Was a time when buying a laptop meant significant drop in performance ... those days have gone the way of the VCR and Blockbuster. It's a new era and it's been here for quite some time. Unfortunately folks are still parroting web site posts from a decade ago referring to a world we no longer live in.
Sort and filter through all currently available mobile graphics cards by performance or specification.
www.notebookcheck.net
The 5th ranked GPU listed in the GTX 2080 (Desktop) - Performance Rating = 76.7 ... 5% faster than the mobile version
The 8th ranked GPU listed in the GTX 2080 (Mobile) - Performance Rating = 72.9
The 2080 Desktop has the following 3D Mark Scores = 436117 / 143576 / 27620 / 40278
The 2080Laptop has the following 3D Mark Scores = 449825 / 139346 / 25440 / 35035
Here are game scores as tested 1920 x 1080 High Preset (Game = 2080 Desktop Score / 2080 Laptop Score)
Star Wars Jedi Fallen Order = 102 D / 117 L
Need for Speed Heat = 124 D / 118
CoD Modern Warfare (2019) = 78 D / 168 L
Gris (2019) = 140 D / 144 L
Anno 1800 = 77 D / 76.8 L
Metro Exodus = 87.9 D / 86.9 L
Far Cry New Dawn = 102 D / 105.5 L
Shadow of the Tomb Raider - 117 D / 113 L
Rocket League = 242.5 D / 248.0 L
I have both desktop and laptop and both play dames just fine with no throttling ... ever. Both are custom build ... I built the desktops / have a Clevo distributor build the lappies to my spec ... never spent more than $2,100 on a custom built lappie. The custom built's are substantially cheaper then Dell, Alienware etc... in fact before Dell purchased them, Alienware was a Clevo custom laptop distributor.
Can ya spend a ton of money ... of course. I couldn't hit $4k tho
Fantasy GTX 2080 equipped custom laptop (Advertised price = $3,600) *
9th Generation Intel Core i9-9900K Processor (16M Cache, up to 5.00 GHz)
17.3" 4K QFD (3840x2860) 99.5% of Adobe RGB color Matte withG-Sync Technology
Intel® Z370 Express Chipset
NVIDIA® GeForce RTX 2080 GPU with 8GB GDDR6
32GB Dual Channel DDR4 3000 MHz (PC4 24000) - 2 X 16GB
Thermal Grizzly Kryonaut Thermal Compound - CPU + GPU
1TB SAMSUNG® 970 PRO™ M.2 PCIe NVMe V-NAND SSD (OS DRIVE)
Seagate® FireCuda™ Gaming SSHD 2 TB SATA 6.0Gb/s
Intel® Wi-Fi 6 AX200 M.2 AX + Bluetooth 5 Combo Card
Typical GTX 2080 equipped custom laptop (Advertised price = $2,180) *
9th Gen Intel Core i7-9750H Processor (12M Cache, up to 4.50 GHz)
17.3" Full HD 144 Hz Wide View Angle 72% NTSC Matte with G-Synch Technology
NVIDIA® GeForce™ RTX™ 2080 with 8GB GDDR6 -
Max-Q design
16GB Dual Channel DDR4 2666MHz (2x 8GB)
500GB WD® Blue SN500 NVMe PCIe M.2 SSD (OS DRIVE)
Seagate FireCuda™ Gaming SSHD 1TB SATA 6.0Gb/s
Intel Dual Band Ultra Wireless - AC 9560 M.2 + Bluetooth® 5
Typical GTX 2070 equipped custom laptop (Advertised price = $1,580) *
9th Gen Intel Core i7-9750H Processor (12M Cache, up to 4.50 GHz)
17.3" Full HD 144 Hz Wide View Angle 72% NTSC Matte with G-Synch Technology
NVIDIA® GeForce RTX 2080 with 8GB GDDR6 -
Max-Q design
16GB DDR4 SDRAM 3000 MHz (PC4 24000) - 1 X 16GB
500GB WD Blue SN500 NVMe PCIe M.2 SSD (OS DRIVE)
Seagate FireCuda Gaming SSHD 1TB SATA 6.0Gb/s
Intel Dual Band Ultra Wireless - AC 9560 M.2 + Bluetooth® 5
Typical GTX 1660 Ti equipped custom laptop (Advertised price = $1,200) *
9th Gen Intel Core i7-9750H Processor (12M Cache, up to 4.50 GHz)
17.3" Full HD 144 Hz Wide View Angle 72% NTSC Matte with G-Synch Technology
NVIDIA® GeForce GTX 1660Ti GPU with 6GB GDDR6 Video Memory
16GB DDR4 SDRAM 2666 MHz (PC4 24000) - 2 X 8GB
500GB WD® Blue SN500 NVMe PCIe M.2 SSD (OS DRIVE)
Seagate FireCuda Gaming SSHD 1TB SATA 6.0Gb/s
Intel Dual Band Ultra Wireless - AC 9560 M.2 + Bluetooth® 5
Other options include SSDs up to 4 TB, 64 GB of RAM , choices of OS, etc
As for the price, Clevo prohibits distributors from advertising prices below a certain level. Discounts vary by amount spent but my experience has been that I have been offered discounts as much as $150.
If you never heard of Clevo, I'd bet you never heard of any laptop manufacturer other than MSI. Just about every brand you'd recognize does not actually make a laptop. Once you recognice that competitors laptops are often made on the same lines, with the same parts and by the same people as the competing product... wondering whch one is better becomes a comical exercise.
The vast majority of laptops on the market are manufactured by a small handful of Taiwan-based original design manufacturers (ODM), although their production bases are located mostly in mainland China. Major relationships include:
Quanta sells to (among others) HP, Lenovo, Apple, Acer, Dell, NEC, and Fujitsu
Compal sells to (among others) Acer, Dell, Lenovo and HP
Wistron (former manufacturing & design division of Acer) sells to Dell, Acer, Lenovo and HP
Inventec sells to HP, Dell and Lenovo;
Pegatron sells to Asus, Apple, Dell, Acer and Microsoft
Foxconn sells to Asus, Dell, HP and Apple
Flextronics (former Arima Computer Corporation notebook division) sells to HP
Been buying Clevos gotta be 15 year's or more ... never an issue. My day to day lappie was built in 2012.