its installation with Windows XP. This laptop competed with the ASUS Z70VA or Z71V, like others within the same brand.

So, the ASUS Z70VA was a better option, but it cost $250 more, while this Sager was priced at $ 1,621 in 2005 (less than $2,500 today). His weight was 3.4 KG, which made it clear what the trend was: to lose 3 KG.

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You may have noticed that the gaming laptop market in the first decade was dominated by ATI, while NVIDIA launched GeForce Go as an alternative.

6. 2006, Alienware Aurora mALX

Alienware was bought by Dell and its goal was clear: to release the most powerful gaming laptop possible at the time. With this idea came the Aurora mALX: the first gaming laptop to use 1 GB VRAM. It was a carefully maintained laptop:

• Vinyl and custom paint.
• Clevo M590K chassis, house brand.
• 19-inch screen with a resolution of 1680 x 1050 pixels.
• Serial or parallel ports disappear to make room for 5 USB.
• It used an AMD Turion 64 ML-44 at 2.41 GHz, which was not the most modern CPU.
• 2GB of DDR2 memory.
• The GPUs were the NVIDIA GeForce Go 7900 GTX, they came 2 in the same laptop! Each one was 512 MB.
• Creative Sound Blaser Audigy 2 ZS sound card with THX certificate.
• Seagate 100GB HDD.
• DVD-ROM NEC ND6750A.
• Yukon Gigabit adapter.
• Windows XP Professional.

Alienware was one of the few companies that bet on AMD in processors when it came to high-end laptops.

However, the price was always the problem: starting at $4,499. On the other hand, it should be noted that it had a weight of 6.8 KG.

7. 2007, MSI GX600: an Ambitious Gaming Laptop

Here we did not have 2 graphics cards, but we did have a great advance in different points. It makes us nostalgic to see the initial MSI logo, which was not at all stylish, but behind it was a team wanting to do great things.

The MSI GX600 is considered by many to be the first gaming laptop in history, why? By the following:

• Powered by a 2.5 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo T9300.
• 3GB DDR2-667.
• NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT with 512MB DDR2.
• 4-inch WSXGA screen with a resolution of 1680×1050 pixels.
• One of the first laptops to come with Windows Vista Home Premium.
• Western Digital 320GB HDD.
• I was getting over 60 FPS in Doom 3 with all settings on Ultra.
• It hit almost 50 FPS in Crysis.
• The autonomy was still poor: impossible to go beyond 3 hours.
• Ports USB, eSATA, HDMI, FireWire, VGA, card reader, DVD-ROM drive, RJ45, Bluetooth, WiFi.

This was what available at the time and was considered a great gaming laptop as it adapted by the latest hardware on the market.

8. 2010, Alienware m11x: the Smallest Gaming Laptop

Little by little, new milestones were being achieved in the sector, and Alienware was one of those companies that was committed to innovating much further.

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We have to go back to 2010, when the Alienware m11x was released by Intel and NVIDIA.

It was not so absurd to build such a small and compact gaming laptop and, in the middle of 2020, launched its 13-inch Book.

The Alienware m11x mounted an 11.6-inch WXGA TN LED panel with a resolution of 1366 x 768, and was powered by an Intel Core i7 640UM and a 1 GB NVIDIA GT 335M.

So, we could choose between HDD or SSD storage (500 GB and 256 GB respectively), although the SSD drive was of low capacity.

It is also necessary to say that there was a variant with an AMD Radeon R5 M335 GPU with 2 GB DDR3.

Anyway, the news was that a small gaming laptop was capable of reaching 30 FPS in titles like Batman: Arkham Asylum and Crysis (if we put the textures in between).

It was the winner of the ” Performance Award ” given by the CES event in 2010, and that’s why we could play the legendary Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare 2, Left 4 Dead 2 or the famous Crysis.

It was really small, but that didn’t mean it was slow or underpowered, it was small, but mighty!

It brought the novelty of Windows 7 Professional, an operating system that was a luxury after the ordeal of Windows Vista.

Playing at more than 30 FPS was considered a good business, but this would go down in history a few years later.

9. 2013, Razer Blade Pro

At the beginning of the second decade of the 21st century, Razer made its family of gaming laptops famous thanks to the Razer Blade Pro that came out in 2013.

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It was a computer powered by the Intel Core i7-4702MQ that had 4 cores and could run up to 3.2 GHz.

His companion was the NVIDIA GTX 765M with 2 GB GDDR5 and a 17.3-inch TN screen with Full HD resolution.

Storage and RAM options were variable, but we could choose up to 512GB SSD and up to 8GB DDR3 RAM.

Although the body was made of aluminum, the weight reached 2.98 KG, but it was already a good figure for what we were used to.

After commenting on his specifications, the most notorious novelty was his keyboard and mouse pad:

• The mat was just to the right of the keyboard and had up to 10 buttons that worked as shortcuts.
• The mat itself was a touch screen as such.

Many said it was inspired by Apple’s Macbook because of the “slim” shape and design. Meanwhile, Razer made merits with its backlit keyboard and mounting Intel Haswell processors that gave that extra performance.

It is true that it was criticized because of its less powerful graphics cards, not being able to exceed 32 FPS in several AAA games, such as Battlefield 4.

It was a team that exceeded $2,000 and people asked for a lot in return, but it put the first stone in the new concept: slim gaming laptop.

10. 2015, MSI GS60 Ghost Pro, 3K screen

I imagine MSI product designers and engineers at the desk, what can we offer to convince? A 3K screen! Jokes aside, this beast got a lot of buzz in the media and the gaming community, it was an epic laptop.

There was not much progress in the CPUs, mounting a 4-core Intel Core i7-4710HQ that was capable of going up to 3.5 GHz.

However, the novelty was in the 16 GB RAM (DDR3L) at 1600 MHz and in the GPU NVIDIA GTX 970M 3GB GDDR5.

However, the 15.6-inch screen of the MSI GS60 Ghost Pro turned heads: Panasonic IPS panel with 3K resolution (2880 x 1620).

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It was not only the resolution, but we were facing an IPS panel that was not cheap at the time.

Additionally, it came with a backlit SteelSeries keyboard which was impressive, as well as 2 x 256GB SSDs.

There was a “but”, and it was the battery: it was still a pipe dream to get decent autonomy playing video games. And we cannot talk about a gaming laptop without decent autonomy, it loses its meaning!

11. 2018, MSI “takes over” the Gaming Laptop Market

MSI was considered one of the best brands (if not the best) of gaming laptops on the market, and the first decade was fabulous. Products like the GS65 Stealth Thin or the GE63 Raider RGB conquered the public.

We ourselves gave the platinum medal in our review of the MSI GS65 Stealth Thin, a remarkable product for its design and power. The model we tested had these specifications with only 1.8 KG of weight.

We had also the GE63 Raider RGB whose weight was higher, but it does have a high-power option to make it useful for gaming users.

12. 2020-2021, AMD complicates Intel and NVIDIA, are SoCs the Future

Surely many of you have missed ASUS, and the truth is that it is a brand that has always been there when it comes to gaming laptops.

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However, its prices were higher and its quality plus did not convince users to invest more money and “move from MSI”.

• MSI was the quality-price brand in gaming laptops par excellence, and the truth is that it continues to battle Razer, Alienware, Asus, HP and Lenovo. So, we wanted to reserve this last year to emphasize the “game changer”.
• Although AMD had introduced Ryzen in 2017, the laptop market continued to give Intel as the “King”. However, things would change from 2019-2020, when AMD presents the Ryzen 4000 with Zen 2 architecture and more than interesting performance.
• In 2021, AMD is betting heavily with its Ryzen 5000 for laptops, which many laptop manufacturers would bet on: Razer, Lenovo, Asus or MSI, among others. They come with a 7nm process and Zen 3 architecture.
• Lisa SU is insatiable and stands up to NVIDIA with its new RX 6000M, affected by the shortage of graphics cards. In theory, they come to compete with the RTX 3000 Mobile, but they still have a way to go, although they do have Ray Tracing and Smart Access Memory!
• NVIDIA introduced Dynamic Boost with its Turing (RTX 2000) graphics cards for laptops, offering to maximize GPU power when the laptop needed it.

Now, how can we summarize the evolution of the gaming laptop concept? The following occurs to me:

1. The weight has been reduced from 6 KG to a maximum of 2.5-2.8 KG in the most powerful equipment.
2. Gaming laptops have their own portable chips, without having to carry the most power-hungry desktop CPUs.
3. The laptop screen, frames, as well as its technology and resolution have been improved.
4. Backlighting on gaming laptop keyboards is a “must-have”.
5. Change of domain in GPUs from ATI to NVIDIA, the latter being the one who manages to offer 144 FPS in laptops.
6. Rise of cores and threads in laptops, seeing models that have 8 cores and 16 threads.
7. Autonomy has increased a lot: from 2 hours to 6 or 8 hours in certain models.
8. Higher efficiency and higher performance.
9. Appearance of ports such as Thunderbolt that allow the use of an EGPU.
10. The design in general, but emphasizing the thickness of the laptops!

We hope this information has been helpful to you. If you have any questions, comment below and we will respond shortly.