Is it really worth going the Desktop Route?

[Curious]

Hey guys,

I had just been doing some thinking regarding the price-efficiency of actually having a computer terminal (desktop) vs a powerful laptop, and had a couple of things that I was thinking about.

First off: is it really that price-efficient to use a desktop vs a powerful laptop? I know for the money you can get better performance on a desktop, but the performance on some of these "mid-range" to high-end laptops is getting pretty damn good. Heavy and bulky sure, but most of the time you can't move your desktop from place to place with ease while you can put a beefy laptop in your bag and have more than enough hardware to throw around.

Second: When people tout about the benefits of upgrade-ability and the modular approach to PC building, with the relatively quality of parts these days and great return policies, unless you have bought complete junk parts or you have to rapidly upgrade your system. Odds are by the time you're ready to upgrade (even for gamer / engineer/ comp-sci guy), you're going to have to toss out the mobo, maybe keep the case & PSU (except in the instance of power changes on the CPU--Haswell vs 3rd gen Intel), maybe the disk drives and hard drives, but is that really worth the bulky nature of even a mid-size tower vs the portability with a laptop that'll probably last 5 years (even though most'll probably replace it before that).

Not looking to cause a giant debate, just looking for some advice (on either side of the argument) to go with this argument.

Best regards,

Curious

 

[voyagerfan99]

Well, do you need to move it often? What do you plan on doing with it? Need more information.

 

[deankenny]

You answered your own questions lol.
You stated the fact about portability, and also upgradeability.

Like voyager said without knowing your personal lifestyle and usage, how are people going to help.

 

[spirit]

If you need to move around the obviously any laptop, regardless of how big and heavy it is, is going to be more portable than a gaming desktop (because believe me, once you get a quality PSU in a well-built case and start adding graphics cards and 3.5" HDDs desktops become bloody heavy!)

So, if you need to mobile then get a laptop and maybe connect it up to a nice display when you're at your desk, but if you won't ever be moving then yes a desktop is better value for money and is more powerful.

 

[Curious]

Sorry for the lack of specificity. There's just sometimes where friends get together and play video games or I could use a beefier machine that's my own on campus.

However, I'm thinking about switching to comp-sci in the fall. I already have a MacBook Air (The newest one) will I really need a much more powerful computer for comp-sci? I've heard about VM's being taxing on a computer system, but I've witnessed how crazy the architecture bump on the i7 Haswell has done for this computer. Even had some computational boosts over the i52500k on my PC when running some MATLAB scripts.

I guess I was just looking for a little bit more opinion on longevity on the system and cost comparison of how much you really save by continuing the life of a desktop PC by swapping cpu/gpu/mobo/ddr3 (not necessarily, but with the progression, you may as well change it out when they keep clocking them higher)